Living the Life in Sales: Bending A Negative Response into Success

Living the Life in Sales: Bending A Negative Response into Success

The chances are high that many of my weekly news blogs will be ignored.  Some will just not have the time to read, others find my posts comfortably nestled into a recipient's Spam box out of the discomfort that my feelings may be hurt? I have no knowledge of who they are.  Usually my feedback is when someone takes the time to acknowledge that they agree or disagree with my post.  I am completely comfortable with this.

The fear of rejection is the bane of success. If rejections scare you, you will avoid making the difficult calls in life. And once the fear of rejection gets its insidious claws into you, it gets worse, creating more failure.

To be really successful (at sales or any other career), you must not just learn to cope with occasional (and even frequent) rejections. You must also learn to turn rejection into a goad that drives you towards ultimate success.

Differentiate between invalid and valid rejection

There are two types of rejections. A valid rejection is when a person doesn't do what you want because of something that you can change. Invalid rejections are when that "failure" took place because of something completely arbitrary that's outside of your control.

Here is an example of an invalid rejection:

Suppose you make a cold call and a prospect hangs up on you. While that's a textbook definition of "rejection", the truth is that the prospect's reaction has nothing to do with you. What's actually happened is that you accidentally broke the prospect's rules. You had no way of knowing that the prospect was busy and that the prospect thinks it is okay to hang up on unfamiliar callers.

Now, perhaps if you said something different or called at a different time, you might have gotten a different reaction, but that's just a fiction that you're making up in your mind. However, if you had called at a different time, the prospect might just as easily have added a expletive before hanging up and then sent a memo directing the company to never buy from you ever again.

There's no way of knowing. It's not a valid rejection, its just chance.

What's important here is that the prospect's reaction really didn't have anything to do you with personally, because anybody else taking the same action at the same time would have gotten the exact same outcome? You simply took an action that didn't work.

As soon as you realize that invalid rejections are just luck, most of so-called rejections simply become neutral events and the entire concept starts to lose its sting.

Understand why you feel rejected.

Why do you work? Is it, money, recognition, and achievement? Wrong, wrong, and wrong. All of those reasons are just outward manifestations of your real goal: you want to feel good about yourself.

For example, you think that you work because you want money? Incorrect. What you really want is what the money can buy, and I'm not talking about that new Ferrari. I'm talking about the feeling that owning a Ferrari would give you.

No matter what reason you give for being in sales, trace it back, and you'll eventually get to "it makes me feel good about myself."

Therefore, rejection "hurts" because there's something about the situation that makes you feel bad about yourself. To test this theory, imagine the biggest idiot you've ever known telling you that you're stupid. Do you care? No. The "rejection" fails to sting because it doesn't assault your sense of self. Who cares what that fool thinks?

Rejection starts to sting as the result of three qualitative and highly subjective factors:

Frequency. Everyone can deal with some rejection, but how much rejection can you experience before you start taking the negative feedback to heart? How many times can you contact a qualified prospect and get a negative response before you begin to take it personally? In other words, getting told a million times that you're stupid might make you question your intelligence, even if you didn't particularly respect the people saying it.

Emotional Involvement. How emotionally involved can you become with somebody before you feel that the other person might know you so well that criticism hurts? For example, you might be reluctant to close because you're afraid that your customer might feel "buyer's remorse" and stop liking you -- a form of rejection. In other words, if you like somebody, you'll tend to feel pretty bad if that person tells you to go take a hike.

Perceived Importance. As a sales rep, you're likely to feel most comfortable contacting people who are of a similar (or lower) social class or educational background. However, you might find yourself avoiding people whom you feel are more important than yourself, because their rejection of you might seem to carry more weight or authority.

Understanding why you feel rejected is the first step to removing the "sting." To do this, you take a different approach, depending on subjective reason that's behind you're feeling of being rejected.

Remove the Sting of Rejection.  Your job is to weaken the ability of the "rejection" situation to make you feel bad about it.

To make yourself feel less vulnerable in this area, you must first throw out all the invalid objections (as defined in the first step). Don't even count them. They're nonsense. If you still feel that you're getting a lot of rejections, then look at the norms for other professionals at your level. If you discover that you're in the ballpark for everyone else, there's no particular reason to feel bad about being rejected. If it turns out that you are getting valid rejections more frequently than your peers, then you'll need to figure out what sales skill is missing or broken in your tool kit, and then work on it. We'll get to that in the last step of this post.

Emotional involvement. The cure for this subjective ailment is to value both what you're offering AND the relationship. If you truly value both, then there is absolutely NO reason why you shouldn't want your customers to be your true friends. If it turns out your friend doesn't want or need your offering, it's not a rejection of you, but of the need for your offering, because it's not about you. If it's just a matter that your friend doesn't want or need what you've got to offer, then you can go ahead and be happy for that friend didn't buy. That's what your friend wanted and your offering is still good. And you're doing what's right by your friend.

Perceived importance. The cure for this is simply to believe in you. Here's the honest truth: if you're offering something that's crucial to the success or happiness of your customer, you are as important as the biggest VIP on the planet. Here's another big truth: most VIPs are exceedingly average people who've stumbled into their success; they are not Gods, Among Men Whose Judgment Must Be Validated. They're everyday men and women, just like you and me. So get some perspective. The opinion of some is just not all that big a deal.

The trick to bulletproofing yourself against rejection is to let people have their own emotions and beliefs, and then simply use whatever happens as either a signal to improve your skills (a valid objection) or a signal to exercise your "so what" mental muscle (an invalid one).

Reframe rejection into your path to success.  In sales, the number of rejections you get is directly proportional to how successful you will become.  The people who hit the most home runs are the one who get up to bat the most. As has been pointed out innumerable times, the person with the major league baseball record for being struck out is Reggie Jackson, one of the greatest batters of all time.

Estimate the number of times you encounter rejection in an average day. (No need to be entirely accurate). Now calculate your daily average salary/commission. Now divide the number of rejections per day by your daily salary. 

Example:

Number of times you get a valid rejection each day on average: 5

Your daily salary and commission, on average: $500

The money you make every time you get "rejected": $100

Look at that number carefully. That's how much money goes into your pocket every time you encounter a rejection. The reasoning is simple. If you're not getting rejected, you are not selling. So when you do sell, it's because you've been willing to be rejected. The rejections lead to the sales, so you actually are paid through the rejection process.

The Failure of Supply Side Economics

The Republican Party has long promoted itself as the party of business. Republicans understand the needs of business, we are told, and if the country would leave the economy in their hands business would boom. All we need to do is to give those at the very top of the income distribution – the “job creators” – more income through tax breaks, and then sit back and wait for the magic happen. Our investment in the wealthy will produce remarkable economic growth, and everyone will be better off.

The Bush tax cuts were a test of these claims about "supply side" economic policies. To justify the tax cuts the nation was, in effect, given a business prospectus from the Republican Party. We were promised that cutting taxes on the wealthy would result in much higher economic growth and broadly shared prosperity. For those who wondered how we would pay for such a large cut to the government’s revenue stream, the Republican prospectus had a remarkable claim. The tax cuts wouldn’t cost us anything. Growth would be so strong that the tax cuts would more than pay for them. Even those who admitted that the tax cuts might not be fully self-financing still made strong claims about faster economic growth offsetting much of the lost revenue from the tax cuts.

The reality, of course, has been quite different. There is no evidence (none!) that the Bush tax cuts, or any other tax cuts directed at the so-called job creators, have had a noticeable effect on economic growth. And the promise of broadly shared prosperity has not been realized. Most of the gains from economic growth in recent decades have gone to the top of the income distribution while the inflation-adjusted wages of the working class have been relatively flat. Furthermore, the tax cuts have not paid for themselves as promised, and it hasn’t even been close. The Bush tax cuts have already cost us trillions in revenue, and if they are extended for high income tax payers, they will cost us roughly another trillion dollars over the next decade.

The failure of Republicans to deliver on their promise that tax cuts would be mostly self-financing is a large factor in the deterioration in our long-run fiscal outlook, and it is putting considerable pressure on programs such as Social Security. In fact, the Bush tax cuts can be thought of as a loan from the Social Security Trust Fund that was supposed to be paid back with the revenues from higher economic growth, a loan that is presently in default.

To see this, recall that the government began intentionally collecting a surplus from the Social Security program beginning in 1983 in order to prefund the retirement needs of baby boomers. The idea was to run a surplus for several decades while the baby-boomers were still working to get ready for the deficit years the system would experience after they retired.

The revenue from Social Security over and above what was needed to fund payouts reduced the overall government debt and allowed taxes to be lower than they could have been without these surplus funds. For example, the surplus that Bush inherited from the Clinton administration was largely due to the Social Security Trust Fund, and Bush argued it would be better to give this surplus to the private sector through tax cuts than to leave it in the hands of the government. But it wasn’t better. The income of the wealthy grew as they pocketed the tax cuts, but workers experienced stagnant wages, a recession that hit working class households particularly hard, and intense pressure to cut important social programs.

Despite their failed promises, the Republican Party is asking that we extend the tax cuts for the wealthy, and some are even calling for further reductions in tax rates. However, if the Republican Party is truly the party of business, then surely it will understand that no responsible financial institution would continue to invest in a business that failed, meet, or even come close to the growth and revenue projections that justified the investment in the first place. The payoffs from tax cuts that were promised during the Bush years have not been realized, and the failed promises about growth and revenue have damaged the health, education, and retirement programs the working class depends upon in our increasingly globalized economy.

A true party of business would end our investment in the false promise of "supply side" economics. However, a party with a goal of reducing the scale of programs such as Social Security and Medicare along with delivering tax cuts to wealthy political backers would use arguments about the economic effects of tax cuts to disguise its true intentions. Which description fits best? Many Republicans still claim that tax cuts for the wealthy enhance economic growth despite the evidence to the contrary, but it’s rare to hear a Republican admit that the "supply side" policies have failed.

Business Principles from the Book of Proverbs

Business Principles from the Book of Proverbs

Republished by Request

What is the best book on business that you have ever read? 



If you visit the typical bookstore-at least in the U.S.A. you will find hundreds of volumes in the business section, each claiming to hold the ultimate secrets to business success and professional advancement. Some are biographical; others suggest multiple step "how-to's" of becoming a great business leader or high-producing salesperson. Some focus on motivation, trying to convince you that you can do whatever you set your mind to do, while others offer cute little stories in which they convey basic business truths. 



I have read dozens of these books, and I'll agree that in them I have found many worthwhile insights and principles. However, I don't think that all the books displayed in the business section can come close to the substance that is available in what I consider the greatest business book ever written-the Book of Proverbs by Solomon. In fact, there is more practical business wisdom presented in one small section of the book of Proverbs than you can find in any other book, even those written by today's foremost business leaders.

I love to read business books. Right now I am rereading King Solomon’s Book of Proverbs: I love to read the most about business ethics, positive working attitudes, sales, and management.  All this and more can be found in the Book of Proverbs. The book of Proverbs of Solomon written between 960 and 922 BC and his thoughts were remarkable and if you read today’s writers like Tracy, Rohn, and Canfield you will find traces of Solomon in their writing.

I know what you are thinking (saying)… Hey I am not a bible reader, nor do I want someone pushing me to a “churchly” dialogue.  You would be mistaken, however, if you do not investigate the wealth of information that can be found here for the 21^st century businessperson.

It behooves all of us in business to seek competent information, wherever the source.  You may be surprised just how many business coaches apply the Proverbs principles.

The Book of Proverbs may be the most practical book ever written for the modern day businessperson. It was designed to be a success manual.

Proverbs defines success far more broadly than economic success. It includes economic as one mark of a successful person. But these proverbs make it clear that economic success apart from wisdom is a snare and a delusion.

The book applies its principles to such areas of life as money, work, planning, peace, goal setting, self-discipline, and other topics. It covers the following in detail:

1. The steps to personal success

2. The standards of personal success

3. Success indicators

4. Failure indicators

5. The function of riches

6. The basis of riches

7. The concept of ownership

8. The nature of economic causation

9. The marks of an ethical economy

10. The purposes of inheritance

Whatever your persuasion, non-religious or religious, should you not at least investigate a tested resource that can aid you toward a professional and personal path toward success?