What are you doing to prepare your sales team for rejection?

Many sales managers train their sales teams in closing techniques, sales process and closing, but what about rejection? What can you do the prepare your team for the volume of rejection they will encounter in sales?

1. Hire the right people

Hire salespeople that have a high tolerance for (emotional) pain. Don't make your life harder than it has to be by hiring salespeople that can't handle rejection at all and trying to completely change them into rejection crushing sales ninjas. Most likely it's going to be a waste of time and energy.

2. Focus on the right metrics

Focus on rejection metrics. What I mean by that is the simple math that tells you and your sales reps how many times they have to get rejection to get to a *yes*.

Example:

100 dials >50 reaches >35 pitches >25 no's >10 opportunities >5 closes

Now you know that for every 5 rejections you'll get 1 closed deal.

Instead of purely measuring number of closed deals per day, you should measure the number of rejections that sales reps generate per day and reward them for it.

Have a rejection leaderboard. Have rejection benchmarks for your team.

This will reframe the topic of rejections in your team from something negative to something positive.

3. Give your sales reps the right tools

Give your sales reps easy tools to recalibrate how they feel about rejection. One classic example is to give a rep a large bottle and a whole pile of pennies. Tell them that every time someone rejects them, they can throw one penny in the bottle. By the time the bottle is full, they're probably a lot richer ;)

This will give your sales people a feeling of accomplishment and progress every time they hear a no. And that's a very powerful thing.