What should I do when I am rejected?

So you made your pitch; You gave a beautiful presentation; Did everything right, but the answer from the prospects is still no! What do you do? How do you take it?
Rejection is an integral part of business negotiation. In many cases it is not something the faint hearted like to accept. Often the question bugging the mind of the person that was rejected is: Where did I go wrong? If we allow it to, rejection will creep into our psychology of selling and it will dampen our enthusiasm to sell the product. This is a zone we want to avoid getting into, because once you find yourself in the “can’t help myself zone”, there is no coming out of it. A sales person who allows rejection to get to his head will feel like a jilted suitor, when the next prospective bride comes along his reluctance to pop the question would be written all over him. The tragedy with this is you never know when a willing customer would be in your clutches: How can you know unless you try?
Success at getting that sale requires you to keep going even if you hear the word “no” over and over again. You have to be mentally tough. If one customer replies with a no, that does not mean others will.
One of the key factors is self-talk. What are you telling yourself when you meet a barrage of rejections? If your self-talk is negative you will discourage yourself from moving ahead. Dan Pink, author and speaker, describes it as “the buoyancy principle”. Self-talk, he claims should be interrogative in nature. The reason interrogative self-talk is more effective is because framing your self-talk as a question demands an answer This might sound corny, but if you can keep asking yourself questions and supplying answers you will remain positive minded.
Your pose, yes, the way you sit or stand is of vital importance too. Experts in body language emphasize that a slouch, a bent body posture, will affect the way you think. Set your shoulders back, walk straight with a ram rod back. Do not bow your head in disappointment or shame. Focus on successes, progress and possibilities. Confidence poses are necessary to boost your morale. You need to close the door on the disappointment and compartmentalize your feelings so that the let down in one transaction will not affect the other.
Rejection in business is not always permanent, so we must remember that a client that said “no” today could change to a “yes” tomorrow. A lady who said it took her two years to sell insurance to a client shared her experience. The man had rejected her out right several times. It seemed that he did not believe in insurance. Then one major calamity happened to a neighbor. A fire took the neigbor’s office and razed it to the ground. But his insurance company took an assessment and in the course of three weeks, they had paid for the damage, such that the neighbor was able to resuscitate his business. Her client was the one who called her and she made an easy sale after that. Rejection is not permanent. Minds can be changed in the nick of time. The trick is for us to maintain relationships with clients for as long as possible so that a “no” can eventually change to a “yes”.
One vital response to rejection is the will to improve. A no should spur us into improvement of the pitch and the presentation process. Did we study the client well enough before pitching? Did our pitch really address his needs? Did we come across as a solution provider and not just another hunter after his money? There are a myriad of questions that should go through our minds. If we take the time to study what we have presented we are likely able to find hints of improvement that we can adopt.
Trophies and victories can serve as a morale booster in the midst of a rejection. So why not meditate on them? A total recall of how it felt when we made that enormous sale will send our hormones bursting through our being and conjure the mien that we require to trudge on and forget the set back. Apart from a revel in our successes, we also need a support system. There ought to be at least one person or group of people we can share the rejection with. This is the time when we need an optimist. Not someone who will beat us up for losing the sale, but a person or people that would encourage us, possibly go over the details with us and look for loopholes in our portfolio that can be filled. This would help us prepare for what is ahead.
Whatever the client says during a course of a rejection, we should never take it personally. Sometimes the fault is not really in our presentation or the product. There are clients who simply like to test the resolve of a sales person and see how much he can persevere before they say yes. The job of a sales person requires a lot of perseverance and longsuffering. But one good thing about it is there is a possibility that as sales people we develop a thick skin and get used to being turned down once in a while. For every sale made usually there have been at least five rejections. So the trick of the trade requires that we take rejections in our stride and use them as stepping stones of encouragement that makes us try harder.