• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, September 20, 2018

According to an article in Sales and Marketing Management by Jeb Blount, Rejection is one of the most painful of all human experiences. And when you choose a career in sales, you are actually signing up to seek out rejection. The best salespeople master techniques to get past the noes and keep pushing toward the yeses. 

No matter what you sell, when you learn how to recognize and manage your emotions, you gain the power to influence the emotions of other people at that crucial inflection point when no is on the table. This is why managing disruptive emotions is the primary meta-skill of sales. 

Additional emotions that impede your ability to get past no:

Fear

Fear is the root cause of most failures in sales. It causes you to hesitate and make excuses rather than confidently and assertively ask for what you want. It clouds objectivity and breeds insecurity. 

Desperation

Desperation is a disruptive emotion that causes one to become needy and weak, be illogical, and make poor decisions. Desperation makes you instantly unlikeable and unattractive to other people. Desperation is the mother of insecurity.

Insecurity

Insecurity drowns confidence and assertiveness. It causes you to feel alone. Insecurity causes you to feel as if rejection is lurking around every corner, so you become gun-shy—afraid of your own shadow.

Significance

Need for significance is a core human desire and weakness. Your egocentric need for significance treats rejection as a threat, thus triggering the fight-or-flight response and causing irrational behavior. The insatiable need for significance is the mother of attachment and eagerness.

Attachment

Attachment causes you to become so emotionally focused on winning, that you lose perspective and objectivity. Attachment is the enemy of self-awareness and the genesis of delusion.

Eagerness

Eagerness causes you to become so focused on pleasing other people that you lose sight of your sales objectives. You give in and give up too soon. Eagerness is the shortest path to becoming the buyer’s puppet.

Worry

Worry is the downside of your brain’s vigilant crusade to keep you safe and alive. Your brain naturally focuses on the negative, what could go wrong, rather than what could go right. This, in and of itself, can trigger the fight-or-flight response and the stream of disruptive emotions that come with it, based only on the perception that something might go wrong. This leads to paralysis from analyzing every negative possibility and avoidance in the form of procrastination.

In concert or individually, these disruptive emotions can lead to dangerous confirmation bias. This human cognitive shortcut causes you to put on your rose-colored lenses and see only those things that support your delusional view of the situation.

As humans, we have all been that rudderless ship, helplessly rocked by out-of-control emotions. We’ve all said or done things in the moment that in retrospect we regretted. We’ve all avoided the truth. We’ve all been hit with a hard objection and then stammered and stuttered, searching for the right words in the throes of the fight-or-flight response.

It is easy to talk about managing disruptive emotions in dispassionate clichés, like “just let it roll off your back,” but it is an entirely different thing to quell your emotions and turn around an objection when everything inside you just wants to run. Intellect, rational thinking, and process drown in the sea of disruptive emotions and subconscious human instinct.

So don’t feel bad. But do seek awareness, pleads the author. Make the deliberate choice to monitor, evaluate, and modulate emotions so that your responses to the people and environment around you are congruent with your intentions and objectives. 

It’s not easy.

Jeb Blount is the author of Objections: The Ultimate Guide for Mastering the Art and Science of Getting Past No. Through his global training organization, Sales Gravy, Jeb advises many of the world’s leading organizations and their executives on the impact of emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills on customer-facing activities and delivers training to thousands of participants in both public and private forums.