Using Rejection to Cultivate Sales Resilience

I was once invited to take part in a panel on “Verses Versus Verses: Perspectives on Poetry Contests” (poets love a good homonym). I flew to Seattle, checked into the conference, and was seated in front of the audience before fully understanding the rest of the line-up: an editor, a judge, and an accomplished poet who had lost a number of contests. That made me the de facto “experienced contest winner.” 

While that’s not un-true—several of my collections have been attached to pre- or post-publication prizes—calling me an experienced winner is only half the story. I am much more experienced as a loser. For every application or submission that manifests into opportunity, I gather double (or quadruple or, to be honest, tenfold) rejections in a variety of forms. 

There is the polite rejection. There is the uber-generic rejection, which is accidentally formatted, brackets and all, as “Dear [Author], We enjoyed the chance to read [Title].” There is the ghost rejection, where you don’t know you’ve lost until you see the news of who has won. There’s the personal rejection, a painful variety that begins as a solicitation—a Golden Ticket that, in your hands, turns back into a regular old Willy Wonka chocolate bar. 

I’ve experienced them all. Heck, I’ve experienced most of them in the past month alone.  

WHY REJECTION GIVES YOU A HEADACHE

Social psychologist Naomi I. Eisenberger has written about the overlap in neural circuitry between social pain (“painful feelings following social rejection, exclusion, or loss”) and physical pain. The mammalian correlation between social connection and survival supports the hypothesis that these experiences could be linked on a systemic level. Sure enough, there is an overlap in processing in your brain’s anterior cingulate cortex and, specifically, the affective processing that takes place in the dorsal portion (dACC) and the anterior insula. 

Whosawhatsisnow? Think of it this way: if you’re exposed to high, burning heat, studies show that the same parts of your brain light up as if you had been prompted to think about a relationship gone wrong. Evidence also supports genetic correlations between those especially sensitive to physical pain (measured in tandem with responsiveness to opioid pain relief) and social pain sensitivity. Linguistically, we conflate these two all the time, by talking about rejection or grief as something that “hurts,” “aches,” or “stings.”

One way that contemporary psychology studies imitate social exclusion is by telling participants that they’ll take part in a cyberball game, during which a particular participant is blocked from receiving the ball. Participants who were simultaneously exposed to a three-week, elevated dose of Tylenol (versus a control placebo) had fMRI scans that showed less activity in response to being excluded from cyberball. No surprise when being left out has you reaching for your favorite OTC painkiller. 

We tell sales professionals to not take rejection personally, which is good advice that takes time to internalize. For many people, primary sales interactions are intertwined with social networks. If you’re tasked with selling Girl Scout Cookies or wrapping paper as part of a grade-school fundraiser, who do you appeal to? Family and friends. Babysitting, mowing lawns, and other forms of young entrepreneurship rely on neighborhood connections and word-of-mouth. We’re conditioned to take it to heart when a sale falls through. 

WHAT TO DO WHEN REJECTION STRIKES

When you experience rejection, remember that you’re in brilliant company. The Beatles auditioned for Decca Records in 1962; George Martin declined. RSO Records said no to U2 in 1979. Def Jam signed Lady Gaga and then dropped her before she could put out a debut single. 

Back to the Future was vetoed by over forty film studios because it wasn’t sexy enough to compete at the box office (Disney, ironically, turned it down because the weird mother-son time-warp crush was too risqué). Before finding a home on Netflix, the thriller Stranger Things was dismissed by cable executives as a mismatch between the young cast and an older target audience. The possibility of adapting Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel, The Queen’s Gambit, was rejected because chess was judged too boring, despite Heath Ledger’s fervent efforts to make a movie version before his death in 2008. The 2019 miniseries won 11 Emmy Awards.

Even the greats get rejected. To protect yourself from those inevitable lows, stockpile your positive feedback. I have an instinctual resistance to feel-good advice, so understand that the first time someone suggested this to me, I rolled my eyes, picturing a cheesy, tasseled, leather-cover journal. 

I was wrong to judge. For better or worse, we live in a world of metrics; take advantage of that feedback. If you have a blank, tasseled, leather-cover journal, and a calligraphy pen with fresh ink, and those are the materials that make you happy, go for it. If you want to open a Word document titled “NotALoser.docx,” that functions as a copy-and-paste repository from emails, that works too. My system? A bulletin board of push-pinned notes within view of my desk. 

The point is that when you receive praise from a supervisor, a colleague, or a client, save that language and make it easily accessible. Sometimes, the world will trumpet your weaknesses. In those moments, there is nothing wrong with reminding yourself of your strengths. 

WHEN REJECTION IS ADVICE (IN DISGUISE)

I suppose I could just say, “Shrug off rejection! Always keep going!” That’s a solid survival technique that won’t help you thrive. Sometimes a solid round of hearing “No,” in sales or in writing or in life, is a sign that some aspect of your approach needs revising. Sometimes the headache can’t be cured by Tylenol alone. When I have a poem or an essay or a book proposal that’s been rejected multiple times, I must weigh where my resources should be invested. Is it time to submit again? Or is it time to revise? That’s where my trusted readers come in. 

At Maestro Group, we emphasize not being afraid to analyze the deals that don’t work out, whether through the specific lens of game theory or something more conversational. Improvement doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Figure out who your trusted people are. Ideally, they are a mix of coworkers and people outside the conventions of your company. Find the real talk about what is and isn’t working with your pitch and, when you find it, listen. 

Every award season delivers a new constellation of winners in the literary world. Some years I’ve been among them; most years I have not. Any envy is softened by the knowledge that what matters most is not how writers act when they win, but how they react when they lose. Rejection hasn’t worn me down. Weirdly, rejections are what give me the confidence that a sixth book will sell, and a seventh, as long as I keep putting in work on the page. Talent is valuable but, without resilience, talent is merely a shooting star that soon fades from sight. 

Interested in increasing your resilience as a sales professional? Reach out at mastery@maestrogroup.co!