Say NO to Rejection in Sales

The hardest thing about sales is the rate of rejection. 

Even the best salesperson in the world has to face rejection every day, otherwise, you just aren’t putting yourself in front of enough leads. In fact, the best salespeople are the ones who are able to cope with it best. It’s tough. It’s exhausting. But that’s what gives you that high when you close a sale; all the NOs you had to endure to get to that one yes. 

Today, I wanted to talk about all the different types of rejection outbound salespeople suffer on the daily.

Deliverability 

I’m willing to bet that everyone reading this has seen this before: 

It sucks. It sucks because you spend effort finding a great lead, researching them and then writing them the perfect personalized outbound email. And, it doesn’t even reach their inbox….

Taking care of your domain reputation is key. Luckily, this is the easiest type of rejection to solve for. Here are some tips: 

1. Warm up your inbox 

2. Don’t send too many emails per day 

3. Make sure you have verified email addresses 

4. Learn about domain, inbox and IP reputation 

5. Constantly monitor your reputations

6. Make sure your emails and subjects are not too similar across your campaign. Personalisation helps here. 

A related type of rejection is the classic OOO response. This is especially the case in summer. The solution there is to schedule the meeting a couple of days after their return to the office.

Email not opened 

This one is pretty standard. It’s usually your fault.

But you can fix this one too. Here’s how: 

1. Work on your subject lines

   1. Make sure that they are short (2-3 words) 

   2. Use proper punctuation (capitalization)

   3. Make sure that they have a recognisable name (lead’s name, lead’s company’s name, etc…) 

2. Work on your preview line 

   

   1. The preview line is the first part of your message that is viewed by leads in their inbox, it’s usually around 30-90 characters. This is what determines whether the lead will open your email

   2. Make sure that the preview line grabs the attention of the lead

   3. Don’t waste that precious space with “I hope you are doing well” or some similar jargon that no one cares about 

   4. Mention something that the lead cares about, or at least something that shows that you have personalized this email for them beyond their name and company

   5. A new wave these days is starting subject lines with with “RE:”. The general principle there is that if your email looks like it’s coming from a co-worker, it’s more likely to be opened. Personally, I feel a bit scammed when I get a fake “RE:” subject line.

3. Reach the right leads

   1. If your lead doesn’t have the problem your product is solving for, they will not open your email. It’s that simple. 

   2. The problem you are solving should probably be hinted at in the subject line. For example, we sell outbound software, so our subjects are usually {Company Name} Sales Growth

Email opened but no response

If your email has been opened, but you haven’t got a response, it usually comes down to 1 of 5 things. 

1. Your structure sucks

2. Your personalisation sucks 

3. Your CTA sucks

4. Your timing sucks

5. The company you targeted doesn’t need your product 

6. You’ve found the right company, but you’ve reached out to the wrong person 

Let’s tackle them chronologically. 

1. Structure: Email structure is easy. Do not exceed 60ish words, no one has time for that. The vast majority of people read emails on their phones, so make sure it’s easily readable. Each paragraph should be 1 sentence. Each sentence should be 1 idea. Don’t use spammy words like “synergy” or “automation”. And on that note, make sure that all the words you use would be understood by your 10-year-old daughter. 

2. Personalisation: is hard. Doing it manually takes time, you need to stalk the lead on LinkedIn, you need to find out as much information about the company as possible, and then you need to find a way to turn all of that into 1 sentence. It takes so much time, for emails that most of the time don’t even get opened. There are tools out there today that have solved this problem. For example, GodmodeHQ researches all of your leads at the same time and uses that to write them personal emails and LinkedIn messages. It’s pretty neat. 

3. CTA: A mistake we see some of our customers making is using a time-based CTA. “Can I grab 15 mins of your time?” This is usually not a good idea. People value their time. Instead, try to go for an interest-based CTA like “sound interesting?”

4. Timing: This one is actually the trickiest to get right. We all know that sometimes you get lucky and get the sale for being at the right place at the right time. Your customer just so happened to be looking for a good billing product when you sent them your cold email. But, it’s our job to try and make sure that we are there at the right place at the right time intentionally. We do this through signals. An obvious example is: you’re a recruiter with some great front-end dev candidates, so you look for companies that have posted job openings for that role. 

5. Company doesn’t need your prod: I don’t mean that they don’t need your product now, I mean that they don’t need it at all. Don’t try to sell fishing rods to a hunter. Make sure you’ve narrowed down your ICP enough and researched your leads well enough to reach the right people. 

6. Wrong person: It’s pretty easy to reach out to the wrong person at the right company. The solution is to go multithreaded: target a few people from your prospect company. Use multiple channels to do it too for the best results. 

Now you know how you can push your response rates up! The problem is that not all responses are good responses. Sometimes, the response you get is just “nop”. Usually, that’s because of one of the reasons above. 

After this stage, rejection gets a bit more complicated. Sometimes you get a positive response, but the conversation just dies out, no matter how many times you try and save it. That usually means that there’s not enough of a need for your product. 

Sometimes, you get rejected/ghosted after the demo. Review your demos, analyse them with call recording software and see where it went wrong. Sometimes, you lose out to competition. That’s okay. Learn from it, try to ask them why, and refine your offering. 

The conclusion is that rejection sucks. But like we’ve seen today, there are things that we can do to minimise it and learn from it.