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.