"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning" - Bill Gates

I love Bill Gates – thank you to him for the inspiration of this article! (Credit to whoever took this gem of a photo)

I bet you don’t read too many blogs out there that say ‘failure’ is ‘awesome’. It certainly isn’t the most ‘nicest’ of educators but oh boy; it’s the most powerful.

There is a reason I am bring up failure and talking about it head on; it’s often avoided and not talked about directly.

I can understand why, even me writing the word ‘failure’ is making this blog a more emotional experience than normal in that it has me thinking through my previous wins and losses over the years (especially 2016).

I have found that the people who get into most trouble with ‘failure’ are positive thinkers. They are the great natured (yet misinformed) people that avoid anything negative in their mind. E.g. “There is no failure, only feedback”, “Everything is a lesson” and even the lighter version being just not thinking about it.

One of the greatest quotes I have heard recently is:

– “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning” – Bill Gates

That is complete gold. If you avoid failure with your unhappy customers, you shall never learn what will make your business stronger.

Failure is like gravity. You can believe it doesn’t exist, but if you test that theory (please don’t) from a high place you will get a dude shock.

When I started out in business, myself and my close friends, clients then and clients today all had massive problems with failure. That is we take a loss, get all sad, depressed and feel like giving up. I think the big reason for that is that we are never taught to understand how ‘wins and losses’ really work in school.

Bringing it back to Marketing – be it you are marketing your own business or a full time marketer; you must get used to the idea of ‘wins and losses’ / ‘successes and failures’ extremely quickly. Not all of your marketing moves will work and if you let failure knock you around, you won’t learn the lessons you need to in order to make it work.

Facebook is a great example. My video advertisement now is the best I have ever done. The best! However, it took me a good 10 – 15 goes to get it this effective and powerful. It cost money, time and I even got trolled a bit for it (sometimes fairly in all objectivity).

Networking and selling is the same! You can say the wrong thing, lose a sale but that is how we learn friends.

My advice and thinking? The more successful you get, the more you are going to fail. The more shots you take, the more you hit and the more you miss. Failure is a great educator in marketing if we listen.

Don’t let it bum you out. Let it inspire you to take your next shot and win.

Love your work, thanks for the read and stay awesome!

Categories:

Tags:

No responses yet

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.