How To Overcome Rejection
Written by Dave Lorenzo on September 21, 2016 / Behavior / Personal Development
You just lost a big account.
You didn’t close the deal you were planning on closing.
You were rejected on a sales call.
These things can set you back. It happens because the failure gets into your head. You feel that just because one person didn’t want you, everyone doesn’t want you.
In fact, just like the language I use above, you personalize the lack of success in your business.
You shouldn’t do that.
In order for you to achieve overwhelming success in business and in life you only have to be “right” a fraction of the time.
I use the baseball batting average to describe this.
The best hitters in baseball only get a hit 3 out of 10 times they step up to bat.
You only have to be successful 1 time out of 10 because in business one home run can sustain you for a lifetime.
The video below will help you get through some of the rough patches when you are not as effective as you would like to be. Watch this when things don’t go your way. Watch it when you feel rejected.
How To Overcome Rejection
I often hear from clients that they’re getting depressed because they lost a client relationship that was valuable to them or something happened in their business that has just really got them down.
Now I’m not talking about clinical depression. If you feel like you’re clinically depressed you need to get some help from a mental health professional. If you’ve just got the blues I’ve got a great way to cure them and you can do this in your office, at your home, you can do it wherever you are whenever you’re feeling a little bit down.
Right now get out a piece of paper and write down vertically the letters C, A, P. The acronym is C, A, P.
You’ll see them written on the board behind me here in green, C, A, P. I want you to think about these 3 things and I want you to take some action to cure the doldrums that you’re currently in.
What I’d like you to do when you’re feeling a little bit down is reach out and call your best client or a couple of your great clients and I’d like you to ask them what it is you do for them that makes you different. Just call them up and say, “Hey Joe, I’m doing a study, I’m taking a little survey, improving my marketing and I’d like to know what is it about me, what is it about my business, what is it about my firm that makes me or us different? What makes me different? What do I do particularly well? What do I do for you that you find valuable?”
Now you’re soliciting this feedback under the pretense of conducting a market research survey and you can use this in your marketing but what it will do is it will make you feel better about yourself. This is always helpful. I always tell my clients whenever you’re feeling down review testimonials that you’ve captured and call your best clients and find out what makes you different, what makes you great at what you do.
The second thing you need to do is you need to think about alternatives.
Whenever you’re feeling down or you’re depressed, you’ve got the blues, you need to realize that there is always, always, always an alternative out there to any problem or situation that you’re facing. I tell the story all the time about how I started my business in 2008. I went out on my own and started working with lawyers in 2008 and there couldn’t have been a worse time to start a business. The world was crumbling down all around us. Financial markets were locked up. Lawyers from big firms were being laid off everywhere and my focus at the time was solely on lawyers. What I did was I went out and I provided hope for people who didn’t have any. By providing that hope, I showed them, my way of providing hope was to show them how to attract new clients. Just the conversations alone were uplifting for them and it showed them that there was an alternative to simply doing nothing so you need to realize there’s always an alternative out there. You just may not see it and that brings us to our third point and that’s the letter P in the acronym.
The letter P stands for person.
You need to find a person who can help you see the alternative with fresh eyes so reach out to a person whose been in a situation that you’re in currently and know that there’s always a person out there that you can talk to. Look for a person whose been in your current situation, the situation that’s bringing you down, the situation that’s giving you the blues, reach out to them and ask them for the alternatives they used to get through the current situation.
Bottom line is if you have nobody to call I want to be the person that you call. I want to be that person if you have nobody else to call so reach out to me, call me and know that there’s always an alternative.
Here are three more resources to help you grow sales:
Succeeding in business and in sales requires mental toughness. If you want to become mentally tough, follow this guide.
One of the Most Important Lessons in Sales
When it comes to selling you can never quit. You must keep going after your prospective client until he agrees to work with you. If you believe you can help, you have no choice but to persist.
Constantly Look for Better ways to Do Everything
“What are we doing here?” This is a question I ask myself to force continuous improvement.