Imagine you are a commercial pilot, you’ve just taken off, you’ve climbed to a little over 2,000 feet and you lose both your engines. You have been hit by a flock of geese. You can’t make it back to the airport and you are surrounded by the concrete jungle of a large city. Everyone gets to walk away. No serious injuries. Improbable? Yes. True? We know it is. And we all know the story.
Now let’s pose another scenario which we won’t be familiar with. We’re still a pilot, we’re flying a small plane over the Rocky Mountains. We are 30 miles from the nearest airfield. We lose our engine and there are no roads nearby, just dense pine forest and at our height we will, in one way or another, be on the ground in 5 minutes. Are we still going to walk away?
The answer to that question, surprisingly is that it’s likely as long as you follow some simple rules. The first rule, every pilot knows, Sully knew, Chuck Yeager knew, is ‘Fly the plane’. That means don’t panic, try to keep the plane under control. And then comes the next set of crucial steps. And you can see these at work if you examine the “Miracle on the Hudson”. Those steps are Perceive, Process, Perform. In simple terms, identify what is going on. Then decide what options you have. Finally, choose the best option and execute as best you can.
Knee jerk reactions in sales can be as fatal to a sale as a panic action in a flight emergency. We must first analyze the problem, then assess alternative actions, then finally, make a choice and act. When I coach sales teams who are recipients of a sales ‘surprise’ my first question is “do you really have to do something right this minute?” Nine times out of 10, the answer is no. Especially if the bad news is received on a Friday. There is almost always time to spend finding out what is really going on, circling the wagons and calmly discussing options and weighing choices.
So, firstly, hurry up and do nothing. Assess the situation, identify and analyze your option, choose the best one and execute.
Oh, one final thing, if you are wondering about how you get to walk away from the ‘problem in the Rockies’, the pilot should, if they can’t restart the engine, and absent a clearing, visualize an airfield on the top of the trees and conduct a normal approach and landing at the lowest controllable airspeed. If they do that, they will invariably survive and often walk away.