How to teach your team to make the most of a ‘No’

How can you teach your team to stop worrying about rejection and build confidence in their ability to succeed despite it?

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Sales Hacker

Rejection is part of the job in sales and 90% of the time you’ll get a ‘No’ but what we must remember is that success and failure are on the exact same road. When you hear a ‘No’, that doesn’t mean that you have failed, and when a door is closed to you, that doesn’t mean it has closed forever. As sales leaders it’s our responsibility to help our salespeople overcome the fear of rejection and build their confidence.

Practice objection-handling 

Teach salespeople to treat a prospect’s ‘No’ as information rather than rejection, and to follow-up with a strong discovery question based on that information. This teaches them to see the silver lining of each response they receive.

Perform post-mortems on lost deals 

Uncover the real reason behind each rejection, as there will be valuable information there which will help your team improve. Remind them it’s okay to lose, but it is not okay to lose the same way twice. Here are some key questions to ask: 

• Was the timing off?
• Did a competitor come in with a better value proposition?
• Did the salesperson truly fully-understand the prospect’s problems?

If the third option is the case, have them go and talk to the lost opportunity. This process will help your salespeople gain a deeper understanding of what happened and why. It also gives them the feedback they need in order to learn and improve for the next sales opportunity that walks through the door.

Use data to grow 

Whilst you should encourage your team to be introspective about why they’re receiving rejections, you shouldn’t just rely on this; when you ask your team to be introspective about why they’re receiving rejections, you need to back that up with data. Rejection is a part of the sales process, but it doesn’t have to be a roadblock; use the data to fix the root cause of the issue at hand. 

Focus on what’s next 

Overcome rejection by focusing your attention on the next opportunity. You feel the pain more when your pipeline is soft so plant as many seeds as possible – depending on your growth strategy that can mean going deep into one account or wide across an industry.

Salespeople who generate a lot of activity have very little time to mourn over one piece of business that is lost. Let your team can mourn their losses, but they also need to quickly focus their attention on the next opportunity – the next win.

Celebrate and reward wins 

Every win, big or small, deserves some type of celebration and finding ways to celebrate the successes of team members will help reaffirm their positive mindset. To stop negative self-talk in its tracks, make your salespeople keep a list of the successes they’ve achieved to remind themselves of the good things so they can refer back to them when a string of rejections gets them down. 

As their leader, you should be intentional about praising each of your reps – the more they are familiar with the feeling of the positive reinforcement of getting to a ‘Yes,’ the more motivated they’ll be to continuously strive for another one. 

If you walk away from this article with nothing else, realise it’s your responsibility to support the team and help them see that their world doesn’t end when they experience large or small rejections – they become stronger and better each time.