Buoyancy in Sales

We’ve been discussing buoyancy in sales quite a bit lately. Pink defines buoyancy as learning how to stay afloat amid the ocean of rejection. Moving forward and finding the ability to deal with rejection is an important part of learning to sell well. Whether you sell yourself or have a job directly in sales, buoyancy is an absolute must.

As Professor Sweet mentioned in class, we don’t often or ever sign up for rejection. Doing just this, however, can actually help in sales! While you don’t necessarily want to fail or get rejection, learning how many rejections you have to get through in order to accomplish a sale is important. It’s almost like there is a “burn rate” in sales. You gotta burn through many rejections to hit your goal number for sales.

It helps to adopt a good mentality for this. You basically want to make your sales not fail proof, but fail safe. Knowing that is safe, even necessary to fail a certain number of times helps you to not take rejection personally.

If each rejection statistically just gets you one step closer towards your goals, then you can actually count your failures as a success. At least, you kinda can. I found Evan’s guest lecture very helpful for just this. You don’t necessarily want to apply all the effort of sales into the mass of people who will say no. You also don’t want to just focus on the few people who say yes. Instead, it helps to focus on the people in the middle. The maybes you get from customers or the trials people agree to. If you can figure out how many rejections you need to get to the customers that will say maybe, then you can start to really focus your energy where it counts.