What happens when a company's best salespeople sit down to talk about their failures?
That's exactly what 124 leaders from El Puerto de Liverpool experienced — directors, managers, and mid-level ops leaders — at a Fuckup Nights keynote in Mexico City. The event was part of the launch of "Strategy in Action," Liverpool's internal program for reviewing results, spotting areas of opportunity, and turning mistakes into real learning — every quarter.
Liverpool's Head of HR had read our book. He understood something important: the people who hear "no" most in any company aren't the executives. They're the salespeople.
What Makes a Great Salesperson?
Santiago Lecumberri, Head of Founders Community at Fuckup Nights Global, opened with a question: what's actually in your control when you're trying to close a sale?
What's not in your control? The customer's mood. Whether they've already decided. Whether they have the budget. Whether they just came in to browse.
Obsess over what you can control. Let go of everything else.
In sales, that shift changes everything. When you stop chasing what doesn't depend on you, you show up without anxiety — and nothing pushes a customer away faster than a salesperson who visibly needs to make the sale.
"The best salespeople in the world have one superpower: they're not afraid to fail. And because they're not afraid, they try more times." — Santiago Lecumberri, Head of Founders Community, Fuckup Nights Global
The numbers backed it up: 80% of customers who buy do so on the fifth contact. And 90% of salespeople quit before they get there. The best salespeople aren't the smoothest talkers — they're the ones with the highest tolerance for frustration.
The Fish Philosophy and Fail Forward: Losing the Fear of Trying
Santiago introduced the four pillars of the Fish philosophy — the framework behind Liverpool's "Strategy in Action" program — and how they only work when making failure visible stops being scary and starts being the thing that pushes you to give your customers a "WOW moment" they'll never forget.
- Pillar one: choose your attitude
- Pillar two: make their day. Not yours.
- Pillar three: be present.
- Pillar four: play.
The goal of this philosophy is to lose the fear of experimenting — making what went wrong visible as a method for getting 1% better every day.
Playing doesn't mean not taking your work seriously. It means taking it seriously enough to create new ways of reaching your customer. And to create new things, you have to stop being afraid they won't work.
The challenge left for the team: create one "WOW moment" per week. An experience that surprises the customer. That sends them home with more than they came for. You can't do that with a script. You can only do it when you've stopped being afraid to try.
Why Talking About Failure Makes Leaders Better Salespeople
A department store with over 170 years in the market. A global organization that's spent more than a decade talking about failure. What do they have in common?
They both know that mistakes don't disappear when you hide them. They pile up. And in sales — where "no" is the daily bread — that has a real cost.
Human connection is the last frontier where AI can't replace a salesperson. Transactional sales? Sure, those are going. But sales that require a real relationship, real listening, genuine empathy — those are staying. And those are exactly what Liverpool needs to strengthen.
Just as we've seen with teams across other industries — like our work with FEMSA— this format works because talking openly about failure takes the fear out of trying new things. You might get it wrong. And that's okay.
The best salespeople don't wait for feedback. They go looking for it.
Want Your Sales Team to Learn How to Fail Better?
Liverpool distilled it into three ideas: sell from the inside, sell with empathy, sell with purpose.
That's not something you learn from a script. You learn it when a leader stands in front of 124 people, says out loud what went wrong, and the whole room recognizes they've been there too.
If your company is looking to build more resilient teams — ones that can process failure and keep going — that's exactly what we do at Fuckup Nights At Work.
"No" isn't the end. It's part of the process. And the teams that understand that are the ones that sell more.
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