I can't take credit for this technique. 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 instance, every sale you close you are paid $500. Then 1 sale would equal $500.
The next part requires that you're tracking your contacts-to-closings ratio. The top sales people track this and other information daily. What I mean by tracking is, you should always be keeping track of the number of contacts, appointments, presentations and closes you make. 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.
Now 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 equals $500. 10 contacts equals 1 sale, therefore, 1 contact equals $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.
How To Handle Rejection
Rejection stings no matter how you slice it. When you are turned down for that job you wanted or don't get the employee of the month recognition or if your sales pitch is tossed back in your unsuspecting face, it doesn't seem to be a character builder. It is rejection and it is not all that it is cracked up to be. It does however have a place and a purpose in business.
The sting that you are feeling is a motivator to work at improving the areas you know could use some improvement. Take the time and sit down with a pencil and paper and make a list of what you tend to be doing most often when the rejection happens. What you think might help to identify steps that can change it.
Any one can easily shrug off a bad day or can take it if it's the beginning of the sales pitch such as cold calling leads. When the first two say "No, thank you!" in an unpleasant fashion, you truly don't mind, do you?
It is when it gets to the twenty first time that you begin to feel a little dejected. Is it when you've begun to develop a relationship of some kind with the customers that you seem to lose the prospect?
During development in any relationship there are going to be touch and go moments. Maybe it is when you are closing the deal that you most frequently lose the prospect. This is always upsetting; having spent your time and invested your knowledge on getting the lead, working up to the sales pitch and closing the deal just doesn't happen. Of course, it is upsetting and of course, you don't like losing the investment that you've made in the person with whom you are working to develop a business partnership. It stings and it is not easy to accept. No rejection is easy to accept and the further you've come into a relationship with the person who has done the rejecting, the less you are going to like it. The good news is that you don't have to like it. Your task is to change it.
It is something that bothers you and it bothers most people who have ever been rejected in any way regardless of what they might tell you. Rejection hurts.
This is fine as long as you let it motivate you to take action on what you think you might need to do differently or how you believe you could change the outcome of those calls. When the rejection always happens at a certain point, it is time to take a long hard look at why and what we need to learn to keep it from being a cycle that we endlessly repeat in our business efforts. We also need to work on why we believe that person's rejection was so important to our efforts.
Granted, we had invested long and hard in bringing in that prospect. What made that important? Was it the funds it might have generated? Probably not. Usually what makes the rejection more difficult to cope with is that we believe that the person's rejection is not just a rejection of the business we offered them or the product we were selling. But in some basic way, it is a rejection of who we inherently are. However, this is not always true. Usually it is just what it is - a rejection of the business because we could have presented it more fully or more attractively or with less push when it was time to close it.
Take the time to change your attitude about what the rejection really means to you and to your business. Find out what you might be doing differently, what you could be learning to change how you handle a prospect in each phase of the business development. Ask colleagues to rate you in the various parts of your pitch. Ask them to be honest, and you too will need to use that quality. Be honest with yourself about what you don't know so that you can give yourself the opportunity to learn it and to grow, both personally and in your Internet marketing business.
Both Jim Klein & Kevin Sinclair are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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