Regardless of how good of a salesperson you are, you will make mistakes. When the time comes for you to reckon for your mistakes, whatever you do, don’t make excuses, just apologize. Dale Carnegie, in his great book about sales techniques highlights the importance of a swift apology when it comes to sales.
Nobody is perfect. Your clients, however, may expect you to be. You will inevitably make mistakes, and whether it’s offending your client or messing up something on the end of the numbers, your mistake can usually be fixed.
Possibly the fastest way to fix your mistake is to simply apologize and move on. If you try to make any kind of excuse as to why you made the mistake, it only serves to make you look bad. An excuse does nothing to right the wrong which you have committed. However, a swift apology and a righting of your wrong will go quite far in the eyes of your customer.
Making excuses will only draw out any potential conflicts and brings on a high likelihood for arguments between yourself and your customer to ensue. So, instead, when you make a mistake, own up to it, apologize, and make sure that you correct whatever it was which you messed up to begin with.
Nate 
Luke Owen 
Shelton Brower
I haven’t really thought about how customers expect you to be perfect until now but it is so true! When I am a customer I expect the salesperson to be perfect and not mess up otherwise I won’t get the product. But as a salesperson I would expect people to understand me and get that I am still human and they need to understand that as well.
I really like this post. Just from personal experience in selling, it is so important to take mistakes head on. The sooner that you face the ax the better. Never ever lie to your customer and even if it is someone else’s fault, take the blame. I like your point of apologizing and moving on. This is great because something else will happen with you and your customer and you will both forget about it shortly.
This is great commentary on the fact that no one is perfect, we will at times make mistakes in sales. Maybe it’ll be a matter of false information or potentially offending someone on accident but the importance of a humble apology cannot be overlooked. Thanks for your reflection on the willingness to admit fault in sales, it’s definitely applicable to everyday life as well!
Great advice. Being humble and admitting our mistakes is hard for a lot of people to do. Nothing is ever perfect, but I do agree with your point that customers expect perfection from salespeople. With a sincere apology I would expect the customer to respect that and move on with the process.
Can’t agree more. It’s very important to just own up to a mistake you made instead of trying to find something to blame. There’s always going to be external factors at play, but that still doesn’t excuse the fact that you may have made a couple of mistakes during a failed sales conversation. Not only does knowing and acknowledging where you went wrong help you to grow, it also helps people to have a better perception of you, in my opinion.