Do a Success Postmortem

You probably hear all the time that you learn your best lessons when you fail. I agree you learn great lessons when you fail, but I actually think you learn your best lessons when you succeed.

Think about it. When you fail and you do a postmortem on failure, which is a great thing to do, you're only guessing what really went wrong. You're only guessing what you need to do next time to make it better. Now, that's important to do. Let's learn from our failure. But the best time to learn is from something that goes well.

I had three clients that I met with over the past two weeks that had record breaking quarters, and that's great. We certainly took the time to celebrate. But then I asked them a simple question: why? What did you do differently this quarter to drive that success? Because if the answer is I don't know, we have no idea whether we've got the ability to repeat that. But an answer to that question drives continued growth.

I met with a client this week, and they saw very clearly that they increased the number of webinars they were having with prospects, and most of their new clients came from those webinars. Now that's something we know - as opposed to learning from failure and saying, "Hey, maybe we could have done this better," they knew, the data was there, that more webinars equal more prospects, equal more clients.

We need to learn from our success. We need to not only do postmortems when we fail, but we need to do success postmortems. So think back on the last quarter - for you, for your team - what went well? Even if you didn't have a great quarter, what went well within that quarter? Why did that go well? What could you learn from it? What could you repeat again next quarter and build on?