“Rejection in Sales: What Is It Good For?”

Rejection seems to be a major cause of stress in all areas of life including personal relationships or looking for a new job or an apartment. Rejection seems to have an extremely negative connotation. It is something to be scared of, something to be embarrassed of, or even ashamed of. What most people forget is that we are just people; human beings. As human beings, we make mistakes and we fail, but it is important to not take it personally and to learn from your mistakes. 

Punk Rock superstar Henry Rollins once said, “We all learn lessons in life. Some stick, some don’t. I have always learned more from rejection and failure than from acceptance and success.” Rejection sounds scary, it’s one of the most common stressors in our modern age, but if we take a look at it from a different perspective, we can make the most of it. Rejection is only a bad thing if we take it personally and dwell on our defeat, rather than learn from our mistakes.

It’s personal for them, not you.

‍

When rejected, it is natural to feel like it was something that you did personally, or that it was because you were not good enough to sell whatever product or service you’re representing. This is a really bad way to look at rejection. In most cases, it was not your fault that you didn’t make the sale. There are actually a lot of reasons why a potential customer may not want to buy what you are selling. Instead of telling yourself that you’re a failure, think of some of the alternative causes as to what happened. A few examples are: 

‍

• The product or service is not what the potential customer is looking for or needs
• The product or service is too expensive and doesn’t fit within their budget
• They may have gotten a better deal from another company
• The purchase may not be urgent for them and they may come back later

‍

It’s nice to think about these alternative reasons to why the potential customer didn’t buy your product because none of these causes have anything to do with you! Most reasons that potential customers or clients have to not move forward on a purchase have to do with their own needs and finances. Taking yourself out of the equation while reflecting on rejection is a super important and healthy exercise because it helps us move on from our defeat. That being said, it is also important to learn from our experience.

‍

Learning by doing

‍

It can be difficult to move on from a rejection, but it is so important to keep going. It is so easy for us to dwell on our mistakes and on the “shoulda, coulda, woulda”s of our experience. The big problem with this is that we dwell in the wrong way. It is not a bad thing to think about the things that went wrong or the things that we maybe should have done differently, but we need to look at them in a positive note. A quote that I reflect on a lot is from famed inventor, Thomas Edison, “I never once failed at making a light bulb. I just found out 99 ways not to make one.” He knew that not getting the results that you were looking for was not a failure, it was a learning opportunity. This is important! Dwelling on your “failure” is a waste of time and energy. If we take our experience, what happened, why it happened and use that information to recalibrate and adjust for next time, we’ll end up happier and more successful in the future. 

Instead of putting ourselves down and labeling ourselves as a failure, a loser, or not good enough, let us realize that in many sales situations, it is not our fault. There are many reasons as to why the potential customer did not follow through with the sale, and most of these factors have nothing to do with you personally. It is also crucial to take our experience as a learning opportunity, rather than a failure. Instead of saying “I stink! I should have done this.” or “I’m not good enough to make sales, I didn’t even do that.” Tell yourself, “You know, I should have done that then, but now I know that I’ll do that next time!” Every time you have a sales call that doesn’t go so well, learn what you should do next time, rather than wallow in your failure.

‍