There comes a time in every businesses life cycle that you will go through rejection. It could be when you tell your family and friends about your idea and they don’t understand it or think it wont work, or when you have sent out 5 emails and made 4 calls to the same person and they still haven’t responded to you. This defeat weighs heavily on the minds of an entrepreneur. It can make you second guess everything you have worked for, create self-doubt internally, and, in some cases, make you want to close your doors and go back working for someone else.
STOP! Defeat is part of the success that every business goes through. I once read a study that it takes approximately 12 emails before a person responds. That’s 3 months if you are doing weekly follow-ups and sprinkling in calls between them. During that 12-weeks, you have probably said to yourself multiple times “What don’t they like about my email, my product, me?” The unfortunate reality is that in 2020, people are simply bombarded with so many sales tactics that it is nearly impossible to figure out which ones are worth responding to.
As a salesperson, I ALWAYS respond to sales emails as I understand the pain that a salesperson goes through in trying to get a response. Even if the response is that I am just not interested, having some closure can do a lot for a salespersons mentality. Not only is it better than proverbially ghosting someone, it also demonstrates to them that you took the time to care, even if just to tell them that you aren’t interested. In some cases, I’ll even comment on ways that they can improve their outreach, or commend them for something they wrote that really reeled me in to read the email or respond to the voicemail in the first place.
The problem with getting defeated easily is that we start to lose faith in ourselves. This plays an incredible mental toll on our health and our idea of self-worth. You need to remember that it isn’t you that isn’t getting responded to, you just haven’t found a way to connect with your opportunity yet.
Take your sales hat off for a second and imagine if rather than trying to sell you were running a marketing campaign. If people weren’t responding to the campaign, would you continue doing it hoping for a different result on the next one? Of course not, that’s the definition of insanity. Instead you would try a different technique. This is no different in sales. You are marketing yourself and your product to a list of opportunities.
I’ll get into details in a later post about some sales techniques that can help you get higher engagement, but this post is about how we handle defeat. Personally, I expect to be defeated at least 50% of the time. Maybe it is half of your family that supports you and the other half who thinks you’re making the wrong decision. It might be a 50% (or less) open rate of your cold emails, but either way, if you go into it with the mentality that the odds are stacked against you, you have mentally prepared yourself for defeat before it takes its emotional toll on you.
Now, this is likely contradictory of many articles you have read about sales and being an entrepreneur-trust me, I’ve read them too. The Grant Cardones of the world who make it seem like by taking their course you will never fail, but this simply isn’t true. You will be defeated, and you will be defeated more times than not. One of the best examples of this that I like to call upon is Jamie Siminoff of Ring. When he appeared on Shark Tank he was flat out rejected by the Sharks and 5 years later, Amazon had acquired his business for over $1B. What a story. Jamie, like many entrepreneurs, was flat out rejected by some of the most powerful people in business. Not only was he rejected, but his rejection was aired for the world to see. Can you imagine the deflation that he felt with this defeat?
I believe that one of the number one reasons a wantrepreneur never succeeds is because he or she is afraid of being defeated. It is a carnal part of our being that we do not want to lose, the fear of losing is even crippling to some people. We need to readjust our mindset and acknowledge that we are going to fail 50 times to get to the 1 success. So fail often, and fail early, because then you will be ready to succeed!