Well actually, of course there is failure. If you take a driving test or exam you either pass or fail.
Salespeople will either succeed in achieving their monthly sales targets or fail to meet them. The key is how you perceive 'failure'.
Every failure can be looked at as a learning opportunity that is beautifully epitomised by Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb. Despite more than 10,000 failures, he stood by his dream until he made it a physical reality. He said that every discarded idea took him one-step closer towards finding the idea that would work.
One of the most powerful self-coaching questions salespeople can ask is, "What will I do differently next time?" or "What can I learn from this?"
Salespeople who make mistakes and learn from those mistakes have a tendency to do better than salespeople who are scared to fail.
Therefore if you can see that when you don't achieve your targets you have an opportunity to learn, because you have been given great feedback on what not to do next month.
I would also suggest that is still not common for salespeople or their managers to conduct post-mortems when they fail to win an opportunity - why?
This is a critical part of the sales/buying cycle - the learning phase. And unsurprisingly, it is even less common to find companies conducting post-mortems when they win business. Too busy celebrating and mentally spending that additional commission, I suspect!