#1: I Look Forward to Failing.

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Let’s play two truths and a lie: 

1. We’re two days into the new year and I haven’t made a single sale. 

2. I blew my only easy New Year’s Day goal. 

3. Number one and two freaking suck.

I’m sure if you have basic reasoning skills and a grasp on the English language, you have deduced that number three is the lie based on the title of this blog post. You would be correct. Allow me to break down my two truths.

1. It’s January second. The dealership I work at is in its third week here in our kick-ass new location, and although I was the first salesperson here to close (woohoo!) and have since sold even more, I haven’t closed in 2025. You bet your ass I’m doing everything and a half to make sure I do, but things aren’t as busy as I would’ve expected them to be with Christmas money in the pockets of buyers.
2. My only goal for January first was to write this blog post. I did not. I spent seventy dollars on this damn website domain to get rid of the “slash WordPress dot com” and I blew the one and only goal I had set for myself. I was too busy battling a hellish hangover and trying to erase the memories of the night before. Happy 2025 to me.

Sounds pathetic, doesn’t it? Maybe. But sounds can be deceiving (I know that’s not the saying. Bear with me.)

If you happen to be the version of Roxanne that I was prior to sales, you’d be bummed as hell by my two truths. But if you’re the Roxanne from now- two sales jobs deep and now fully engaged in the culture of B2C (business to customer) sales, you’d be eager to capitalize on the first two failures of 2025. 

Cap·i·tal·ize , /ˈkapədlˌīz/, verb.

To take the chance to gain advantage from.

“do they have what it takes to capitalize on this emerging opportunity?”

Hell yes I do, and here’s how I got to that point.

My first sales position was a remote, hot lead, inbound call position. Sounds easy. The only thing that was easy was selling myself- and yes, that’s about eighty percent of the job- but that eighty percent was only easy because I happen to be a people person to my core, but man, I had no idea how far that other twenty percent could stretch. That twenty percent included discrepancies between what people were looking for and what our product offered, timing, location, capital, family, and most importantly- my ability (or inability) to overcome said obstacles. With all of that being said, I still did quite well as a first time salesperson. I was on a high with my first successful week of sales in the bag. I rode that high as long as I could, but it came crashing down when I saw “continued training meeting” on my schedule for the next week. 

“What in the hell is a continued training meeting? Why am I scheduled for one?”

I thought I was doing well. I was doing well! That’s what made it so much more anxiety-inducing; did my superiors not have faith in me? What kind of a tremendous fuck-up did I make to discredit my good numbers in spite of being a rookie?

And these were all questions I shamelessly asked during my dreaded CTM. Untactful? Maybe. Enlightening to unpack? Very.

It was then that I learned that training and skill development is never something a good salesperson outgrows. My supervisor told me that the moment a salesperson becomes comfortable is the moment they plateau- and I came to discover very quickly that a plateau in sales might as well be a nose dive.

I learned so much in that first CTM. I realized that despite my KPIs (key performance indicators- which, in this case, were my capture and close rates), I still had many areas that needed major improvement. More importantly, I learned that even the biggest failures- a lost sale, the occasional irritated customer, and many other road bumps, were moments to immediately jot down to discuss in my next CTM. I came to learn that the more CTMs I was scheduled for, the more time and energy management was willing to invest in me. They had faith in my potential. My supervisor listened to my bullet -pointed failures, and I listened even more eagerly to her advice on overcoming future similar obstacles. CTMs became something to look forward to, and that anticipation morphed into a ravenous hunger to improve, to leave behind techniques that weren’t serving me, and even to have light shed on flaws that I had no awareness of that my supervisor had overheard in my calls.

The transition to automotive sales was a culture shock, and looking back, I should’ve gone into it with the exact same mindset as my remote sales. I had lots of experience conducting business face to face, and I felt highly confident in my sales skills, but the intersection of those two qualities had all red lights. Can you guess what taught me the most and helped those red lights green-ify, streamlining the intersection?

When I dropped the ball on a sale, I’d separately ask both of my managers and the top salesman “how did I fuck up this time?” Although crass, it was the key to beginning to dismantle my unaddressed road blocks and poor mindset. We can unpack all of the logistical skills I learned in my first few weeks another time, but the biggest overall lesson I learned time and time again- and continue to learn every day- is that failure is never the enemy. Failure is the only sure-fire way to learn something new every damn time.

So why am I not upset about not making a sale today and not writing my blog post yesterday? I learned. I learned that I can’t solely rely on our in-house lead generation and I’ve since kick started a number of self-generating lead methods, and I learned that if I plan on having even a shadow of a productive day, I can’t have a hangover.

Every day that I come into the dealership, I motivate myself to eat my fuck-ups and wait for a lesson to come out the other end. I encourage you to do the same… And don’t water them down. Don’t sugar coat them, don’t supplement the word “failure” with “learning experience”. Embrace the failure for what it is and allow it to radically uproot the pieces of you that need uprooting. Thank fate for the areas in which you are lacking, and thank fate even more for the opportunity to fail because of those areas that are lacking so that you can initiate the change that you as a businessperson- a human being- deserve. So, here’s to embracing the failures, the lessons, and the constant journey of growth—because if you’re not failing, you’re not learning.