3 Tested Ways You Must Know To Reframe Rejection in Sales

A salesperson’s job is to prospect and get in front of as many leads as possible to constantly fill their pipeline and drive results.

This can be a very rewarding process both financially and psychologically – who doesn’t like the dopamine rush we get when closing deals? However, given the myriad of conditions that need to be fulfilled for a sale to happen, the sales profession brings with it a substantial amount of challenges.

One of those main challenges is that most prospects you will speak to are going to say no to what you have to offer.?

In any sales career, rejection is inevitable. It’s part of the job. You learn to take it in stride and move on, yet even seasoned salespeople tend to struggle with the feelings that rejection may bring about. Ultimately, we are all human beings and rejection can feel terrible.

But what if we could reframe rejection so that it didn’t affect our behaviour as much? What if we could bounce back quicker and stronger? This article will explore a few ways to do just that.

A paradigm shift

In one of my previous articles on well-being and high performance in sales , I mentioned how most people have been conditioned to believe that before they can perform better at work they need to feel more confident, they need to be in the right mindset, they need to first change their thoughts and emotions.

In the article, I highlighted how this idea can be very limiting. We can’t always ensure to be in our “confident mode” or have the “right” thoughts and emotions – we simply can’t control those things at any given time.

We don’t need to confine ourselves to a small range of conditions to perform well. Sure, being in a state of confidence and excitement helps, yet it doesn’t have to be ever-present to allow us to perform well. ?

Wanting to change the way we think and feel - because we believe our thoughts and feelings are not the “right ones” - implies an attitude of non-acceptance towards what we are experiencing, and it puts us in a struggle with our mind.

Over time, if negative thoughts and emotions are labelled as “bad” or “the wrong mindset”, then we start to fear our natural response to new situations which, in turn, increases what psychologists refer to as?experiential avoidance –?a trait by which an individual behaves in a certain way for the sole purpose of avoiding the experiences in which negative thoughts and emotions are triggered [1].

Let’s explore rejection through these lenses.?

You attempted a prospecting call. The person on the other side has been very dismissive, calling you an “incapable time-waster”. It’s been a hard day and this has been yet another rejection to add to the myriad of negative responses you have already accrued.

Now, we can do very little about the uncomfortable feelings that we may experience in anticipation of a potential rejection or following one that just happened. Ultimately, we are human and as such, we are wired to respond that way.

Researchers at the University of Michigan placed people in functional MRI machines and asked them to recall a recent rejection and they discovered that when we experience rejection there is an activation of the same brain regions that are active whenever we experience physical pain. Hence why even small rejections seem to hurt more than we think they should. [2]

But why is our brain wired this way?

According to evolutionary psychologists, everything started when we were hunter-gatherers who lived in tribes. Surviving on our own was extremely hard, so being ostracised from our tribe was almost a death sentence. As a result, we developed some early warning mechanisms that would help us anticipate the threat of being kicked out of our group – and that was rejection. [3]

Rejection causes emotional pain because it threatens our need to belong. It can affect our mood and self-esteem and it drives a tendency to self-criticism in most individuals. In other words, a lot of the damage that rejection causes is self-inflicted. As Socrates once said, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

In view of such notions, the best way to deal with rejection is to accept it for what it is: an uncomfortable emotional response, arising in specific situations which are interpreted as a threat to our ingrained need to belong.

Now, the issue is not rejection or the uncomfortable feelings that come with it, rather it is the way we relate to them. Because we unconsciously label those feelings as “bad” for us, then we may develop a fear of such normal responses stemming from our survival instincts.

Why do you think the mind gets super agitated just before or after an episode of rejection? Why do you think we can become supercritical of ourselves? Apart from any underlying insecurity we may have, it all comes down to our attitude of non-acceptance towards what just happened which then amplifies the natural, uncomfortable feelings we are experiencing. We would have liked for the person on the other side to respond differently, we would have liked a more positive outcome, we would have preferred not to experience discomfort and we would rather not experience such feelings once again.

All of this tends to increase experiential avoidance. As salespeople, we may consciously or subconsciously begin to reduce our prospecting activity levels and avoid calling certain types of prospects in an attempt to escape rejection and the uncomfortable feelings that come with it. We end up sacrificing long-term rewards and satisfaction for immediate self-preservation.

We need to learn to treat these negative emotions the same way we treat positive ones. Ultimately, they are both neuro-psychological responses to external or internal stimuli; we learnt to categorise them into “positive” or “negative” through our upbringing and societal conditioning.

By approaching them with less judgment and more openness we won’t generate the unnecessary additional pain on top of the level of baseline discomfort that comes with rejection.

Then, as we shape a healthier relationship with our emotions and we take more action, rejection will likely affect us less and less.?

It’s all about interpretation

In his book Smart Calling, Art Sobczak puts forward an interesting argument, “You are rejected only if you think you are”. There is a clear difference between a rep that feels rejected and one that stays resilient and focused:

• A non-resilient rep goes from call to call, constantly hearing nos and ending each call negatively with a visible frustration on his face. She takes it personally and loses motivation as she goes through the day.
• A resilient rep accomplishes something on every call, even if it is not the ultimate objective. She has always a secondary objective to fall back on. Something that is always in her control and that can be a better measure of progress than just a yes or a no. She celebrates those minor successes that are improving her sales skills and helping her build relationships for the long term. ?

If we look at reality objectively, it is fair to say that there is no relationship between the last call we made and the next one.?However, when we get caught up in our inner voice that says things like, “Today is just one of those days”, “Today, I am not going anywhere”, “There must be something wrong with me”, “Perhaps this is not for me”, “The next call is going to be as bad as my other calls” and on and on, it almost feels as though there is a strong connection between them.

But again, that’s not the case. That’s not objective reality, that’s just one of the many interpretations of reality.

Several decades ago, a well-known psychologist named Martin Seligman went on to demonstrate how we possess certain ingrained, unhelpful tendencies in explaining the “failures” we experience. From his research on life insurance salespeople, Seligman came up with what he calls the 3 P’s. They are Personalisation, Permanence, Pervasiveness:

• Personal Bias: we tend to associate rejection with who we are as people. We tend to take it personally. We may say, “I am useless”, “I am not good enough”, “I am...” and on and on.?
• Permanent Bias: we tend to interpret a bad rejection as an indelible black mark to our status and capacities as salespeople. Something that will last forever. We may say, “This is going to ruin everything.”
• Pervasive Bias: we tend to perceive rejection as something that happens all the time and that applies to other areas of our life. Perhaps we may start thinking we are a “failure” at something else as well.

Knowing the existence of such biases can help us become more aware of them as they show up in the mind. By catching ourselves in unhelpful thinking we can “wake up” and regain a ?clearer and more objective outlook on things.

Ultimately, it is known that statistically, you are going to hear more nos than yeses and the more conversations you have, assuming you are adopting a strong sales approach and targeting the appropriate people, the “luckiest” you get.

Review your calls regularly to seek feedback and drive continuous improvement, yet don’t get caught up in the downward spiral that rejection tends to trigger. Your biggest opportunity could just be one call away.

Let’s now pull all of this together for some practical advice.?

Practical pill: accept your response to rejection and shift your focus on what matters

Based on what has been discussed above it is clear that to become more resilient salespeople we need to tackle the unhelpful self-biases we possess towards rejection as well as our natural tendency to not accept the uncomfortable feelings that rejection brings about.

So, how do we do this? Here is your practical advice:

1.????Set a secondary objective for your sales activity. Salespeople know what their ultimate sales goal is - for example in a phone prospecting call, it could be to schedule an appointment with the prospect – and they will generally measure their success based on that as well. However, it may not be the wisest thing to do. It is important to recognise that scheduling an appointment with the prospect is not fully in your control, no matter how good you are on the phone. Instead, you should think of defining a secondary objective that is fully in your control and that you can fall back on whenever you don’t hit your primary goal.

A secondary objective is an attempt you can always make on our part on each call. This way, rather than thinking, “Oh, that’s so bad, today I got only 1 yes and 9 nos”, you would be thinking, “Today I hit my primary objective once and my secondary objective 9 times.” It’s a mindset shift, you gain and focus on the small wins on each call and don’t really think you have been rejected. Generally, the best thing is to link your secondary objective to your skills development. For example, a good secondary objective may be: “Every time I get an objection I will apply my sales technique to get past it and convey the value of how we can help” or if you are already at the discovery call stage you may say: “I will make sure to do 75% listening and 25% talking.” Regardless of whether you get a yes or a no, you can always achieve your secondary objective.

2.????Check yourself against the three P’s. Following a rejection, you may experience one if not all of the self-biases discussed above. Ask yourself, “Is this Personal?” (probably it didn’t happen because of who you are as a person, many other factors may have been at play), “Is this Permanent?” (certainly it’s not going to last forever and it’s not going to ruin everything), “Is this Pervasive?” (certainly it’s not something that happens all the time, there have been other occasions in which you have prevailed and persuaded the other side). Recognise those patterns and re-focus on the task at hand.

3.????Use acceptance self-talk. The feeling that anticipates or follows rejection can be awful, yet we don’t need to amplify it by not accepting it for what it is, just a feeling, like anyone else. At the start, when experiencing discomfort it can be helpful to say to yourself things like: “I don’t like this feeling, but I have room for it.”, “It’s unpleasant but I can accept it”, “I don’t like it, I don’t want it, I don’t approve it, but right here and now, I accept it.” Acceptance is an attitude of openness, curiosity and receptiveness towards our feelings, not a thinking process. Despite silently saying things such as the above examples won’t make you truly accept, it can act as a prompt and remind you to do so.

Now imagine as though points 1, 2 and 3 were turned into three different pills that a doctor had prescribed to help strengthen your resilience in the face of rejection. Here is your instruction for use:

• Pill 1 is to be taken at the beginning of each workweek (review the secondary objective regularly to make sure is aligned with your skill progress and development).
• Pills 2 and 3 are to be taken when necessary after an episode of rejection.

This practical advice should make sense, yet if you have any questions feel free to drop a comment below, I would be happy to respond and provide further guidance.?

Happy prospecting!

Federico Presicci is a trainer and accredited coach dedicated to elevate sales' professional wellbeing and performance through mindfulness approaches. Learn how to better relate to your thoughts and emotions and your life will transform. Connect or follow Federico on Linkedin .

References

1.????Gardner & Moore, 2007.?The Psychology of Enhancing Human performance. Springer.

2.????Kross, E., Berman M. G., Mischel, W., Smith, E., and Wager, T., 2011. Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain. Source can be found at https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/108/15/6270.full.pdf

3.????Winch, G., 2015. Why rejection hurts so much — and what to do about it. Retrieved on 1st January 2022 from https://ideas.ted.com/why-rejection-hurts-so-much-and-what-to-do-about-it/ . TED.

Sobczak, A., 2010. Smart Calling: Eliminate the Fear, Failure, and Rejection From Cold Calling. USA, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Inc.?