Four Ways To Deal With Sales Rejection

Due to sales rejection being a potential outcome when we are making cold calls, we can dread picking up the phone regardless of our skills, knowledge, and years of experience. The explanation for this resistance is that we as humans extremely dislike the feeling of rejection.

According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we have a level of needs called "Love and Belonging" and this is where we have a need to be accepted by others. This need is very important to us and according to Maslow's model, this is a need that we put right behind or after physical safety and security.

When we experience rejection, we take a fairly negative hit in that area of needs and this can cause us significant emotional and mental discomfort. To avoid this mental pain, we consciously and subconsciously avoid situations where we may experience rejection.

If you can relate to this feeling and you can see the potential connection with approach anxiety, the first step to effectively dealing with or decreasing it is to simply become more aware of what it is and why it occurs. From there, there are some very clear things that we can do to improve our ability to deal with sales rejection.

1. It is Not Personal

We need to keep in mind that when someone says "no" and rejects our cold call, they are rejecting the sale and not us as a person. It is nothing personal against us or anything about us personally as they likely do not know who we are or anything about us. This may sound silly to point out, but our first natural reaction to sales rejection on a cold call can often be to take the rejection personally in some way.

2. There is no Physical Pain

We can sometimes look at the phone and dread picking it up and making calls due to the potential for sales rejection. But one thing to keep in mind is that there is not any physical pain that can result from cold call rejection. The worst thing that can happen is to get hung up on. And there is really no real impact on us when that happens.

3. Not Everybody can be a Fit for Our Products

If we are cold calling to sell a product, there is no possible way that everybody that we call is going to be a qualified prospect. There are just likely a set of requirements or characteristics that make someone a good prospect and it is simply not likely that everybody that we reach will fit well. As a result, we have to get rejection from most of the people that we encounter from the segment of prospects that are simply not a fit for what we sell.

4. We are Still Accomplishing Something

When someone rejects us, it may hurt and feel like we are wasting our time. But the reality is that even when someone hangs up on us or says "no", we are still accomplishing something as we can now take that person off of our list of people to call. Every "no" gets us one step closer to a "yes".