Nugget #8 - Go for the no.

This is going to be a very tactical tip. But let’s get under the hood behind this concept first.

One of the hardest aspects of selling is the constant, unrelenting rejection.

Getting hung up on. Cussed out by random people you want to help. Self-inflicted pressure of needing to succeed or you’re not going to eat. 80-90% of the time we are running into ta toxic fog of rejection head first - if we’re good.

Certainly I’m not the first to suggest human beings are hard-wired to need community, a sense of belonging. Pretty simple concept to grasp.

Within that need to belong is a fear of rejection. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to feel that tightening of your chest and pit in your stomach when you imagine a world where no one in the world cares about you. Those feelings are hard coded in our biology & for good reason. The innate drive to keep us together is a core mechanism that keeps humanity intertwined.

At our core us modern human are still dealing with the remnants of ancient monkeys. Sure, we have developed the internet & gone to the moon and back (supposedly to some). But the evolution of how we experience emotions doesn’t drastically change.

Emotions continue to be a seemingly all-powerful guide to human behavior. If our conscience cognitive abilities give us the ability to steer us in the life direction we want to go, emotions are certainly the engine that drive us.

There is an old truism in sales, “people buy on emotion and defend with logic.”

If a seller can develop an intuition about how others are feeling (aka empathy) we can have a sense for how their emotions can be influenced.

Highly anxious people have a tendency to demonstrate higher degrees of empathy. They (we) can be so fixated on how someone else is feeling we try to mold our behaviors to influence them to experience positive emotion. They (we) have a tendency to believe if other people express positive emotion towards us it is an indication of our self worth. They (we) crave that validation.

The cruel irony: people that experience the highest degrees of the emotions we are designed to avoid may actually be best positioned to succeed in sales.

So we arrive at a point where sales professionals need tools and tactics to help us deal with handling rejection.

If we know for a fact we have to work through our fear of rejection to be successful in sales, and we know we’re naturally inclined to avoid rejection, let’s flip the game on it’s head.

Let’s positively reward ourselves when we experience the inevitable rejections. When we get a “no”, treat it like a “yes”.

Simple tactic: get a sticky note. When you are cold calling, every time you get an outcome other than booking a meeting with a qualified potential client, give yourself a tally. Imagine how good you would feel when you book a meeting - give yourself that feeling when you get the no.

Give yourself a “no” goal. Instead of aiming to book 3 meetings in a day, aim to get 10 no’s. When you get the 10 no’s you should feel as good as you would by booking 3 meetings. You are trying to outsmart your biology when you take this approach. It will make you significantly more resilient.

Here’s the nuance: we are still going to be working towards positive outcomes. We will want to call seemingly the right people at the right time with the right message. We will naturally adjust our effort to be more effective in this pursuit.

Track your numbers. Identify how many times you tend to experience “no” before you get to “yes”. Make your selling efforts a strategic game of increasing the amount of conversations you are having while also improving the ratio of positive to negative outcomes. Apply better list building tactics based on insights from your ideal client profiles (ICP), optimizing how you get the attention of people who align to your ICP, what messaging you use in conversations with certain personas. This list goes on.

The more “no” you get, the more informed you can be better get to “yes”. The emotional state you are going to employ to gather as much of that data is rewarding yourself when you the inevitable no’s.

Crucial side note to wrap: people can be influenced for better or for worse. As sales professionals we must hold a high ethical standard to how we seek to influence other people. We must approach our efforts with the best in mind for others. We must build trust with the communities we want to serve.