Episode Details

Here’s a question that’ll stop you in your tracks: Would you let someone walk up to you, take your wallet, empty out all your cash and credit cards, and leave your family with nothing?

Of course not. That’s insane.

But if you’re in sales and you let rejection stop you from making calls, booking appointments, and closing deals, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re handing over your commission check to fear.

That was the powerful insight from 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, on a recent episode of Ask Jeb the Sales Gravy Podcast. When you give rejection the power to stop you, you’re literally taking money away from your family. Let that sink in.

The Science of Why Rejection Hurts

Let’s get one thing straight right now: I’m not going to sit here and glorify rejection. Nobody wants to be rejected. Unless you’re a pure sociopath who feels nothing (and there aren’t many of those in sales), rejection is going to hurt you.

It doesn’t matter if you’re highly outcome-driven like me or highly empathetic. Rejection hurts everyone in different degrees, but it hurts. Period.

Here’s what’s actually happening inside your body when you get rejected: Your brain treats rejection like a physical threat. Fight or flight kicks in. It’s a neurophysical response that dumps adrenaline into your bloodstream, makes your heart race, and creates this overwhelming urge to either run away or fight back.

That uncomfortable feeling? That’s not weakness. That’s just science.

The Problem: Sales Is a Rejection-Dense Profession

Here’s the brutal reality about selling: If you don’t face rejection, you’re going to fail.

Sales is what I call a rejection-dense profession. When you hit rejection in sales, you don’t have the option of going backwards. You can go over it, through it, around it, or dig under it. But your job is literally to go out into the world, find rejection, and bring it home.

That’s the job description. That’s what we signed up for.

Think about it like this: A few years back, I got invited to jump out of an airplane with the Golden Knights, the U.S. Army’s elite parachute team. I’m not a skydiver (just like I’m not a Spanish speaker), but what an honor to jump with probably the best parachute team worldwide.

I asked the guy I was tandem jumping with how many times he’d jumped. Ten thousand times, he said. So I asked him, “Do you ever get afraid?”

His answer changed everything for me: “Of course, I get afraid. I’m jumping out of an airplane. Your body is going to get afraid. I’ve just done it so many times that I know exactly what the process is. I’m able to get myself to jump even though my brain says this is the wrong thing to do.”

That’s exactly what you have to do in sales.

Building Obstacle Immunity

In my book Objections, I talk about something called obstacle immunity. It’s the process human beings go through of facing something that feels really big and uncomfortable, but doing it enough times that we lower the size of that obstacle.

The fear of being rejected never fully goes away. But you can lower that fear.

Here’s how you do it:

Develop the Ledge Technique
The ledge techn