Manage Feelings of Rejection
When it feels awful to be rejected, that’s evolution at work.
The horrible feeling of rejection is deeply encoded in human DNA as an evolutionary result. People have lived in groups for many thousands of years. This helped them get scarce resources and protect themselves from natural threats. It was impossible to survive on your own.
People who have a stronger propensity to fit in and work together in a social group have a higher chance of successfully passing their genes to the next generation. People's fear of being rejected by others was bred into them by natural selection.
Nowadays, there are enough resources, shelters, and companions in many parts of the world so that people are not constantly under stress. However, our brains are still very sensitive to rejection. The fear of rejection is typically unconscious because it is ingrained so deeply that it is even subconscious.
This human nature makes salespeople’s jobs difficult because, in the history of time, no salesperson has ever avoided rejection. The good news is that we can always increase our emotional self-awareness and control our emotions while we can.
Salespeople can mistake common objections for rejection.
A salesperson's role involves asking questions frequently. If you approach enough potential customers, you will eventually get responses that are not a resounding "YES," including counter-asks, negotiation, skepticism, hesitation, and various other responses. These are all perfectly reasonable buyer reactions, and they serve as stepping stones on the way to a yes. It’s human nature for salespeople to associate these reactions with rejection. However, it’s very important to stay calm and collected and analyze why the buyer responds in such a way.
How can salespeople better deal with feelings of rejection?
It all starts with self-awareness. Experiencing an emotion is very different from getting caught up in it. Being overcome by emotion will typically cause a change in your physiological response to the outside world. However, feeling an emotion does not always result in a change in behavior.
Knowledge and experience are great tools to improve self-awareness. If you know that if you ask buyers enough questions, you'll eventually get counter-offers, negotiations, skepticism, and hesitation, which will make you feel rejected. You can plan for your feelings and watch them come out, like watching clouds move across the sky. You know these emotions are a normal response and can keep your composure. Just like all subjects, an understanding of the subject will allow you to see the mechanism of the subject from a more analytical perspective.
Once you have a basic understanding of your emotions, you can use common techniques to deal with rejection in sales. These include positive visualization, taking a break when your emotions are high, looking for "no" on purpose to build a thick skin, and so on. We will discuss such tactics in future articles.
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