The Handling Rejection Competency
Joe DiDonato | Chief of Staff | Baker Communications, Inc.
Why is being Rejection Proof important? The most straightforward answer is that when salespeople are unaffected by rejection, they are more likely to ask tough, penetrating, and timely questions, even when the answer could result in a “no.” Those probing questions are important to move the sales process on to the next step, or alternatively, qualify whether this is going to be a customer that can use your products or services.
Rejection is just a normal part of life for most people. It happens in non-sales situations as well.
In 2016, one very successful author published a slew of rejection letters on Twitter that she had received over the years. She was turned down 12 times before Bloomsbury agreed to publish her book. She just forced herself to keep going, saying to herself, “I wasn’t going to give up until every single publisher turned me down.” The author? J.K. Rowling. The book? Harry Potter.
Another person whose career is riddled with rejections and missteps became equally committed to getting past those rejections. He apparently couldn’t even get in the door when he applied for a gig at Netscape in the 1990s. He was later fired from his job as PayPal’s CEO after spending some time in the position when the company bought his finance startup. His early attempts at building an aerospace business saw him dealing with less than enthused Russian entities who refused to sell him the rockets he needed to execute his dream. But after each rejection, he went on to build something better. After Netscape, he created his first successful business, Zip2. After PayPal, he went on to co-found Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink. That’s right, we’re talking about Elon Musk.
In the world of sales, the quantity of rejections each new seller gets daily is extremely high by comparison. It takes 100 outreaches to come up with 10 solid prospects. Of those 10 prospects, that seller will be whittled down to only 3 potentially closeable deals. And of those 3 closeable deals, only one will close. Can you handle 99 rejections or disappointments to get to that one deal? That’s what it’s going to take until you can hone your skills to find better prospects, ask better questions, come up with better value propositions, and learn to overcome objections. Only then are higher close rates achievable.
For many sellers, it’s totally normal to doubt yourself when you encounter that one customer or prospect who rips you apart. To my personal amazement, I saw that happen to one of our most senior sales reps. Not only did the customer rip him apart, but he also called me in an attempt to get him fired, or at the very least, removed from the account. His reasoning? “The guy’s an idiot, a horrible representative of your company, and you should really consider whether you should have him calling on your customers and prospects.” We had no choice but to remove him from the account.
Two weeks later, that same sales representative closed a $460,000 deal with another customer. That customer raved over how great he was at identifying their needs and how astute he was at making great recommendations that added true value.
Two completely opposite views of the same individual. What was the difference?
Turns out that because of the overbearing personality of our key contact at the other company, our seller couldn’t drill down deep enough to find out the real needs they had. He was honestly trying to get to the best solutions to offer them. Conversely, the prospect felt that the seller asking that many questions showed our seller’s lack of business acumen and his inability to connect the dots.
It was just an unfortunate scenario that resolved itself a few months later when the contact at that account “moved on” to another opportunity. Subsequently, the account was reassigned back to the original seller and a deal was consummated with the gentleman’s successor.
What’s the morale of the story? You need to be “rejection proof’ as a seller.
Let’s change our focus to winning for a second. Not many things are comparable to the adrenaline rush you’ll get when you close a deal. The trick is learning the skills that will help you achieve more wins. It’ll take work on your part. But world-class performance never happens easily or by accident.
Rejection is going to be even more prevalent early on in your sales career. Learning to handle objections will help you tremendously. At a former company, we found that learning to overcome the top 3 objections about our product resulted in a 51% increase in closed deals, and a 147% increase in pipeline. Do you know how to overcome your top 3 objections? If you don’t, do yourself a favor and ask for coaching on how to overcome them.
Learning to ask a lot of questions and to show empathy to your prospect’s needs is another way to reduce the number of rejections you’ll be facing. You can never ask too many questions in our opinion. It’s only when you have that depth of understanding of the customer’s needs that you can present the best solutions to them. And it’s when you have empathy that you can understand the true impact of the answers to the questions you’re asking.
If you would like to learn more about using competency data to drive your hiring, training, and coaching efforts, we invite you to watch one of our recent webinars: How to Implement Data-Driven Sales Enablement. View the webinar for free here: https://www.bakercommunications.com/webinars/How-To-Implement-Data-Driven-Sales-Enablement.html.
