Lenann McGookey Gardner

How to Deal with Rejection

A lot of people get especially negative when they’re selling because they have allowed themselves to hate the rejection involved, and to become sullen. 

Here’s a framework for thinking about this: 
For most of us, given enough time and money, we’re pretty confident that we can solve most technical problems that occur in our chosen field. To say that a different way, when approaching a technical problem in our chosen field, we’re pretty confident—maybe 80 percent or 90 percent confident— that we can solve it, if we have the time and money available to work on it.

By contrast, even the most successful salespeople don’t experience success 80 percent or 90 percent of the time! 

In American professional baseball, if a player were to retire from the Major Leagues with a lifetime batting average of .400, he almost certainly would make the Hall of Fame—he would have the highest lifetime batting average any professional baseball player has ever recorded.

He would also be a guy who failed six out of ten times when he came up to bat.

And with all these failures, he’s the best batter in the history of the game.

Think about your selling efforts in that way, and you might experience a turnaround in your own thinking. In many sales jobs, if you can close four out of every ten prospects you approach, you’ll be a star! 

So, how will you feel when you get the next six rejections? By accepting that a .400 batting average is tremendous, couldn’t you see the rejections as simply the things that happen between successes?