Review of Losses

My first job out of college was as a Sales Engineer selling Mail Opening and Extracting Machines. Don’t let the title impress you. I had a five state territory and as a twenty-two year old kid I was solely responsible for rooting out every possible receiver of more than 500 envelopes a day that needed to be opened, get to know them and then sell them at least one machine to do the work. Think of all the companies you paid your bills to back in the 80’s that had millions of dollars coming by checks that needed to be opened and extracted in order to be processed.

I know it sounds incredibly glamorous, and it was especially at 4:00 in the morning when I would be staking out the major post office sorting station and following trucks that would go and pick their mail up at the post office rather than waiting for it to be delivered back to their business to find new customers.

The mail opening business only had about three or four major players and I knew everyone of my competitors in my territory. I not only had to find new customers who did not have any machines and sell them, but I had to make sure my current customers were happy and up-to-date as well as try and steal away my competitors’ clients. It was more like the TV show Scandal than I’d like to admit.

The worst part about my job and the most memorable these 30 years later is when at quarterly sales meetings we had to review our losses in front of the worldwide sales team. Think of a hospital Morbid and Mortality (M&M) conference where a Doctor who has made a mistake had to stand up in a room in front of all their colleagues and discuss in detail what they did wrong. That is what review of losses was like for me, the youngest and usually the only woman in the room, only no one had died. The only saving grace was if I had already shared the loss with my boss and asked for his help all along the way. If the loss was news to my boss as well as everyone else in the room it was hell to pay. I only made that mistake once.

It is inevitable that in life we all are going to make some mistakes, but most of the time you do not have to dissect that error and lay yourself open for critique. I can relive in my head each time I had lost a big sale to one of my inferior competitors. It was not just the commission I was sorry about losing, it was the fact that I had to admit in front of God, (and the people that owned the company thought God worked there) and these witnesses that I had made mistakes, not called on a Vice President in a timely manor, or visited the operations center in time to know that they were getting a big new account and doubling the amount of mail that needed to be opened. In the end it was my fault and I had to own it and more importantly learn from it.

In the last few days I have had a couple of hard conversations with people who needed to do an M & M on the way they were handling a situation. The details of the story are not important, but a bigger problem was created because someone ignored having a hard conversation or thought someone else was going to do the dirty work. In the end that one hard conversation turned into many harder conversations. The loss was amplified because the details were ignored.

Ignoring bad news has never been a plan that works. The bad is still there and might be growing when you have your back turned. To paraphrase a song from Carley Simon, “If you think this blog is about you” it is. We all have bad, hard difficult things we have to deal with. Dealing with them head on is by far the easiest solution. Own it, learn from it and move on, never to make the same mistake twice.