fear of rejection

Do you struggle with fear of failure or rejection?

If you knew the you never had to face rejection or failure in your prospecting, what difference would that make?

You see statistics tell us that 48% of salespeople never even follow-up with a prospect. Can you relate to that? I mean, it’s hard for me to imagine 48% of salespeople never follow-up with a prospect. Makes you wonder how they make any sales.

The same statistics tell us that 25% of salespeople stop after a second contact. I guess if they didn’t want it the second time they don’t want it all.

And, only 12% of salespeople make more than three contacts. Guess what folks, these are the salespeople making most of the sales.

When you put all this into perspective, it helps explain the fact that 2% of sales are made on the first contact, 3% are made on the second contact and 5% are made on the third, 10% are made on the fourth and 80% of sales are made on the fifth to 12th contact. Can you afford to allow your fear of rejection or fear of failure to keep you from your prospecting and follow-up?

After training over 1,200 salespeople and working with more than 100 entrepreneurs I can assure you that there are only a few reasons salespeople stop before they get the sale. For the ones that don’t even follow-up it’s fear. Fear of rejection and/or fear of failure. It’s these fears that hold them back and to some extent its the same fear that causes the salespeople that will make the follow-up to stop just before the sale.

Let’s face it no one likes to be rejected and no one likes to lose. As the saying goes: “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a man who is playing golf with his boss.”

OK kidding aside it’s our fear that holds us back, what can we do about it? For starters it helps if you put things in perspective. One of the most important things you can do in sales is to be prospecting constantly. It should be a part of your daily routine. The problem is that when your selling the last thing you want to do is prospect and the biggest reason I hear from those I work with is because it has the most rejection and failure associated with it.

So again I ask, what if you knew you would never face rejection or failure again? What difference would that make in your prospecting? Imagine how that might feel.

Let’s start with the fear of failure first. Failure has different meaning for different people and if you simplify it most people will agree that it’s when you don’t get what you had planned or hoped for, or in other words you did not meet your objective.

If you agree that in it’s essence that is what failure is then we can eliminate fear of failure by properly defining our objective for prospecting.

Without fail when I talk to a struggling salesperson or entrepreneur, if I ask them what the purpose of prospecting is they tell me it’s to make sales. No wonder over time they get to the point they can’t stand it, and they keep looking for other ways to sell their goods or services. They have the wrong objective.

The purpose of prospecting is to find qualified people that have a need and are indeed a good fit for what you have to offer, and that you desire to work with. Did you see the words “make a sale” in there? Do you suppose that a lot of the people you talk to won’t fit this description? That’s the point. Those that don’t fit your criteria are unqualified, which is a success. If they have a need and desire for what you offer, you are successfully qualifying them.  And best of all, you are qualifying them to see if you even desire to work with them or not.  If they aren’t someone you want to work with they are out. If they don’t have a need or don’t see that they have a need they are out.

Simple, no failure. When you have the proper objective for prospecting you literally can’t fail. By the way the same holds true for sales.

Think about what this really means for you. Get really clear about why you are prospecting. It’s not to make a sale. It’s to qualify people in or out so you discover the people you want to do business with. Either way you are a success.

Besides fear of failure, the other fear that holds people back is the fear of rejection so check back for the next post and I will discuss how to eliminate rejection from your process.

Did this post provide you with an ah-ha moment?  Share your thoughts and comments below, and if you know a struggling sales person you might decide to share this on LinkedIn, or another social media website.

About the Author Mike McMahon

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