How Top SDRs Stay Sane When 90% of Their Day Is Rejection

:: 00:00:00

Speaker 1

If you're doing outbound sales for an MSP, you're even know that job is not easy, right? Like you are. You're talking to strangers. People aren't answering the phone when they do answer the phone. You're not getting through the decision maker. The person that you want to talk to. It can sometimes feel like you're just experiencing failure after failure after failure after failure, you've made like 30 phone calls.

:: 00:19:13

Speaker 1

You're like, damn, I can't get anybody on the phone. Or you do talk to three people in a row and, you know, people hang up the phone on you or worse, you know, calling you names. Who knows? And so it's easy to feel like there's a series of failures when you're doing you're doing your outreach. And that's why today I'm not going to talk just general mindset.

:: 00:34:16

Speaker 1

I'm going to talk resilience. I think resilience is one of the most important skills that you can cultivate. When you were doing sales. And I'm going to share why. Okay. Now, to me, resilience is the ability to bounce back after a setback. Right. So you've got a setback or a perceived failure or not accomplishing a goal or anything that could potentially feel like some degree of failure in cultivating the ability to bounce back from that is what separates the champions and the people that are phenomenal again in life.

:: 01:08:05

Speaker 1

But but specifically in sales, the people that are able to pull themself out of ruts, the people that are able to not get stuck into a slump, and people who were able to, like, bend the curve right after a bad day or a bad couple of days or a bad couple of hours, whatever it is, that stems from resilience.

:: 01:24:06

Speaker 1

And the reason it's so important, especially when you're doing outbound sales, is failure, if that's what we're going to call it, failure. Just not not getting the desired outcome that you want. Failure is not just something that you're going to experience along the way. Failure is fully integrated into your role, right? Like mathematically, it is simply part of the job.

:: 01:44:23

Speaker 1

And then you read this way you're going to make 100 calls. How many people are you going to actually talk to? 15. Right. That means 85% of the people that you're calling, you're not even going to reach. You're not even going to talk to low. Some people may go, gosh, you know, I'm making calls. I feel like I'm getting my ass kicked or I'm not, you know, hitting my numbers and not doing my goals because 85% of the time you're not even talking to somebody that's actually statistically about right.

:: 02:07:21

Speaker 1

Of the 15 people that you talk to, half are not going to be the right person or half are not going to be the right number or the right contact or a decision maker. And then half of the people that are left may be decision makers that cut you off right away. Right. And then half of the people that are left may, you know, let you get through your pitch, but not book a call, you know, not be interested and say, you know, that's a little piece to hang up on you, you know, so you get down to like some number.

:: 02:31:15

Speaker 1

And statistically, you should have experienced failure 95% of the time. Failure is defined by not getting the appointment 95% of the time throughout your day. That makes resilience and the ability to bounce back from that incredibly valuable. If I do all of these things to avoid making the call because I feel like I'm going to experience failure on that call, I'm afraid of the rejection.

:: 02:54:16

Speaker 1

I'm afraid of whatever that is. And I haven't cultivated the resilience to just, like, bounce back from that. So I do all of these things. What I'm doing is I'm trying to avoid the the immediate feeling of failure. And the trade off is I have a perpetual feeling of failure forever, because the only way to avoid failure is to avoid doing something.

:: 03:16:15

Speaker 1

Like if you were doing anything in life and in sales, if you're making calls, you are by definition going to experience some failure. The only way to avoid that is to not make the calls. I used to avoid doing the actions. If you avoid taking any action, yes, you might avoid the immediate feeling of strong or failure, right?

:: 03:37:01

Speaker 1

Like somebody's hanging up on you, but you are guaranteed to have the perpetual feeling of failure that comes from not getting the wins. So not making calls may help me avoid that immediate sense of failure. Like, you know, I'm researcher, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm looking at websites, and I'm not getting hung up on right now. I'm also not getting any wins.

:: 03:57:10

Speaker 1

I'm not getting any sales. I'm not getting any appointments on the board. I am going to buy very definition, going to experience a longer sense of failure into perpetuity forever, because I'm not taking the action that's going to get me the wins. The only way to avoid failure is to also avoid winning. You have to go into this knowing I'm going to experience some failure, right?

:: 04:18:21

Speaker 1

Because I have to experience it in order to get the wins, which means I have to cultivate the skill of resilience, of being able to experience it and not let it deter me from continuing to take action. A story that resonated with me early in my career was early in my sales management career. I was working on a project.

:: 04:35:21

Speaker 1

It was pretty high profile. You know, the executive team at the time, I was I was new to sales management. The executive team was aware of this thing. It was a test that I had proposed. It was a new idea, and I was pretty optimistic about it. Right. So I went into it thinking, it's going to be a home run.

:: 04:50:12

Speaker 1

This is going to this is going to make my career. You know, it was going to be awesome. So I went into it, gave it my all, and it flopped. The rest of the day I was I was pretty bummed. The next day I was pretty bummed. And I think it was towards the end of the following day or so.

:: 05:05:14

Speaker 1

I can remember. It's been a while, but whenever it was, my my manager came to me and he said he sounded like a little bit angry about it, and I, I liked this manager and we got along really well. I'm very supportive. This thing didn't define you, but what you're doing right now is you are going to let that define you.

:: 05:27:16

Speaker 1

Here's the thing, Ray. We are in business. Anybody doing anything worth doing and trying anything new is going to experience failure. That's all that happened here. You had an idea, you pitched it, you put it forward. Didn't work. It was a setback. And now you're having trouble getting back up. Getting knocked down isn't something that you avoid doing.

:: 05:50:11

Speaker 1

Getting knocked down is the game. It is part of the game in. The only thing that matters is that you know how to get back up and run the next play, and we need you to get back up and run the next play. Otherwise, you're not just going to let this thing define you, you're going to let your reaction to a define you.

:: 06:10:01

Speaker 1

I'll tell you what that's that's stuck for me, to this day, like I still remember and I've quoted it right. I have told people on my team, hey, cool idea. Didn't work. Get back up. Let's go. Like part of the game or one in the next play like this. We got to keep going. That is the nature of this beast.

:: 06:25:05

Speaker 1

It's the same thing in sales. You're not going to win every deal. You're not going to. You're going to nail every pitch. There's a reason that when we look at close rates, they aren't 100%. And if they are, that's pretty suspect, right? Like if you see the way that's got 100% like that, what's really going on because you can't win them all.

:: 06:39:29

Speaker 1

Failure is part of it. What we've got here are are seven things that I have learned over the course of my career. And life that have helped me build more resiliency and a stronger mindset, but like resiliency specific. And I'll tell you the first one, the first one is taking constructive or even harsh feedback with the best of intentions, you know, so you take my, my boss and, and, you know, in earlier in my career, he came to me in India was was pretty stern about it, you know, it wasn't like, hey, buddy.

:: 07:09:22

Speaker 1

Like, it's okay. It was like, hey, dude, get up. Like, this is how we play the game. I remember having a decision to make right? Like, I remember thinking, like, I was, I was younger, I was like, should I be pissed or should I just listen? And I made the choice to just listen. I made the choice to say, you know what?

:: 07:30:09

Speaker 1

I think this guy has the best of intentions. Whether he cares about me, he cares about the business. He cares about the outcome. It sounds like they need me on the next play. So I'm going to go ahead and just take this feedback. As harsh as it feels, I'm going to not get defensive about it. I'm going to take the coaching.

:: 07:47:16

Speaker 1

I'm going to implement the coaching, I'm going to get my ass back up and I'm going to run the next play. We never talked about it again. That I think is a lesson, and it's something that over the course of my career, I've had that decision to make multiple times. I've had people have tough conversations with me that were coaching, that were constructive, sometimes harsh.

:: 08:04:20

Speaker 1

Right. Like it's and I'll they do. But I could have delivered that a little bit a little bit clear. But who gives a shit when you're on the court. Think basketball. You know, like you know, people aren't going, hey, excuse me, John, can I have the ball, please? It's like, hey, dude. Like it's, you know, it's like on the court language.

:: 08:19:10

Speaker 1

So if you put that filter on harsh feedback, the next time that you're getting what feels like strong coaching, don't assign some other meaning to it. Just take the message for what it is. Extract the piece that's valuable. Implement it. Make the changes. See the improvements. The second tip that I've got go into things with lower expectations, not necessarily lower your standards.

:: 08:42:13

Speaker 1

You don't need to lower your goals. You don't need to have smaller goals. The lower your expectations about how the process of getting there is going to feel. Just assume it's going to be hard. Like I did the math for your earlier, you're gonna make 100 calls, you're gonna have 15 presentations. Half of those people aren't going to be the right people or decision makers or whatever it is.

:: 09:02:07

Speaker 1

Half of the people that are left are not going to like, we've done this right. If I go into each day thinking, you know what, I'm going to set 20 appointments, I'm going to I'm I'm going to make 100 calls. I'm going to talk to 50 decision makers. I'm going to set 20 appointments. Well, you know, I'm probably going to get pretty disappointed each day, right?

:: 09:18:09

Speaker 1

Whereas if I go into this and I say I expect this to be hard, I expect this to be challenging. I expect there to be a learning curve. I expect there to be frustrations. And what I'm doing is closing the gap between how I think things ought to be and how things are really going to be. Now, if you do it right, you actually lower your expectations to a point where, hey, you know what?

:: 09:41:21

Speaker 1

Today went marginally better. It's feels pretty awesome, right? But your expectations are going to have a significant impact on how you feel about the same degree of work in the same degree of failure, in the same degree of success. At the end of the day, I go in and I can make the same number of calls. I have the same number of presentations, have the same number of appointments that at the end of the day and end up feeling one way or end up feeling another, based entirely off the expectations that I have to begin with.

:: 10:07:03

Speaker 1

The third thing that I have found to be really helpful not taking things personally. So, you know, kind of like the coaching feedback, but just in general, like what you're experiencing on the phone or what you're experiencing if you're out at a tradeshow or if you're out canvasing or if you're out and you're you're talking to strangers, you have no idea what is going on in their life when they tell you, hey, you're an asshole, goodbye, or get out of my office or whatever it is, right?

:: 10:34:10

Speaker 1

Any time that you have that negative reaction from somebody on the other phone, there's no point in taking it personally because there's no way that it was actually personal. You know how I know that they don't know you. They don't know who you are. They don't. They probably don't know your name. They probably don't know what city you live in.

:: 10:52:19

Speaker 1

They probably don't remember the name of the company that you work for. What they know is when they were walking out the door this morning, they're, you know, they stepped in some some dog shit on the way out or they, you know, the wife yelled at them because they forgot to take the garbage out or, you know, their boss just yelled at them a second ago, or they had them, an employee or a teammate that quit on them.

:: 11:12:02

Speaker 1

Or there's I mean, there's so many things that can be happening in other people's lives. For all you know, you're calling after three other cold callers just came in who were terrible at their job. Hey, hello, hello is dead space. And, you know, maybe the Steelers took three of those calls. The right time. Damn. I'm tired of phone calls.

:: 11:29:12

Speaker 1

It's not personal. Don't take it personal. Now, the fourth thing. Focus on the controllables. Like, what do you actually control? You can control the number of calls that you that you make. You can control the things that you say on the phone. You can control how you respond to other people if they're rude to you, if they hang up, or if they tell you they're just not interested.

:: 11:51:07

Speaker 1

Whatever it is, you can control how you react to that. You can control how prepared you are for the day. Right? You can control which list you're calling on sometimes, right? You can you can influence these things. What you want to do is you want to focus on what are the things that I actually control. Because if I'm focused on anything that I can't control, it is a useless emotion, completely useless if I'm folk, if I'm upset about something that I don't control.

:: 12:16:03

Speaker 1

Like somebody said something to me on a phone and I get upset about that. I'm basically choosing to be upset. I'm choosing to be demotivated. I'm choosing to lower my own morale because I'm choosing to focus on something that I never had any control of to begin with. Now, the flip side of that is when you focus everything you have on what you do control, you tend to get better results anyway, right?

:: 12:41:12

Speaker 1

If I focus on the number of calls that I make instead of the words that everybody on the other end of the phone says to me, then I'm going to make a higher volume of calls and probably better quality calls if I focus on the preparation for the calls that I'm making, if I focus on the script or the top track that I'm using, if I focus on those things, I'm going to continue to get better results because I'm changing the only thing that can be changed to get better results.

:: 13:08:12

Speaker 1

The world is built of systems with inputs and outputs in the vast majority of time you don't control the outputs, you only control the inputs. Those inputs influence the outputs, right? Like if you make more calls, you're probably going to get better results. If you make better calls, you're probably going to get better results. So if you change the inputs, you're gonna influence the outputs.

:: 13:26:23

Speaker 1

But you don't control the outputs. You only control the inputs. So focusing all of your energy and all of your attention on that is going to not only get you better outputs, but it's going to leave you more sane, like in the in the process, because you're not getting frustrated over shit that you can't control anyway. Now the fifth tip is actually it's related to that.

:: 13:46:05

Speaker 1

Okay, so in that I said one of the things that you can you can control are the words that you use on the phone. You have control of that embrace scripts, embrace talk tracks, embrace frameworks that help you stay within certain boundaries. And, you know, I talked to a lot of people who who are kind of like anti script, right?

:: 14:06:00

Speaker 1

Like I don't want to read a script. I'm, you know, I'm kind of like I like to I like to freestyle like to, you know, keep organic, like scripts make me feel constrained and, you know, all that. Do you think professional actors like a George Clooney, Brad Pitt, whatever, show up for filming and don't know their lines? Sorry.

:: 14:23:23

Speaker 1

Like, I'm I'm Brad Pitt, like I'm not going to be constrained by this script. Now, the reason they focus on knowing the script is because once I know the script, then I can focus on the performance. I can focus more on how I deliver that script and make sure that it's a high impact, high quality, that I'm into it, that I've got the energy, it helps me improve active listening while I'm making the calls, because if I don't know my script, I'm constantly on my toes.

:: 14:53:10

Speaker 1

I'm constantly like, oh man. Like I'm fumbling around like, what are they going to say next? And where we are? Oh man, did I say that. Why did I say that? Like, that's that's what happens when you don't know what you're going to say. When you know what you're going to say, you can turn all of your energy to how you're going to say it.

:: 15:06:26

Speaker 1

If you give me two sales reps and one person knows their script in their sleep like they've they've repeated it over and over and over and over. So they know it. They have it memorized. They and I know some scripts can't be like fully verbatim, but you know what I mean? Like, they they know it. What they're going to say.

:: 15:22:22

Speaker 1

The other person says, I'm going to wing it like I'm just under, I'm just going to talk or I'm going to wing it. I promise you that at the end of the day, week, month, the person that knows the script is going to deliver better results because they can focus on optimizing how they're delivering that script and making sure that it's received the way that they want to get the results they want.

:: 15:44:12

Speaker 1

Now, the sixth thing is have a pregame ritual, right? Like before you start the day and before you make your calls, think about in in basketball, if you've ever watched basketball, you'll watch like when they step up to the free throw line. A lot of players, almost every player that has a ritual has a process. It's like they'd they dribble the ball three times, they'll spin it, kind of crouch down and then shoot right.

:: 16:04:25

Speaker 1

And then when do they make it or miss it? They okay? Yeah. Step back up, do my thing. It's how they practice it because practice makes permanent. They do that consistently. Same thing with like field goal kickers. And in American football they count their steps. They move over. They get they've got this holding. And it's because they're addressing the mental game right.

:: 16:25:19

Speaker 1

And I encourage sales reps do the same thing. I do the same thing. And you can do it at the beginning of the day. You can do it before each call. I mean, the more warring them that the length of the ritual should correlate to the length of your sales cycle or what it is that you're selling like you're one of them.

:: 16:40:16

Speaker 1

You don't want a 38 minute pre-game ritual if you're supposed to be making 80 calls a day, right? Like, that's not good. That's not going to work away. Well, but you can do something to start the day and get focused every single day, every single morning. And you can, between each call, do something for example, some teams I've worked with, we get mirrors, you know, we put them on the, on the computer.

:: 17:03:03

Speaker 1

I know a lot of you going to go, oh, the old smile doll. But you know what? It actually matters. The psychology actually matters if, if I, if I didn't kind of smile on this thing and I would do this, like, you'd probably receive the message differently. It's the same thing on the phone and all they have oftentimes if you're making phone calls, all they have is literally your voice in the way that you project your voice.

:: 17:23:05

Speaker 1

Why in times has to do with how you carry yourself. So that could be something like, hey, glance in the mirror before you make the next call. You know, some people will sit down after a call, right? Their three notes stand back up right and and get ready. Have something that allows you to create, some separation between the calls, because the last thing that you want is some bad juju from, from a prior call getting carried over.

:: 17:47:24

Speaker 1

Right. It helps you stay out of slumps and all that stuff like something that allows you to reset. Like stepping away from that free throw line, stepping back up. Right. You can do something similar for for the day, right? Like for for most of the teams that I've managed, we do like a quick huddle in the morning. Yes, it's procedural.

:: 18:01:26

Speaker 1

And yes, there's an administrative component. Yes, there is, you know, focus element to it, but it's also a pre-game ritual that says, hey, you know what we're gonna do at the beginning of the day? We're gonna get sales focused, right? And we're gonna we're going to run a drill. We're going to talk about our commitments. Where do these things boom break right now?

:: 18:17:15

Speaker 1

Let's go do this. Whatever it is for you. Think about what is the pre-game ritual that you can you can implement that allows you to bring your full self to each and every call and each and every day. And the seventh one, create an alter ego. You would be surprised at how many public speakers, well known public speakers are introverts, right?

:: 18:37:24

Speaker 1

Like you, you get them off stage and they're and they're quiet and they're a little bit shy. You're like to how do you do that? Like you stand for 100 or thousands of people and you do this and I know many of them. And what they will tell you is, well, you know, I kind of slip into an identity when I, when I step on stage in the way that I do that is usually with some type of anchor.

:: 18:57:01

Speaker 1

Right. Actually stole this from, from Todd Herman, who's got a great book on this, about alter egos. And he and actually another friend of mine does this, too. Actually, he wears, thick framed glasses. And when they slip on the thick frame glasses, they kind of slip into another character. The glasses are fake, like, they are just they are part of slipping into a character.

:: 19:20:08

Speaker 1

And you a lot of professional athletes do this, some consciously, because now it's something that people talk about. But for years it was unconscious. You know, Bo Jackson, the, you know, famous, you know, football and baseball player, had a different personality, went into a specific mode before he before you went on the field. Justin Jefferson, you know, for the for the Vikings, he has a though all these diamonds and stuff, like all this jewelry.

:: 19:44:11

Speaker 1

Well, what's kind of funny is I heard him talking about it once and he said, you know, the thing is, I was I was a little brother, like. And he's kind of, he's kind of silly and his ego is fun and, you know, laughs a lot. He's like, but as, as a little brother man got my ass kicked.

:: 19:56:12

Speaker 1

I was the smaller one and you know more shy. But when I slip on my, my jewelry, what I get when I get this on, like I take on a new, a new, a new persona, like, entirely. That's why he wears it. Like he slips into that personality. Olympic athletes. I'm telling you, it's incredibly common. And the reason it works is because one, when you slip into a character, you are more willing to do things that need to be done because your character's doing it not here.

:: 20:26:21

Speaker 1

Right? Like if you need to, run a certain script or you got to make calls a certain way and maybe you're like, I don't know if I would normally do that. You're like, boom, you slip into your persona, right? It's not me doing it. It's my it's it's my alter ego. Right. That's what we do. The second reason it works is the flip side of that, which is the rejection that you get as you're doing something.

:: 20:46:26

Speaker 1

Again, you're not going to avoid failure unless you avoid doing something. So if you're going to do something, you're going to experience failure. Now how do you experience that failure? One of the ways is to insulate yourself from it with an alter ego. If you yell at me, guess what? You didn't yell at me. You yelled at my yelled at my alter ego, not me.

:: 21:02:18

Speaker 1

Like I'm. I'm like, I'm Justin Jefferson. Like I'm, you know, I'm I'm chill. I'm. You know, I'm a little brother. I'm quiet. I'm silly on the field. I'm something else. When I learned that concept is a holy shit, that makes all the sense in the world, and it's typically anchored with something, you know, whether it's like some type of jewelry or something you wear, you know, glasses or a hat.

:: 21:24:02

Speaker 1

It's why a lot of, influencers, like people that are that are creating content stuff and have like certain outfits and things like they because they are they're slipping into character. Those are seven things that have helped me. I hope that they they help you, you know, come back and revisit this like periodically at different points in your career, your life for like one of these may resonate more than another time.

:: 21:43:04

Speaker 1

You know, you're saying like resilience isn't it's not just like, a nice to have thing like it is. It is something that's absolutely required. If you want to win at a high level in sales again, really anywhere, you've got to know getting knocked down is part of it, right? Like experiencing some failure, some rejection, some disappointment, some frustration.

:: 22:04:19

Speaker 1

Completely part of it that is a given. Can you bounce back? Right. That's the hard part for a lot of people. You can't win in outbound. You can't win in sales if you don't know how to get back up. And I love to hear, like if any of this resonated. Go ahead, drop a comment. You know, make a make a comment, let me know.

:: 22:22:28

Speaker 1

Would love to to get some feedback. Just remember, if you're building mental toughness and mental toughness is an asset, part of your character that is invaluable for for your career or for the trajectory that you're going to be on. And for life in general. So, I open up somebody else.