Dealing with Rejections

[armenh]

I was wondering how you deal with failure in business and generally in life. Do you apply different methods of coping when you deal with rejections/failures regarding your business or your personal life? We all know that we learn through failing and then succeed by getting back up and fighting harder, but what motivates you to keep going? Is it the fact that there are many other opportunities there, or can it be a pride issue? Or you want to prove to yourself that you are capable of accomplishing that certain task?

Do you think it is necessary to fail before we can succeed? Does success stem out of failure?

[StephenG]

That really is an excellent question even though I have to admit it sounds a bit winey when first read. To be honest I took the word rejection out of my vocabulary. I always try to evealuate each unsuccessful interaction objectively. You simply need to change something to raise your level of positive responses. It may be your target customer, it may be your product or it may be your approach. But the bottomline is that each time you make a presentation it becomes part of your job to learn from it. One little thing I found handy was as I approached a home or office I kept my eyes open for somekind of common ground I could open up with that had little or nothing to do with my product, it may have been a car, or a plant or garden, a pet, a piece of art anything. I might spend 30min or 10 min just having a conversation with a client, a total stanger before I even approached business. I always believed this was the key to my success in sales as I had no real sales skills per say. Listening and responding is also extremely important and cannot be overstressed. And when I say listen I mean really listen carefully to what they are saying, just listening accurately can often go along way toward securing some confidence. Steve