Second Place
If you are a competitive person there are few things worse than finishing in 2nd place. Personally I’d rather be last than 2nd. Unless you are historically ‘not good enough’ a la the early 90s Buffalo Bills, no one remembers the guy who finished second.
In sales when you are working on a deal, and competing against other companies the longer you are involved in a deal the more important it becomes for you to win it. Your time is incredibly valuable – too valuable to waste coming up just short on a deal. If you aren’t going to win a deal cut bait as soon as is responsible to do so, or else you spend nearly as much time, money and effort as the guy who wins. At a seminar this week I was reminded of the poker analogy, the guy who finishes second in a hand paid the most money to lose. Finish first or get out of your way and move on to the next one.
No doubt about it…finishing anything but first sucks. I must admit though that I’ve gotten some of the most beneficial feedback and even direct market intelligence from a debrief when we didn’t win the contract. It doesn’t suck less, but it certainly helped to win the next one.
The intel from a 2nd place debrief is certainly valuable – but that’s getting harder and harder to get nowadays.
I dunno man…this might work in Sales contexts, but in a lot of other contexts it doesn’t make much sense to hate Second Place more than Last Place. For example, if you’re competing with other companies to see “Who made more money this quarter”, do you really think being Last would be better than being Second?
What about if you’re competing on user satisfaction?
What about if you’re competing on employee retention?
The whole “Second Place is just the FIRST LOSER” thing may sound tough and die-hard, but I think that many business contexts are a lot more of a spectrum than the black-and-white world of “making the sale” is.
Plus, coming in Last can also get you stuck with some bad PR in the form of “The Worst Company for _____ Is:”
If you’re not winning on customer satisfaction does it matter if you’re in last or first? You still have a long way to go. If you’re second best at employee retention then your best employees are going to the other guy. Yeah 2nd place isn’t necessarily as bad as last, but its certainly a long way from first.
Competitiveness is one of the key traits of successful entrepreneurs – the “unreasonable” desire to win and anger at losing anything. Some people have this, but most don’t.
I think competitiveness and tenacity are the two “secret sauce” traits that are most important in a leader after all the other basics line up in the business story.
Sounds like Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition speech. “Our chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…fear and surprise….” Ha!