They fear saying something stupid, so they don’t say anything of any consequence. They fear asking stupid questions and appearing ignorant, so they ask only yes-no questions. They fear the prospect won’t understand their services, so they explain every last detail about them.

“By defining ‘the usual suspects’ as saying something stupid, asking stupid questions, or not explaining ourselves, we have implicitly defined our approach to risk management. It is to control the conversation, to avoid unknowns, and to make it mainly about ourselves,” Green writes. “And so it is that we end up shooting ourselves in the foot, actually increasing the risk of losing the sale.”

Prospects trust credentials, reputations, track records, and smarts, but they select providers based on other factors, he stresses.

Those factors include “curiosity, a deep other-orientation, collaboration with clients rather than hiding from them, candor and transparency, a willingness to admit boundaries to our knowledge, and detachment from a particular solution, even from the sale itself,” Green says.

Those are risky actions, but that risk will build trust and lead to more sales.

Sales Training Failures

If you’ve heard the statistic about how sales training fails 90% of the time for companies, you might be hesitant to participate in it. If it’s such a failure, why bother, right?

The thing is sales training fails partially because companies don’t go into it with the right preparation and planning. You can’t just say sales are bad; we need to get our salespeople into training, says John Doerr in his podcast interview 90% of Sales Training Fails–but You Can Fix That. You have to set objectives and expectations for the training, identify the right program for your team, and measure the results.

“If your salespeople know the training you’re sending them to is just another event, another thing that they’re going to go to, and they’re not going to be held accountable afterwards for putting these things in place, they go into it with the attitude that maybe I don’t have to listen,” Doerr says.

Don’t let other companies’ sales training failures scare you off. Learn from their mistakes so that it becomes a success for you.

Online Failures

The online world is also filled with horrible failures: Google penalizes websites for not following their rules, buyers bash companies’ brands in social networks, and salespeople fail to generate client relationships in social networks. But those, too, are situations companies can learn from and change.

If your website goes into “Google Jail,” all is not lost, writes Melanie Yunk in her article What to Do When Your Website Goes to Google Jail. And you certainly shouldn’t give up on the site, for the benefits to your company outweigh the hassle of fixing the offending features.

If you doubt the effectiveness of social media marketing and think your activity there is a waste of time, Landy Chase has some advice for you. With minimal effort, you can easily network with prospects and clients, he says in his article 4 Easy Ways to Use Social Media to Boost Business Development.

“Want to research an account for key contacts? Sign in to LinkedIn and type in the company’s name. Their system will serve you with everything you need to know about that company in a matter of seconds. … Want to send out a new article or item of interest to your prospects? Log in to your email account. There you will see a list of high-quality content, courtesy of the sites you follow, waiting in your in-box for you to review. See something there that you want to distribute? Click on the groups within your social media network that you wish to receive the information, and hit Send,” Chase writes.

Again, with proper planning, your online activity can be a success.

Learning from Failure

Like most companies, MicroVentures Marketplace, Inc. knew it needed to publish content that educated potential buyers and made them aware of their services. An obvious choice for the investment company was a blog. The problem was rules and regulations made it difficult for company founder Bill Clark to write about timely issues. The company’s traditional blog failed to be the big hit they needed, writes M. Sharon Baker in her case study about the business, Startup Uses Media and Sponsored Blog Posts to Prove Concept, Gain Investors.

Clark didn’t give up on the idea of publishing content, though. A better option for him was to write sponsored guest blog posts. The price was high, but he could reach his targeted audience and he could write about anything he wanted.

“It was the most successful thing I ever did to grow signups,” he says. “When I wrote a little 300-word post, it brought us the most traffic and the most signups.”

A single sponsored post drove 700 to 1,000 unique visitors to MicroVentures’ website the day it po

sted, Clark says. In addition, he typically gained 50 to 100 investors from sponsored post traffic.

Remember, failure is an opportunity to learn and grow from the situation. It took Thomas Edison nearly 10,000 attempts to discover how to create the electric light bulb. Kathryn Stockett received 60 rejections before The Help was accepted by a literary agent. They didn’t give up. Neither should you.

This article originally appeared on RainToday.com’s RainMaker Blog.