Get Rejected – It’s Good For Sales

Fear of rejection is one of the most common weaknesses among salespeople and it is a major reason people give for avoiding the selling profession altogether. It is closely related to what psychologists call the abandonment fear. Abandonment fear is a primal response all humans have to some degree. In ancient and pre-historic times if you were abandoned or rejected by your community you most likely starved to death or lost the protection from predators that the community afforded. But that fear is misplaced in the modern day salesperson. Nobody starves to death or is eaten by a saber-toothed tiger because a prospect decided not to buy from them.

Salespeople who fear rejection make fewer sales calls because they spend a lot of time working up the courage to make the call. Then, if they are not successful, they spend time recovering from the experience. They take a break. They analyze what just happened. They rationalize the situation. They blame themselves. They blame the company or outside factors like the economy the government or the Federal Reserve Bank. Eventually they make another call, usually with lowered expectations and the ensuing unhappy result. They repeat this over and over expending vast amount of emotional energy in the process.

Salespeople without fear of rejection make one call after the other with little or no downtime between calls. They realize that the prospect’s decision not to buy from them or to talk to them or to meet with them is not personal. The prospect may be busy or not have a need.  What seems like rejection may be due to any one of several other factors. But it is not an attack on the salesperson. They are not going to starve because this one person could not see the benefit of doing business with or talking to them. They know that there are other prospects right around the corner to talk to. They also know that outside factors have little to do with their overall success. Sure the economy, the government and even their own company create situations they have to deal with. But they adjust their approach and go on selling and succeeding anyway. They also realize that sometimes they make a mistake in their approach or they miss cues that the prospect gives them and they lose an opportunity to business due to their own failure in that instance. But they realize the mistake and move on trying not to make that mistake again. They know that no one is perfect – not even them.

So the lesson for today is to increase the amount of rejection you experience. If you do, your sales will increase dramatically and the rejection isn’t about you anway. Watch this video to understand more about how that works.

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Dan Caramanico is a salesforce development expert and he is the author of Attributes of The Optimal Salesperson® One of Selling power’s top ten books for 2010 and Optimal Selling, Sales Conversations of the Optimal Salesperson.