Episode Details

Here’s a truth that’ll make you uncomfortable: Getting rejected isn’t the real problem. The real problem is that you’re not doing the work upfront to lower the probability of rejection in the first place.

That’s the insight that hit when Wendy Ramirez, a leading Mexican sales expert and author of Lo que nadie habla de las ventas: Estrategias para no ser llamarada de petate or What Nobody Talks About in Sales: Strategies to Avoid Being a Flash in the Pan, joined this week’s episode about handling rejection on Ask Jeb on The Sales Gravy Podcast.

After forty years in sales, I’ve been rejected yesterday, I’ll get rejected tomorrow, and I’ve been rejected so many times that I almost don’t even feel it anymore. But that doesn’t mean you can just “let it roll off your back” like some sales trainers tell you.

If you’re struggling with rejection, you’re not alone. And more importantly, you’re not broken. There’s a biological reason it hurts so badly, and there are concrete techniques you can use to handle it.

The Biology of Rejection: Why Your Brain Is Working Against You

Here’s what most sales trainers won’t tell you: Rejection is supposed to hurt. It’s baked into your DNA.

Forty thousand years ago, human beings lived in small groups around campfires. If you got kicked out of the group and walked away from that campfire into the dark, you were in danger. You were part of the food chain. There were things out there hunting you, rival tribes fighting over scarce resources, and being alone meant you probably weren’t going to pass on your genes.

So human beings who avoided rejection were more likely to survive. This fear of rejection became an evolutionary advantage, and it’s still with us today.

That’s why selling is so hard. It’s why most people don’t want to go into sales. Walk into the accounting department and ask if anyone wants to make cold calls with you. They’re going to look at you like you’ve got four heads because nobody wants to be in a profession where you have to do something that unnatural.

This avoidance of rejection serves us really well in most of our life. You need to get along with your family, your coworkers, other people in the world. Knowing where the line is that would get you rejected is super important to being able to work as a team.

But in sales? It’s killing your performance.

The Truth About Objections: You’re Creating Them

When people reject you or give you an objection, what they’re expressing is their fear. They’re expressing their fear of moving forward, their fear of change, their fear about whether or not you’ll do what you say you’re going to do.

And here’s the brutal part: Most of the time, you created that fear.

The easiest way to deal with an objection is to do good discovery and do a good job in the selling process. When salespeople make the mistake of not doing any discovery, they don’t have any ammunition.