Being an Effective Loser
Transform the World
By Tim Sanders
I REMEMBER THE PHONE CALL LIKE IT WAS YESTERDAY.
“We’re going with AOL,” said the marketing vice president for a Fortune 10 firm.
I sat down in my chair for the rest of the conversation. After competing for US$20 million in advertising spend, Yahoo! was going to lose a major deal to AOL. My team and I worked more than six months on the deal, traveling dozens of times and investing hundreds of hours putting together presentations and contracts. We were devastated by the news.
Two weeks later, I spoke at an industry trade show in San Francisco. At the pre-event reception, I spotted two AOL sales executives hobnobbing with some ad agency honchos in attendance. I waited for a moment when the AOLers were alone, took a deep breath and approached them with my hand extended for a hearty shake.
“Tim Sanders, Yahoo!, congrats on winning the deal in Detroit—that’s a mega win for you guys.”
They were startled. They could tell by my body language that I meant it, too. I admired anyone who could win a deal that big during the dotcom bust. In just a few minutes, they relaxed and we started sharing stories like a group of amateur wrestlers at Denny’s after the show. They explained how they were able to navigate Time Warner (very hard) and secure prized television content to seal the deal. They talked about how close the competition was and how we almost got there with our aggressive pricing. I learned a lot from our conversation. Later, when I was on the platform, they sat in the front row supportively.
That night, several of my team members groused about how I was sucking up to the enemy. They reminded me of how hard we fought just to lose to “those guys.” I responded with a question, “How did we lose that deal?” They looked at me blankly. “Probably cheated somehow,” one offered. Another chipped in, “Yeah, I bet Ted Turner got on a plane and closed the deal himself. He knows everyone in the auto industry!” I explained what I learned and how we could tweak our approach next time and win. Even though it was tough for them, my team understood that we needed to do better than price in the future. That was the last time we lost a major deal to AOL.
My grandmother raised me to be a good loser. While many of us don’t want our kids to be bad losers (don’t pout), do we coach them to be good losers? Face it: Losing is the way of life—even for champions. For hospitality and production sales pros, you have to face coming out at the wrong end of the RFP. Speakers’ bureaus lose events to rivals on a weekly basis. For meeting and event planners, you have to deal with losing budget battles and recognition competitions. I lose speaking engagements to other speakers. We are all occasionally on the losing end. Are we going to grow or shrink from it? I’m not suggesting you get comfortable with losing, just be effective in your response to it. The only way to grow from adversity is to objectify the game and learn from the losses.
Ways to be a Better Loser
1. Show respect to the winner. You can’t hate them enough to improve your future performance, that’s unsustainable motivation. If you always claim that they won unfairly or because you “can’t win for losing,” you’ll never see a way to win. The way I see it, winning is more contagious than it is exclusive. Thank the judges or prospects for their consideration. Once you’ve drained the negative energy out of the equation, study the victor. Itemize what those victors got right and how it influenced the final results. Find something to admire about them, and then deconstruct that attribute competitively.
When I worked at Yahoo!, new CEO Terry Semel admired Google’s commitment to search (versus portal). He said they were shrewd, understood the future market and executed quickly. That helped us understand what we’d need to do in the future to stop losing. Maybe that didn’t work for Yahoo!, but I believe it was a great response that kept the company from dropping to No. 3 or No. 4 (like AOL did).
2. Learn from your defeat. Blame and denial may feel good, but they never help you learn. Unless your competitor cheated to win, you were beat either on price, technical ability or fundamentals. Identify the fundamental rules-of-the-road that you might have broken during the competition. Isolate the technical reasons that you were “outscored” in the eyes of the customer/judge/scoreboard. Imagine a rematch, with your revised approach based on your newfound intelligence, where you catch up or pass your rival.
3. Let it go. It’s just a competition. It’s just business. As Richard Carlson asks, “In a year, will this make any difference?” We hold on to our defeats too long, allowing them to magnify and take on mythical status. If you don’t let go of it, you’ll start playing not to lose instead of to win. If you don’t let it go, you’ll get beat down and drain energy out of everyone else. Freaking out is contagious. So long as you recognized your rival’s strengths and reviewed your approach and execution, it is OK to let the loss go and start thinking about how you’ll do next time.
After all, who likes a bad loser? One+
TIM SANDERS, a top-rated speaker on the lecture circuit, is the author of Saving the World at Work: What Companies and Individuals Can Do to Go Beyond Making a Profit to Making a Difference (Doubleday, September 2008). Check out is Web site at www.timsanders.com.