The Fear of Rejection

Most salespeople that are unsuccessful only really fail if they don’t convert new logos and don’t grow their base from the inevitable ‘churn’ that will happen daily. New business hunters are even more susceptible to this….!!!

It’s the fear of rejection…!!

It doesn’t matter how you approach your business, whether its through cold calling on the phone, door knocking, referrals or other ways, you fear that negative answer, to show ‘loss’ in face of your peers or to see yourself and your job role as ‘unworthy’

So I’d like to show you not only how to get over the fear of this rejection but also maybe to change your mindset to try to understand why this rejection might be happening…sound good…? Let’s go…!!

So why do people struggle so much with cold calling in the first place..? It’s because everyone takes it personally – the EGO takes over and no one wants to feel rejected right ? It’s the circle of life that no -one likes rejection but in order to change your mindset you have to understand that ITS NOT YOU THAT THEY ARE REJECTING – Yes you may have been able to do something differently, but that’s only a tweak – It’s not YOU that they are rejecting, they are just of the opinion that they are not in the market for what you are talking about at the moment. The other thing to consider is that you have NO IDEA what’s going on in that persons life right now and so if they sound angry, upset or indifferent, it’s not you they are angry, upset or indifferent about – they are like that anyway because of their circumstances right now and THAT IS NOT ON YOU…!!!

Secondly, a lot of salespeople I see EXPECT REJECTION because of their skill-set…. That’s right, they actually play through in their head the reasoning that this person will probably say no…!! THAT'S CRAZY RIGHT…??!! There’s a huge difference between fear and faith and the bit in between is knowledge. Let me explain….

You’re walking by the sea and you come to a ledge about 20ft above the water, the water looks inviting and you’d like to jump in and cool off, but…….you don’t know if its shallow, if there are rocks, strong currents, deadly sharks, or whatever and so you don’t immediately take the plunge but you sit and think about it for a while – in that time a group of schoolkids come along and they say "come on jump in, we’ve been swimming here for ages and its perfectly safe" and so they proceed to jump in, swim about and generally have a great time – this increases your knowledge and therefore your confidence to jump in too and the fear is reduced and the faith is increased – and now you have that faith, you decide to jump in and you proceed to have a great time – you now have the knowledge that if/ when you return to that place, you can repeat the process and re-call that learned knowledge to jump in again!

The overriding factor in you choosing to jump is the prior knowledge that it is now reasonably safe to do so and so the risk is reduced and so the fear is reduced.

When cold calling, if you’re not confident in your skill-set of being able to talk to people, handle objections, have some product knowledge and stick to a script to get you to an end result – then your fear and your risk is going to be fairly high and it is going to put you off doing that activity – so by constantly doing it, having a plan, having faith in your own ability and letting all thoughts and doubts around your EGO fall by the wayside, you can approach cold calling and knocking doors in a much more positive and forceful manner – Pre Determine what the outcome will be and Visualise the end result – If you believe it, then it will happen

I've always found it funny how the more doors I knock and the more calls I make, the luckier I get….? ??