Turning Sales Rejection into a Growth Catalyst

Unlock the secrets to turning rejection into a stepping stone for success in your sales career. Ever wondered why some people thrive despite constant setbacks? We promise you'll walk away knowing how to handle rejection without taking it personally and even see it as a beneficial part of the sales process. Discover strategies to manage personal conflicts with clients by leveraging your team or transferring clients when necessary. Analyze your rejection rates as a valuable source of feedback, prompting potential training opportunities to refine your sales approach and boost your deal-closing prowess.

Craving to enhance your sales game? Learn how mastering client qualification and objection handling can transform frequent rejections into opportunities for meaningful engagement and connection. We'll guide you through understanding your current clients' needs to unlock the potential of new prospects. Objections don't necessarily mean the end—often, they're just signals that more information is needed. With the right approach, demonstrate your solution's value, especially when budget concerns arise. Join us as we emphasize the strength of being part of a supportive sales team, sharing insights and learning from shared experiences. Don’t let rejections weigh you down; use them as a launching pad for growth and success.

Chapters

• 0:00 Dealing With Rejection in Sales
• 8:33 Improving Sales Performance and Process

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Okay, well, welcome to this podcast. What I'm going to talk about is something that I've sort of touched on before and I no doubt will again, because it's one of the biggest subjects, I think, for any salesperson, particularly salespeople who are getting started or salespeople who are just hitting a rough patch and things just aren't clicking for you. So I don't know if you're in either of those categories. If you are, then hopefully this will help you. If you're not, this might be just a useful kind of review of how to deal with rejection. So rejection is one of the biggest fears that salespeople have. Pretty much most salespeople have some level of fear of rejection and in a lot of salespeople that fear is big enough that it prevents them from asking for the business, asking for the order, actually closing the deal, even when a client might be sitting there waiting. And I've certainly been in that position where I've gone to buy something and I'm ready to go buy something and I'm ready to go, I've had all my questions answered and the salesperson will not close the deal. And I must admit, because I've been in sales a long time, sometimes I just really can't be asked to do the job for them. Other times I just want to get it done, so I'll close it myself. As a client, but as a salesperson, as a sales professional, this is what we do. This is our contribution to the business. We are absolutely essential to the business because if you don't have orders, you don't have a business. If you don't have sales, there is no business there. So one of the things we have to kind of step up, step up to as salespeople is asking for the business going, going in and getting the order, and I don't mean doing that in a very sleazy, pushy way. That is pretty much the direct opposite of how I like to do sales and how I teach sales. So what can you do about rejection? What can I just cover in the 20 minutes or so we've got in this podcast?

Speaker 1: 2:15

Well, the very first thing to remember about rejection is you have a pretty much 100% certainty that you are going to get a no from a client. You're going to get rejected in some way. So a lot of people try and avoid it. That is probably the worst strategy to take and the key thing is to embrace it that it will happen. So the more important question is how do you handle it? What do you do with rejection when it happens. And that's really what I want to focus on in this podcast, because this is the reality of doing sales, and anyone who thinks they can get through a sales career without having a no, without being told no by somebody, is really fooling themselves, unless you have the most amazing product or you have very interesting sales strategy, and we probably won't go into that here. So the very first way to deal with it is to not make it about you, so don't take it personally. Make it about you, so don't take it personally.

Speaker 1: 3:18

Now, there may be situations where it is personal and, frankly, that does happen, so I kind of half joke about it. I know it has happened, I know situations where it has happened and, quite frankly, one way to handle it if you do feel that you're in a situation where there is a personal clash between you and your client, if you have a sales manager, I would talk to them and just say look, I think I've got an issue with this person, I think it's personal, I think it's going to impact the business that we're trying to do here, and my recommendation is that you get somebody else involved. Or you can even say to your client look, I'm just getting the feeling that you'd rather not deal with me personally. Look, I'm just getting the feeling that you'd rather not deal with me personally. How would you feel if I asked one of my colleagues to just look after your inquiry, or however you want to phrase it, but bring somebody else in? That is actually a very professional way of handling a situation where you have some sort of personality conflict.

Speaker 1: 4:13

If you're not in that situation, if you're on your own, then it may be that it's worth just speaking to your client directly about it and say, look, I might be wrong, but I'm kind of getting the feeling that you would rather not be dealing with me. Is that correct? And if it is, is there anything I can do about it? There's a couple of things in there. One is the I might be wrong part of it. It gives them. It makes very easy for them to say, oh, you're wrong, yeah, there's not a problem, and it also opens the door to have some sort of discussion. And, look, it may be that that's as far as the sale goes, but the chances are, if there really is a personal issue there, you're going to lose the sale anyway, and so from that perspective, you've got nothing to lose. So that's the first thing. But in most cases it won't be personal, it won't be about you first thing, but in most cases it won't be personal, it won't be about you.

Speaker 1: 5:06

So what is it about? So the kind of things to look at are, first of all, if you're in a sales team, or basically there's more than one of you doing selling, is your rate of rejection noticeably different to other people? Now, if it's very much lower, either you're probably doing okay or you've got a much bigger problem in the organization. If, however, it is higher than other people, then that definitely raises a flag that there are things to look at. So this is information. This is the way to treat this. You're looking at what's going on, you're looking at statistics now and that's giving you information, and once you have information, you can begin to work with it. So that's the angle that we are coming from here and that's where I'm coming from with this podcast.

Speaker 1: 5:53

So it may be that you need sales training. You know that could be it. Maybe it's a case to just step back, just go back to basics, run through the whole thing again. In some cases, that's probably the best way to invest time and money in order to have you really going out there and doing well. If you again, if you're part of a sales team, if you work for somebody, it's worth seeing what's available. If you work for yourself or you might want to just back yourself and invest in yourself so you can look at what sales training is available.

Speaker 1: 6:25

Now, when I look at training because I've definitely invested in quite a lot of training over the years and different things, because I'm one of these people who will invest in myself I want to be not only get better at what I do, but from a career point of view, I want to be as employable as possible. So the better you are in a particular role in this case sales the more employable you are when it comes to finding another job. And certainly things have changed from when I first got into employment. Back then we're going back a few decades, but that was more it was normal to expect to get a job and be there for quite a long time. Back then we're going back a few decades, but that was more it was normal to expect to get a job and be there for quite a long time. These days it's more normal to expect to have a job, but then move on after a certain point, and when I was recruiting salespeople, I would look at four years as being the kind of period I would really hope to get as a minimum, because that made my time and investment in training and coaching, all of those things, worthwhile. So that's just a yardstick, something to think about.

Speaker 1: 7:29

But I am a big believer in investing in myself, and so if I am in a situation where either certainly when I've been employed I've self-trained as well as looked for training from my employer, and if you're not employed, if you have your own business, then I'm imagining that you will see the value of investing in yourself and getting training. So, when it comes to training now, I do training, obviously, but that doesn't mean that you need to come to me because you might not like the way I present. And this is a critical thing, because if you are going to invest in training, you really need to be able to connect, and that person who's giving the training, all the people giving the training they need to be able to resonate with you. You need to be able to connect, you need to be able to understand, you kind of need to be a bit inspired by them as well. So that's why it's important to just have a look at some options and try and find somebody that will really deliver for you, and what I mean by that is that once you've completed their course, once you've done their training, you see a substantial change in the results you're achieving, and I think that's really important.

Speaker 1: 8:33

Stepping down from that, it's a question of looking at your sales process and trying to identify where it's going wrong. So if you're getting a no, I'm assuming you're getting a no when you're face-to-face with the client, because that's mostly where I work, but it might be earlier than that. So you probably need to start thinking about your qualification process. Are you qualifying your clients correctly or are you making a mistake in your qualification process? Because if you're getting a lot of no's, the chances are that you're talking to the wrong people. So if that is the situation, you need to just step back and look at who you should be talking to.

Speaker 1: 9:12

Now, if you're lucky enough to have existing clients, who are they? What do they do? What is the problem you're solving for them? You'll remember that I've spoken about sales being about problem solving, and that's a really healthy approach to sales. So what's the problem you're solving. Where are they in their organization? You know, what can you pull out about the people who have bought from you, about who they are, and how do you identify people who are very similar? And that's essentially what the qualification process is all about. And remember, when you're qualifying, it is absolutely as important, if not more important, to qualify people out than to qualify people in, because you have a certain amount of time every day to spend with people and you need to make sure that time is being spent with the people who are most likely to buy from you. And another area where it can all go wrong is just your approach, the way you are interacting with your client. That's another common one, and again, there are different ways of working with clients that make the whole sales process very much smoother and very much easier. So these are all things to consider and they are all things that you can apply a remedy to.

Speaker 1: 10:29

Another thing to remember is that a no doesn't always mean a no, so you can qualify as an objection, and the important thing to remember about objections is that they are not a no to the sale. They are generally a request for more information, for whatever reason. If you've qualified your client. That client has not understood the value of your solution in their situation and that is generally where objections come up. So objections are things to be welcomed often because, in fact, if someone's raising an objection, what they're actually saying is yes, I'm interested, but I've got a doubt about this, whatever that is. So no could also be an objection.

Speaker 1: 11:13

It may be the kind of thing you might hear is that they don't have budget. They already have someone. If they're coming back, they don't need it. I'd say again, you're back to qualification. But if it's that they already have someone, well, you can inquire about how it's going. And the tip there is to ask what's good about what they're delivering. And the reason there is to ask what's good about what they're delivering and the reason that you do that is that most people, when you ask them what they like about a current service or product that's been delivered, they might give you one or two things that they like, but most people will then go off into what they don't like. So it avoids you having to ask that question. But if they don't give you the dislikes, then ask them, just use a phrase something like and what could they do better for you, or what do you think could be improved over the current service? Because that's telling you what the difference is that you need to deliver Budget.

Speaker 1: 12:07

There's various ways of dealing with that. First of all, are they the budget holder, and this is part of the qualification, because you need to be talking to somebody who can make a decision. Often, if you're delivering value, most of the value we deliver in one form or another really comes back to a monetary amount. And if you can load up the pain by and you basically take a tack along the lines of if you don't do anything, how much will it cost you in three months, in six months, in a year, if we're here a year later, how much money will you will you have lost because of the problems with your current solution? And if you do go with us, we can deliver within a month, and then the savings are these. So in a year from now, you will have saved this much money over where you are today. So these are the kind of ways to approach budget and generally what we're doing is we are talking about value and if somebody is not on board with budget, you really need to demonstrate the value of the solution that you have Now another thing to do, and this particularly applies if you're in a sales team or if you are part of a group.

Speaker 1: 13:20

So if you work on your own, I definitely recommend that you get involved in some sort of support group. And if you're doing training, go for a training program that has some sort of support environment, just somewhere where you can say, hey, this happened, I don't really understand why I got rejected on this or just share the experience. Look for input. That might be from the sales trainers, it might be for other people who are on the training program, whatever it might be, but if you can put it out there and if you're part of a sales team, it's actually very helpful because presumably you're talking to the same sort of people with the same sort of problem and the same sort of solution. So by sharing the issues that are coming up, no doubt other people will also come across that issue at some point or another. So as a team, you're more prepared and more able to deal with those objections when they come up. So do review what's been going on and, again, as I say, look at it as information coming back about something in your sales process. That's generally where the problem will lie and also, of course, it's a way of learning, as I've said, for the whole team.

Speaker 1: 14:33

And the final thing I want to just talk about is don't hang on to it. So there's a phrase, I think it comes from soccer. It's basically about playing the ball in front of you. Well, it might be rugby, actually, I can't remember. But what it means is, if something goes wrong, don't dwell on it. I mean, by all means, learn from it. As I've already discussed with you, look at, okay, what went wrong there? What can I do differently? What do I need to change to minimize the possibility of that happening again? But don't hold on to it.

Speaker 1: 15:08

And this comes back to the second point that I made about not holding on to it. Don't make it about you, don't take it personally. It can be hard to do that, particularly if you've been in a situation where you've been maybe this is the third or fourth rejection you've had that day. That can be pretty hard. So if that is the situation, then it might've had that day. That can be pretty hard. So if that is the situation, then it might be good to just go for a walk, listen to some music for 10 minutes, do something to just get yourself out of that kind of beating yourself up loop and if you're one of the people who goes into that, get out of it, because it really doesn't serve you.

Speaker 1: 15:44

What does serve you is treating the situation, as I've said, as feedback. And so what is that feedback? What is it telling you? What changes can you make? Or where do you need to go off and do some homework? What do you need? To just go and either get clarity on or maybe change an approach, change something, because something in there is preventing you from achieving a sale with somebody who, if everything else works, would be a really good client for you. So you don't want that to happen. So don't hang on to it, take the learning from it and then play the ball in front of you, go on to the next situation, and a really helpful thing to do actually is to ask yourself okay, what can I apply in this next meeting from the one that just happened? Do I need five minutes in the car just to sit down? And I like writing, physically writing, so I think we'll connect to what I'm doing than typing.

Speaker 1: 16:46

But you know, whatever floats your boat, but go through that and just look at what you could do differently, and it's a way of experimenting and trying new things out. You might have a rejection in a meeting in the morning, let's say so. Over lunch you just kind of run through it in your head and look at what you could do differently. There might be one or two things that jump out at you that this is potentially where it all started to unravel a little bit. So okay, what's an alternative? And then maybe try that out. If you've got a meeting in the afternoon, Just do it slightly differently and see what works. And that's probably the best way to do it, especially if you're on your own, because you get feedback immediately about how those changes work. And obviously it's not the same person. The situation might be slightly different, but the bottom line is you're gradually refining and improving your sales process and if you keep doing that, if you use a process of continuous improvement, you can make actually a very big difference to your sales numbers at the end of the year, because you're gradually improving your efficiency at each stage of the sales process and those improvements become cumulative. They give you more time, they give you more orders. So they're very worth, they're absolutely worth doing.

Speaker 1: 18:03

Okay, so that is really what I wanted to cover off in this particular podcast. So, as I said, rejection is something that we will get. As salespeople, you will get it and even as you work with things, you're going to get it again and again. But the most important thing to do with rejection is to look at how you handle it personally. You can either be a victim to it and beat yourself up and say you shouldn't really be in sales whatever it is that you say to yourself in those situations or you can treat it as feedback that, okay, something's not right in the sales process that I have and the way that I am interacting with clients.

Speaker 1: 18:45

So, okay, where did things start to go wrong? How can I step back from this and do something constructive? The final thought with that is, if you have either a sales manager who's supportive or somebody else you can work with, if you are getting a lot of rejections, maybe have somebody come in with you just to sit and observe and sometimes, because they're not in the thick of it, as it were, they can sort of step back and observe what's going on. They may well be able to give you some really important feedback about how you are approaching things that you may not have been aware of, and so that is very, very valuable, so I would definitely recommend that. Okay, that's it for this podcast. I hope you found that useful. Good luck with your sales and I'll speak to you in the next podcast. Bye for now.