Why Rejection Hurts Biologically

Here's a truth that'll make you uncomfortable: Getting rejected isn't the real problem. The real problem is that you're not doing the work upfront to lower the probability of rejection in the first place. That's the insight that hit when Wendy Ramirez, a leading Mexican sales expert and author of Lo que nadie habla de las ventas: Estrategias para no ser llamarada de petate or What Nobody Talks About in Sales: Strategies to Avoid Being a Flash in the Pan, joined this week's episode about handling rejection on Ask Jeb on The Sales Gravy Podcast. After forty years in sales, I've been rejected yesterday, I'll get rejected tomorrow, and I've been rejected so many times that I almost don't even feel it anymore. But that doesn't mean you can just "let it roll off your back" like some sales trainers tell you. If you're struggling with rejection, you're not alone. And more importantly, you're not broken. There's a biological reason it hurts so badly, and there are concrete techniques you can use to handle it. The Biology of Rejection: Why Your Brain Is Working Against You Here's what most sales trainers won't tell you: Rejection is supposed to hurt. It's baked into your DNA. Forty thousand years ago, human beings lived in small groups around campfires. If you got kicked out of the group and walked away from that campfire into the dark, you were in danger. You were part of the food chain. There were things out there hunting you, rival tribes fighting over scarce resources, and being alone meant you probably weren't going to pass on your genes. So human beings who avoided rejection were more likely to survive. This fear of rejection became an evolutionary advantage, and it's still with us today. That's why selling is so hard. It's why most people don't want to go into sales. Walk into the accounting department and ask if anyone wants to make cold calls with you. They're going to look at you like you've got four heads because nobody wants to be in a profession where you have to do something that unnatural. This avoidance of rejection serves us really well in most of our life. You need to get along with your family, your coworkers, other people in the world. Knowing where the line is that would get you rejected is super important to being able to work as a team. But in sales? It's killing your performance. The Truth About Objections: You're Creating Them When people reject you or give you an objection, what they're expressing is their fear. They're expressing their fear of moving forward, their fear of change, their fear about whether or not you'll do what you say you're going to do. And here's the brutal part: Most of the time, you created that fear. The easiest way to deal with an objection is to do good discovery and do a good job in the selling process. When salespeople make the mistake of not doing any discovery, they don't have any ammunition. So the rejection sounds like this: "Your price is too high." That's the only way a person really knows how to explain it. If they don't like you, they'll say, "We need to go think about this." Think about it this way. If you do a great job of building the relationship, asking questions, listening, getting all of their pain and aspirations on the table, and then telling their story back to them in the context of how you can help them solve their problems, then you've earned the right to ask them. When you ask and they give you an objection, you know what to do because you already have that information. You're just bringing back and putting on the table the things that they already told you. The worst rejections I've gotten? They're usually when I lost a deal because I didn't do discovery. And then I found out after the fact that I missed something I shouldn't have missed. It's not so much the rejection that hurts. It's the shame and the gut punch that I didn't do my job as a salesperson, and therefore I created the environment that made that objection so big that I couldn't get past it because I had no information to work with. The Ledge Technique: Your Magic Quarter Second Let's get practical. You're on a prospecting call, you're engaging another person, and they hit you with an objection which feels like rejection. What do you do? Use a technique called the ledge. Neuroscientists would call it the magic quarter second that allows your executive brain (your prefrontal cortex) to get in control of your emotional brain (your limbic system) and that little structure inside your brain called the amygdala that triggers the fight or flight response. The ledge is just something you've memorized that you say automatically whenever you get that particular objection. The thing about prospecting objections is that we know every potential one. They're not surprising. People are going to say, "I don't have any time," "I'm not interested," "I'm already working with someone," "Your prices are too high," "This is not a good time for me," "I'm not the right person." So if someone says, "I'm too busy right now," I just say, "I figured you would be. And that's exactly why I called." That's all I say. The reason I have that memorized is because when they say that, rather than getting consumed by the fight or flight response, I know exactly what to say. In that magic quarter second, my brain that's smart takes over and says, "This is not a threat. This is just a person who says they don't have enough time right now, and you know exactly how to handle it." Relating: The Slower Form of the Ledge If you're in a slower type of objection (let's say you're asking someone to buy from you), use a form of the ledge by relating with them. When someone gives you an objection, they're expecting conflict because we're just human beings. If I tell you no, I'm expecting you to come back at me. So they give you the objection and they're ready for it. If you punch back, they're going to punch back. Everybody loses. But instead, if you relate to them, you lower the temperature. You get on their side of the table. You show empathy without agreeing with them. Here's what that sounds like in practice: Someone says, "This is more than I wanted to pay." You could say, "Well, look, it's really not that expensive and you're going to get so much out of it." Or you could say, "I totally get where you're coming from. It sounds to me like you're someone who makes really good decisions with their money." You're not agreeing that the price is too high. You're agreeing that they're a person who makes good decisions with their money. You're lowering the conflict level and increasing the collaborative level. You're diffusing them and breaking their pattern. Then you can go into, "When you say it's a little bit more than you wanted to pay, how do you mean? What does that mean to you?" But you always start with relating to them. The One Basic Truth About Objections Here's something you need to understand: In every sales conversation, while facing every objection, it is the human being that has the greatest emotional discipline that is most likely to have control over the conversation. And if you control the conversation, you can handle the objection. This is called relaxed assertive confidence. When you demonstrate this behavior, it almost acts like a magnet. People lean into you. And emotionally (because emotions are contagious), it causes them to respond in kind. When you come off as relaxed and confident, suddenly they lower their conflict level and they become more confident in you as well. There's nothing that handles objections better than pure old confidence. Persistence Always Finds a Way to Win Let me leave you with this: Persistence always finds a way to win. Always. In the US, 44 percent of salespeople only face rejection once before they give up. 78 percent give up after asking twice. 91 percent give up after asking only four times. But on average, it takes eight asks to get someone to say yes to you. So think about that. The statistics are in your favor. The more you're persistent, the more you keep asking, the more likely you're going to get what you want. The more you face rejection, the more likely you're going to get what you want. The inspirational part? Doing that is really hard. It takes discipline, and discipline is defined as sacrificing what you want now for what you want most. The easiest, fastest way to put on that emotional armor and dive into objections and rejections is to know exactly what it is that you want. So that in that moment when your brain is saying to you, "Run, don't do this, don't face it," you remember that on the other side of that rejection is the one thing that you want more than anything else in the world. And you're willing to go through it, around it, under it. No matter what it takes. You're willing to do whatever it takes to get that thing that you want. That's when rejection stops being the problem and starts being just another step in your process. Ready to transform your prospecting approach and fill your pipeline? Grab a copy of The LinkedIn Edge, Jeb’s latest book on combining LinkedIn, AI, and proven outbound strategies to sell more and close bigger deals.