Inversion Thinking: How to Fail Before You Fail

Building Your Sales Engine

• 19 min

Play episode

Inversion thinking helps sales professionals anticipate failure before it happens, creating prevention rules that guarantee goal achievement. What if the secret to hitting your sales goals was visualizing failure instead of success? In this episode, Mark McGraw and Josh Pitchford explore inversion thinking, a powerful three-step framework that flips traditional goal-setting on its head. Instead of imagining success, you imagine failing at your goal and work backward to identify what went wrong. The process is simple but transformative: First, set your goal. Second, imagine it is the end of the year and you have failed. Third, create prevention rules that eliminate those failure points before they happen. This pre-mortem approach leverages our natural tendency toward negative thinking and turns it into a strategic advantage. Mark and Josh dive into practical applications, from shortening sales cycles to building prospecting habits. You will learn how to "pre-decide" your actions to remove willpower from the equation and why public accountability can leverage your need for approval to keep you on track. As the Sandler rule states, you have to learn to fail to win, and this episode shows you how to fail before you fail. About Josh Pitchford Josh Pitchford is a Sandler trainer and coach at Sales Engine, where he helps sales professionals and teams build predictable revenue systems. With extensive experience in enterprise sales and account management, Josh specializes in teaching relationship-building strategies, account planning, and the Sandler methodology. 🔗 Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-pitchford-6163274/ Host Mark McGraw — Building Your Sales Engine In This Episode The three-step inversion thinking framework for goal achievement Why imagining failure works better than visualizing success How to conduct a pre-mortem before things go wrong The concept of pre-deciding to eliminate willpower in the moment Creating non-negotiable prevention rules Common reasons salespeople fail to hit goals: not prospecting enough, extended sales cycles Getting to the ultimate decision maker to shorten sales cycles Finding the buyer's compelling event instead of relying on your own Why humans are wired for negative thinking and how to leverage it The importance of clear next steps in every sales conversation Bulletproofing your deals to mitigate risk Public accountability and leveraging need for approval Bringing future pain into the present moment to drive action Never let how you feel determine how you act Building rumble strips as guardrails toward your goals Links Sandler: https://www.Sandler.com Episode page: https://www.BuildingYourSalesEngine.com/ Show links: https://linktr.ee/buildingyoursalesengine Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-pitchford-6163274/