Don't Expect Your Company to Be Perfect

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A Perfect Failure: Expecting Your Company to Be Perfect
(Part 3 of 6)
🕒 2 min read

By Frank Hurtte

People inside your company are prone to making mistakes. The warehouse ships the wrong part. Customer service transposes two numbers. Accounting sends an invoice that leaves everyone scratching their heads. Inside sales misunderstands a purchase order. It happens. Such are the travails of working with humans.

One of the biggest surprises of my career was discovering that customers are generally more forgiving than salespeople expect. They understand mistakes happen because they run businesses too. What they don't tolerate is finger-pointing, excuses, or silence.

I once watched a salesperson spend fifteen minutes proving a mistake wasn't his fault. By the time he finished, he'd convinced the customer nobody else inside his company could be trusted either.

Accountability has rescued more customer relationships than perfection ever has. Companies don't earn loyalty by avoiding every mistake. They earn it by recovering from mistakes better than everyone else. Research firm Gallup explored this same dynamic in their book Human Sigma. They found that customer trust is the main factor that determines whether customers remain loyal after a mistake. 


To Be Perfectly Frank...

Customers usually remember how you handled the mistake longer than they remember the mistake itself.

Catch up on Part 1: Stop Waiting to Feel Ready to Sell and Part 2: Wait Until You Catch Up. Next week, Part 4: Expect Your Suppliers to Be Perfect.


Ready to strengthen your customer recovery playbook? River Heights Consulting helps sales teams build accountability-first cultures that turn mistakes into loyalty. Let's talk strategy.



TL;DR

Perfection isn't the goal; accountability is. Customers forgive mistakes; they don't forgive the deflection that follows. How you recover matters more than whether you stumble.


About the Author

Frank Hurtte is the founder of River Heights Consulting and author of The New Sales Guy Project. He's spent forty years watching salespeople mess up recoveries and watching the great ones turn those moments into wins.










If you want a shortcut to understanding where AI fits in distribution, this is a great start.




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