Why Rejection Hurts and What To Do About It (Ask Jeb)
Episode
21 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Leadership, Sales & Revenue, Software Development
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓The Ledge Technique: Memorize scripted responses for common prospecting objections to activate the prefrontal cortex during the magic quarter second before emotional reaction. When prospects say they're too busy, respond with "I figured you would be, and that's exactly why I called" to bypass fight-or-flight responses and maintain executive brain control during rejection moments.
- ✓Relating Over Fighting: When prospects object during closing, lower conflict temperature by relating to their concern without agreeing to it. If someone says the price is too high, respond with "I totally get where you're coming from, it sounds like you're someone who makes good decisions with their money" before asking clarifying questions to understand their actual concern.
- ✓Discovery Prevents Objections: Objections emerge when salespeople skip thorough discovery work and lack ammunition to address concerns. Comprehensive discovery captures pain points, aspirations, and challenges that can be reflected back when prospects hesitate, reacquainting them with their stated goals and previously agreed solutions to reduce the power of their fear of change.
- ✓Persistence Statistics: Forty four percent of salespeople give up after one rejection, seventy eight percent quit after two asks, and ninety one percent stop after four attempts. The average deal requires eight asks to close, meaning persistent salespeople face significantly less competition as most competitors have already abandoned the opportunity by the halfway point.
- ✓Evolutionary Rejection Response: Human DNA evolved over forty thousand years to avoid tribal rejection because isolation from the campfire group meant death from predators or rival tribes. This biological programming makes rejection personally painful for all empathetic humans, not something to dismiss or ignore, but rather to acknowledge while developing repeatable behaviors and mindset techniques to move forward.
What It Covers
Jeb Blount and Wendy Sofia Ramirez Campos examine why rejection triggers deep emotional responses in salespeople, rooted in evolutionary biology and tribal survival instincts. They provide specific techniques like the ledge method and relating strategies to handle objections, emphasizing that persistence through eight asks typically secures deals while most salespeople quit after four attempts.
Key Questions Answered
- •The Ledge Technique: Memorize scripted responses for common prospecting objections to activate the prefrontal cortex during the magic quarter second before emotional reaction. When prospects say they're too busy, respond with "I figured you would be, and that's exactly why I called" to bypass fight-or-flight responses and maintain executive brain control during rejection moments.
- •Relating Over Fighting: When prospects object during closing, lower conflict temperature by relating to their concern without agreeing to it. If someone says the price is too high, respond with "I totally get where you're coming from, it sounds like you're someone who makes good decisions with their money" before asking clarifying questions to understand their actual concern.
- •Discovery Prevents Objections: Objections emerge when salespeople skip thorough discovery work and lack ammunition to address concerns. Comprehensive discovery captures pain points, aspirations, and challenges that can be reflected back when prospects hesitate, reacquainting them with their stated goals and previously agreed solutions to reduce the power of their fear of change.
- •Persistence Statistics: Forty four percent of salespeople give up after one rejection, seventy eight percent quit after two asks, and ninety one percent stop after four attempts. The average deal requires eight asks to close, meaning persistent salespeople face significantly less competition as most competitors have already abandoned the opportunity by the halfway point.
- •Evolutionary Rejection Response: Human DNA evolved over forty thousand years to avoid tribal rejection because isolation from the campfire group meant death from predators or rival tribes. This biological programming makes rejection personally painful for all empathetic humans, not something to dismiss or ignore, but rather to acknowledge while developing repeatable behaviors and mindset techniques to move forward.
Notable Moment
Blount reveals his most painful rejections stem not from prospects saying no, but from discovering after losing deals that he missed critical information during discovery that would have won the sale. This shame and gut punch feeling from failing to execute proper sales process creates worse emotional damage than direct rejection.
Episode Transcript
Join us for the fanatical prospecting boot camp that will help your team five x their pipeline in ninety days or less. We'll be hosting it on March in Atlanta, Georgia. Go to salesgravy.com/live. That's salesgravy.com/live and use the code podcast to save a $100. This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi. I'm Jeb Blunt, best selling author of fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and ink, and I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check. Alright. Y'all, welcome back to a special episode of the AskJeb podcast segment on sales gravy. I've got Wendy Sofia Ramirez Campos on with me. She is a renowned and leading Mexican sales trainer. She's an author. She's a mindset coach. And I'm not gonna say the name of your book in Espanol. The English translation for Wendy's book, What No One Talks About in Sales, Strategies to Avoid Being a Flash in the Pan, which I think is a really good name for a book. So we're gonna do something to here today that we haven't done before. And let's just be clear, I am not a Spanish speaker. But we are going to do an AskJab. You're gonna ask me a question. We're gonna record this in in both Espanol and in English. And then we're gonna do two versions of this. And in one version, I will be speaking Spanish through the, the helpful technology of AI. And then the other one will be both be speaking English, and so we'll we'll be able to create two versions of this, which I think is fun. So however you're listening to this, you may be listening to this in English. You may be listening to this in to Espanol. Disclaimer is that I am not a native Spanish speaker. Let's take the questions. Okay. Jeff, before we dive into practical advice, I want to start with you as a person because we all face tough rejections, and I'm sure you have as well. Tell us, what's the toughest rejection you ever faced in your career, and how did you overcome it? That's a good question. I I it would be hard for me to it would be hard for me to, like, give you the, like, the toughest rejection I ever faced in my career, except for maybe I got fired when I was younger from a job that I deserved to get fired from. That was that was being rejected. But in that situation, I just went and got another job and decided I wouldn't gonna let that happen to me again. So I learned from that rejection to not make those same mistakes. I it's hard because I've been rejected so much. Like, I you know, I've got a a forty year career in sales, and I mean, I was rejected yesterday, and I'm gonna get rejected tomorrow. I get rejected all of the time. And so a better way of saying that …
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