Sales Fear Series – Fear of Rejection

As I launch this new newsletter, I thought it would be prudent to start it with a series and not a single topical post. Since I have been in sales for over 30 years, I have had my share of experiences with the subject of fear. My hope is that you all find some aspects identifiable. But ideally, I hope you find it helpful.

Fear in and of itself can be a paralyzing creature. For salespeople, fear is that proverbial thorn in the side. It strikes at the most inopportune times. It rears its ugly head at the end of a much-needed quarter. It shows up on that sales call when your VP of Sales decides to join. It swells up after that company meeting when the CEO says that the company is having a particularly challenging year.

Fear of being rejected is one of the most dreaded of the lot. Probably because rejection is hard not to take personally. Even though the salesperson didn’t create the product being sold, some person telling you that they don’t want it makes them feel some kind of way. And since sales involves speaking with people often, that fear of rejection can become haunting.

One way salespeople try to avoid that feeling is to look for those more favorable conversations. The idea is to find that low hanging fruit. They want to find those easy sales leads where the prospects suggests that they are ready to buy now. Unfortunately, this means that there are others that are not being prospected at all for the fear of that rejection that the salesperson has now internalized. This is clearly not a strategy for success.

Here are three ways to overcome the pain of rejection in sales. The first way is to build value in self. The next is to build value in their product. And the final way is to have a mind shift about if the prospects are even qualified to be a customer in the first place.

Value in self is a concept that requires salespeople to find independently. Sales management can do all they can to make sure that their teams have all the knowledge about the product and the company that they can share. But it is the salesperson that must couple that acumen with an already well – established identity of their own self-worth that prevents the poison of the fear of rejection from anchoring itself. What sales management can do, is to remind the salesperson of their successes and the paths taken to achieve them whenever they have moments that suggest they may succumb to that fear. This is why consistently evaluating both ‘wins’ and ‘losses’ in sales is so important.

The next idea about overcoming this type of sales fear is to have a strong value in the product that a salesperson is selling. It is not enough to simply provide a salesperson with the benefits and features statement. There must be customer testimony that reiterates what is on the PDF. Hearing from a customer that values what has been sold confirms and solidifies a belief system that should be inherent with the sales team. And there should also be alignment with the company mission. The company mission is the ‘why’ statement. It should have teeth. It should inspire. And it should be a guiding light for the sales team during all discussions with prospective customers. It becomes harder for salespeople to take a rejection personally while in this state of mind.

And lastly, to overcome this fear is to take a position of qualification. The assumption for many salespeople is that if they are speaking with a prospect, that person must be eligible to buy their solution or offering. This is so not true. The discovery phase of the sales process must function as a protective chamber for the sales team. During this phase, they are insulated from the fear of rejection. They are working from a level playing field here. There is no sense of loss because there is still work to be done to figure out if the deal will go any further. A salesperson can’t lose what they don’t even have.

The fear of rejection is a ghost – like figment of the salespersons mind. Let’s be clear, if there are competitors in the marketplace, the possibility of not securing the sale is a real one. But it is not to be feared. It is logical to accept this aspect of the sales world.?