Nobody succeeds all the time. Everybody fails some of the time.

Good marketers succeed more than they fail … but when they fail, they still are winners. Why? Because good marketers leave their ego at the door and look at failure as an opportunity to learn.

What can you learn from failure? You can learn what you did or didn’t do properly to land an account. You can learn why a campaign failed to generate the response you anticipated. You can learn about your own strengths and weaknesses. You can learn if you assigned the right person to the account, or if you actually set that person up for failure by playing away from their strengths.

But too many marketers fail in another way. They are unable to accept failure as a fact of life and, instead, try to rationalize away mistakes, misunderstandings, and ill-conceived ideas. It’s call denial, and it’s the only thing that stands between you and improving yourself and your company after a failure of any sort. Play the denial game long enough, and your rationalizations begin to sound true to you.

If you think you’ve never failed, don’t pat yourself on the back, because it likely means you’ve never had the courage to step outside of your comfort zone. You’ve played it safe, and you’ve never grown. The important thing is to step back and evaluate what you did … and if you truly made a mistake, don’t repeat it later on.

Roy Williams, a very smart man who publishes TheMondayMorningMemo online, says “The mind is full of clever ideas. But few of them will actually work.”

The next time you’re startled to learn that someone else got the account that you thought was in your pocket, don’t waste time condemning the potential client for not seeing that your company was the best choice. Spend that valuable time examining why you didn’t get the account.

Or if your advertising or PR campaign sags instead of surges, find out why. You’ll be all the better for it.

The less you embrace denial, the more you’ll achieve success!

Grant Johnson

Johnson Direct LLC

800-710-2750