This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Mastering the Art of Sales and Persuasion: Bounce Back From Rejection, with Dan Pink, Author, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
So another big aspect of being successful in selling, selling anything, is something that I call buoyancy. And I got to this term because I interviewed a fellow named Norman Hall who has spent the last 40 years selling brushes – cleaning brushes, scrub brush. A door-to-door in the business district of San Francisco. That’s a hard job. And what he said to me very, very poetic, a lovely way to put it. He said this. He said, “Dan, here’s what you have to understand about my job. Every day I face,” this is his phrase, not mine, “an ocean of rejection. An ocean of rejection. That’s what it is to be in sales.” And I think that’s a very powerful concept. That’s why a lot of us bristle against this idea of sales. We recoil, say oh no, I don’t want to deal with it because we hate rejection. Rejection is toxic.
Go beyond a pep talk
So buoyancy is the quality of how do you stay afloat in that ocean of rejection. And the social science gives us some clues. What do you do before an encounter to be more buoyant? It turns out there’s some interesting evidence showing that questioning your abilities is sometimes more effective than pumping yourself up. Pumping yourself up saying you can do it, you’ve got this is certainly better than doing nothing. The evidence is very clear on that. But in many cases, questioning your ability saying can you do this and, if so, how is a more effective strategy for buoyancy than the kind of you’re awesome, pump yourself up strategy.
Decatastrophize failure
The best predictor of sales success is how people explain failure. When they face rejection, when they deal with a failure, they have a way of explaining it that is honest and authentic and accurate. But that recontextualizes the failure, that makes it less personal, that makes it less pervasive, that makes it less permanent. There’s this – and the literature has a very – really interesting word to describe this. We try to teach people to decatastrophize failure because for so many of us failure feels like a catastrophe and there’s a certain way to explain and recontexturalate rejection and recontexturalize failure and rejection that is, you know, again accurate and solid and strong but that leaves us buoyant for the next encounter.
So what Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania has found out in a study that he did years ago with a group of life insurance salesmen is that he found that the ones who were most successful had a certain explanatory style. And so what they did is they looked at an encounter when they had a failure, when they had a rejection, and they looked for ways to say, is this entirely personal? And most things are not entirely personal. We take them very personally but if I try to sell you something and you don’t buy it isn’t always because I’m a dope. It isn’t always because I screwed it up. It could be that you’re not ready to buy right now. It could be that you have a brother-in-law in the business and you have to buy it from him. It could be that your companies about to go bankrupt and you’re not buying anything right now. So one of the questions that he encourages us to ask is is this personal and look for ways that it’s not entirely personal.
Second one. We have a tendency to say, this always happens. Okay, we feel like it reawakens all the times where we’ve screwed up. And what he says is look for ways that isn’t pervasive. Rebut that argument that it always happens and say well, this doesn’t always happen because last week I closed a deal. Two days ago I made a sale. And the final one is, is it permanent? We have a tendency to think that rejection is a complete catastrophe that’s gonna destroy the rest of our lives and that rarely happens. So is it permanent? No, it’s not, because most things aren’t permanent. And so as Seligman tells us we have this tendency when we face rejection and failure to say, it’s all my fault, it always happens and it’s gonna ruin everything. And with the explanatory style that he suggests, you can rebut those arguments. And the way you might do to a friend and that leaves you – there’s some great evidence showing that that actually your abilities to do that is strongly predictive of your ability to be successful in any kind of sales or persuasive effort.