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Summary
- Rejection is unavoidable in sales but is essential for growth and opportunity.
- Tools like PhoneBurner’s power dialer can reduce your rejection risk by improving call quality and deliverability.
- Viewing rejection as a temporary challenge, not a failure, helps salespeople explore new methods and improve.
- Each rejection provides valuable lessons, helping you develop skills and mental toughness.
- Setting long-term goals, seeing every "no" as a step closer to "yes," performing self-evaluations, and understanding sales ratios can help you stay motivated and successful.
Rejection is a part of life—and especially a part of sales.
Not only is it unavoidable, but many believe that rejection and failure are actually integral to success. The way you react to rejection determines your capacity for growth and opportunity. In other words, seeing rejection only as a setback diminishes your chance for future success.
With that in mind, we’ve created this guide to help you reframe rejection and embrace it when it happens. Read on and discover how to learn from these moments so that you can enjoy more successful sales calls in the long run.
Reduce the Risk of Rejection with PhoneBurner
While some rejection in sales is a given, using the right approach on your sales calls can lower the risk of rejection and improve outcomes considerably. And having the right technology to support that approach is essential.
PhoneBurner - the premier human-centric dialing platform - is designed to improve speed and connect rates with sacrificing the quality of each interaction. Notably, unlike other dialers, PhoneBurner has no “telemarketer’s delay” - that awkward beep or pause at the start of each call that is notorious for increasing rejection and hangups.
Additionally, we’ve packed our power dialer with features that improve call quality and deliverability, including:
- Tier 1 carrier premium telecom that improves call deliverability and reduces spam risk
- Built-in CRM to track and leverage actionable data before, during, and after calls
- Krisp AI noise reduction - built in to our softphone to remove disruptive background noise
Using these tools to connect with more leads and improve the conversations you have with them can help you deal with rejection less often—but there will be cases where it happens anyway.
Here’s how to handle it and why.
Why Embracing Rejection Matters
The late great Muhammed Ali once said, “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
Learn More: The Ultimate List of Sales & Leadership Quotes to Motivate Your Team
Rejection, even when it's a sign you’re doing something wrong, is almost never a sign that what you’re trying to do is “impossible.”
In the process of facing and dealing with rejection, you are forced to either 1) give up, 2) keep doing the same thing or 3) learn and explore new methods and possibilities.
Don’t allow yourself to give up. Instead, when hope seems lost, get back to the drawing board and consider a new way of doing things. Ask yourself deeper questions to discover where you’re underperforming and where you can improve.
This is how champions push through even in the face of constant rejection. And it's how star salespeople outperform their peers—they push past the point where their competitors quit.
How to Move Past Rejection & Towards Sales Success
Set Longer Term Goals
Personal goals can help you reframe rejection, stay focused, and persevere through the challenges you face. Perhaps you want to buy a new house or donate money to charity—keep this in mind and realize that every call you make gets you closer to that goal.
See Every “No” As a Step Closer to a “Yes”
You’re not going to get a “yes” every time, and very few sales are made on the first attempt. They require multiple calls and multiple exposures. They're often the result of a nurtured relationship.
Learn More: The Beginner's Guide to Relationship Selling
Which means, your actual expectation should be to hear a lot of "No" and "I'm not sure this is a fit" on the way to your sale. So take that "no" and see it as a stepping stone.
Usually, you’ll learn more from your rejections than your successes. The more you get rejected, the more skills you’ll develop, and the more mentally tough you’ll become.
And so, if you look at rejection in this way, every “No” truly will bring you closer to a “Yes.”
Look for the Lessons in Rejection
The fact is, no matter what you're doing in life, it helps to fail along the way. Getting rejected and getting back up makes you stronger and more resilient.
It builds character. It builds drive. It teaches you to problem solve. It shows you new ways. It removes obstacles and paves a clearer path.
These are valuable lessons in a life where adversity is a constant.
Some of the most successful people are the ones who tried and failed the most—the ones who got rejected over and over again. Examples include Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Michael Jordan, and countless others.
Sylvestor Stallone was famously rejected over 1500 times in trying to pitch the script for the movie that would become Rocky. Think about that.
Embrace rejection as part of the process. It’s a necessary “speed bump” on the path to success—NOT a roadblock that can’t be overcome.
Learn More: How to Stop Negative Thinking and Make More Sales
Perform Self-Evaluations
After each rejection, it helps to analyze the call and look for areas you can improve on in future efforts. Here are some basic questions to ask yourself:
- Did I listen more than I talked?
- Did I have a concrete and realistic goal?
- Did I do enough research beforehand?
- What could have worked better?
- What can I take from this moving forward?
Understand Your Sales Ratio
Figure out your conversation to conversion ratio. This is one of the most important accountability metrics to track as a salesperson. On average, let’s say it takes you about 20 calls to get an appointment with a prospective client. Then, when you get 20 “no’s” in a row, you know it’s just part of the process, and a “yes” is right around the corner.
Give Your Sales Calls the Best Chance of Success
“Rejection” only has power over you if you allow it to. But when you can reframe it, you can avoid slumps, cold call more confidently, and make more sales.
By using the tips above along with the tools provided by PhoneBurner, you can connect with prospects more meaningfully and move forward with confidence even in the face of rejection.
New to PhoneBurner? Start your free trial today.
