The Most Important Sales Advice I Ever Received That Can Be Applied to Life

There is a simple way to deal with rejection.

It was the second week of a new job and I met a colleague who would be in the trenches with me selling.

He seemed like a regular guy with a wife and two kids and had been with the company for a while. We caught up to discuss the role and talk about the client I would be looking after. The conversation started out in typical form and we discussed our career and what we’d done to date.

Then, out of nowhere, from the least salesy person I have ever met, he explained to me how he deals with rejection.

He said that the client I would be managing, which he used to manage, would often do the following:

• Not show up to meetings.
• Promise to execute an action and forget
• Not respond to emails
• Ignore phone calls
• Take his strategies and use them without engaging his services

It sounded awful at first. What was I get myself into? Could I be in such a harsh role and successfully sell anything?

This line came out of his mouth and is the single best piece of sales advice I have ever received:

“Pretend the rejection never happened and act that way.”

A real-life scenario

After he explained this sales tactic to me, he went on to tell me a story. There was an important deal he was working on and there was one particular stakeholder that made all the decisions.

He tried to call them and they ignored his calls.

He emailed them and they never responded.

He walked up to their desk, and finally got a meeting with them.

He sent them a calendar invite and they accepted it. Then, on the day of the meeting, the client never showed up. An hour later, he bumped into the client in the lobby. It was awkward. At this moment, he decided to pretend that the client never missed the meeting and not mention it. The client said nothing as well.

Here’s the strategy he gave me for dealing with rejection when this happens:

1. Don’t take it personally

His advice to me was that this exact event was guaranteed to happen to me. For me to win, I had to get used to this situation and he said the first step is not to take it personally.

When someone misses your meeting, it’s nothing against you. People are busy and they are not always going to show up on time and attend every meeting. The agenda for your meeting might be important, but it may be insignificant to a client.

If you see rejection as normal and not take it personally, you can move past it and not let it hold you back or make you upset.

2. Walk up to their desk

After the meeting has been missed and no contact has been made to explain what happened, walk up to their desk.

Be more assertive and see if you can sort the situation out.

3. Pretend they didn’t miss your meeting

While attempting to salvage your meeting and get a new one, pretend in front of the client that they never missed the meeting.

Don’t acknowledge it and seek only to rectify this situation and demonstrate that you’re determined to have the meeting.

This was not easy advice for me to swallow. Having a client miss a meeting without an explanation felt as though it would place me in a weak position and make me a pushover.

He insisted that being focused on the outcome was the best approach.

4. Get them to send a new meeting invite in front of you

When phone, email, and prescheduled meeting’s still don’t work, he said that while at the client’s desk, I could speak with them and request a new meeting.

This time, the client needed to send the meeting invite to me while I was standing there. If I stood there and didn’t let my ego be offended, he assured me that I would get a new meeting and the client would show up.

5. Push hard — be relentless

The key advice that he gave me was that if I wanted to work in sales (and with this client), I had to get good at being rejected.

The reason, he explained, he had done well in sales was that he was relentless and didn’t let a small rejection stop him from pushing ahead with a prospective sales opportunity.

He shared with me examples where he’d been rejected, ignored or forgotten about by a client over and over. All he ever did was keep going and not let the client’s action offend him.

“If you are relentless and push for the meeting, you’ll get it,” he said.

Applied to life

This crucial sales advice I was given can be applied to life too. In life, we also go through constant rejection. We’re ignored, forgotten about, not good enough, or lacking experience.

Finding a romantic partner takes many rejections, especially if you decide to put yourself out there and join a dating app as I did.

Any role you take in the working world is going to involve heaps of rejection too. There will always be a better candidate or someone younger or someone smarter than you who can take an opportunity away from you that you thought you deserved.

Starting a business involves rejection too. Your business idea will be shot down, customers won’t buy from you, competitors will undercut you, recessions could affect your financial performance, you could run out of money, get sued, have your IP stolen, get hacked or make a giant PR mistake that winds up causing the public to think you are unethical. There is so much that can go wrong in business. Being an expert in rejection is the only way you can keep going when one of these scenarios occurs.

Our hobbies are loaded with rejection too. My hobby is writing and every day I have to deal with trolls, or angry readers, or people who don’t like my point of view or a publication that rejects my work or an article that doesn’t get read. Every time I try and up my game in writing, there is rejection right around the corner. As I get closer and closer to perhaps writing a book, there will be a whole new world of rejection waiting for me to tell me that my idea is stupid, or that I won’t be getting an advance, or that my audience is too small.

Life is full of rejection and the simplest way to deal with it is not to give up.

Final Thought

The next time you face rejection, think about the sales advice this colleague gave me. We’re all going to deal with rejection at some point.

Facing people who haven’t met our expectations or failed to meet a commitment they made, can make us angry. It can cause us to tell stories or get angry, but that doesn’t serve any purpose.

The simplest way to deal with someone who rejects you is to pretend it didn’t happen, make a new request, and show them that you’re not someone who gives up easily. If you do that, rejection will never win — eventually, you will, though.

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