How To Handle Rejection

Being able to overcome the ill effects of rejection is vital to success in sales.

This technique for handling rejection comes from one of my mentors, Tom Hopkins.

If you focus on this sales prospecting technique when you get rejected you'll turn the bad feelings into good feelings. If you're constantly risking rejection, finding it, overcoming it and closing sales you may not need to use this technique. If you're not doing all these things, you need this technique. It will increase your sales your confidence if you do.

The first step to using this sales prospecting technique is to determine the cash value of each rejection you receive. How do you do that? Let's say for every sale you close you are paid $500. Then 1 sale = $500.

The second step requires that you're tracking your contacts-to-closings ratio. The top sales people track this and other information daily. Tracking requires little effort and yields valuable information. For example, when you see negative changes in your tracking information, you become aware of challenges you need to address before they affect your sales.

Let's say you contact ten people to make a sale. This means your contact-to-closing ratio is ten to one. The top sales people are always striving to improve their closing ratios; however, the ten to one ratio is a reasonable average. Now, 1 sale = $500, 10 contacts = 1 sale, therefore, 1 contact = $50.

If you look at getting paid for each contact instead of each sale you'll see rejection in a whole new way. Aren't you paid by the contact and not the sale? After all, if you don't make contacts, you don't make sales.

Top sales people look at the value of the activity as well as the result.

Using this sales prospecting technique, making contacts and handling rejection becomes fun. Every time a contact results in a rejection of your product or service you can view the rejection as making money. In the above example you would make $50 for every rejection and be one contact closer to making a sale.

It changes the way you look at things, doesn't it?

If you place a dollar value on prospecting and rejection as an activity, you will look forward to these activities. You will view the activity as making money and be inclined to do it more often.