Fearless Sales Genie?

Feb 15 2008

Posted by: Cheryl Clausen in coaching, tags: sales coaching, sales genie

Fear of rejection is a major obstacle that you try to ignore. Of course, ignoring it won’t make it go away and it won’t make it any easier. Plus fear of rejection leads you to rationalize your behaviors and make excuses.

Fear of rejection is entirely in your head, but that doesn’t make it any less real. At some point you have to be OK with the “no” even embrace the “no”. One way to do that is to change your perspective.

By that I mean make it your objective to reject the prospect. Not everyone is a good fit for you and your business. You don’t want whiners and people that don’t pay their bills. You don’t want people that you don’t have a great solution for. So starting right now start thinking about the questions you need to ask that will help you to reject the prospect.

You can even set the appointment up from the premise that you may not be a good fit for each other, but that by the end of the conversation you’ll both know that. The thing is the less eager you are the more attractive you become. But we still have to deal with that underlying fear of rejection.

Make a list of exactly what you’re really afraid of. Keep writing until you can’t think of another thing. Now go down that list and beside each fear write down the reward having that fear gives you. Whoa, I’ll bet you had to read that sentence a second time. You’re thinking reward, fear doesn’t reward me but you see my friend it does.

You’ve allowed fear of rejection to become a behavioral habit. The thing about habits is that no matter how ugly a habit is or how bad the consequences a habit may have on some level that habit is very satisfying. Why else would allow themselves to get addicted to cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs. Fear is your nasty little addiction, and you have to discover for yourself how fear is actually rewarding to you.

You don’t just turn habits on and off. When someone overcomes an addiction they have to replace the behaviors associated with the addiction or they fail. Go back to your fear list and ask yourself what behaviors can you demonstrate through action to replace those fear behaviors and reward yourself. Then commit to those behaviors one experience at a time.

Yep, you’ll still come across prospects that are having a bad day and decide they need to kick you instead of the dog. You can’t change or control that, but you can control how you choose to respond. You are bringing each prospect an exciting opportunity that will benefit them, they have everything to lose and you have everything to gain.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 4:06 pm and is filed under coaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.