No is Non-Yes

Selling is a tough game. Successful selling requires a lot of activities that result in a lot of rejection sprinkled with some success. It takes a lot of grit and faith to stick with it and keep selling under these difficult circumstances. It is never easy.

The numbers work out something like this: You lose most of the time and once in a while you get a cookie. Fortunately for us, if you hang in there you can earn a lot of cookies and some of them are pretty big cookies.

I have been on the sales firing line for almost forty years. I can tell you that the first decade wasn’t as good as it could have been because of my sensitivity to rejection. I wanted to make every sale; I wanted everyone to like me. When I got a severe rejection I took it personal (Who wouldn’t?).

The good news, for me, was that I never gave up, I never quit, and I worked hard to keep a positive mental attitude and to throw the rejections aside.

The thing that really positively changed my attitude and hardened me to rejection was something my favorite sales trainer taught me in the mid 80’s. Mark Thelen’s taught me to modify my attitude about the word no. Mark taught me and others that a no answer is not no is simply non-yes. In Mark’s opinion, a no answer was the result of a salesperson not doing a good enough job of getting to yes. So, I quickly learned to stop taking no and the associated rejection personal anymore. If the prospect said no, I convinced myself that the rejection was my fault not theirs. I just didn’t do my job well enough somewhere in the sales process to win the business. The lesson (Mark's spin) on the word no was refreshing and put things in perspective. I learned to handle rejection and the negativity associated with it..

My wife is convinced that I actually stopped hearing the word no decades ago. When I hear no it just fires me up to do a better job.

What happens in your world when you hear the word no? Most salespeople are stopped in their tracks by the word no. I deeply believe that dealing with the rejection of no getting from no to yes is one of the most important skills in selling.

An important truth in the no game is to understand that selling is a numbers game and that the burden of negative outcomes can affect you…if you let it. Failing most of the time and winning once in a while is something that you have to understand and deal with if you want to be a peak performer. It's normal. It goes along with the territory.

You will prosper it if you keep working hard, do the right things, don’t do the wrong things and never give up. Keep selling baby. And, don’t take no for an answer!