Rejection comes in a lot of forms. “No.” “I’m sorry, I’m not interested.” “I can’t make a decision about that.” “That’s not my department.” Worst of all is the lack of a response, which I still don’t have a better word for than “ghosted.” There are countless ways for a sales call to be rejected, but you cannot close a deal without overcoming rejection to move on to the next call. Rejection is part of the job, and there’s a secret about it: it never gets easier.
Sales professionals aren’t calloused, oblivious, or immune to rejection or loss. I’d say we feel it as fully as anyone else would. In sales, rejection could mean our communication failed, a relationship wasn’t as solid as we thought, we didn’t do enough research, or we timed the whole thing wrong.
Rejection is not the same as losing to budget, a technology mismatch, or the “do nothing” option. “Do nothing” has been the root of a lot of lost deals, but it’s impersonal: the buyer simply chose not to change. Rejection is personal. No matter how you shape it, it feels like someone saying, “you don’t belong.” In my experience, the chances of turning that around are slimmer than with any other kind of loss.
So why do some people last? The popular answer is a callus: do it enough and it stops hurting. I don’t think that’s what’s happening, and the research I found points elsewhere. Martin Seligman studied life insurance agents, a job with historically high rejection rates. Agents who explained failure as temporary and specific (“that call went badly”) rather than permanent and personal (“I’m bad at this”) outsold their pessimistic peers by 37% over two years. Agents hired for that trait, despite failing the company’s standard aptitude test, outsold conventional hires by 57% in year two. Pessimists quit at far higher rates. My read is that the job didn’t build the trait. It kept the people who already had it.
A close cousin of that trait shows up where the stakes are very different. In a 37-year study of Vietnam prisoners of war, optimism was the strongest predictor of who never received a psychiatric diagnosis. Psychology also draws a line between blaming a behavior (“I handled that wrong”) and blaming your character (“I’m the problem”), a split Ronnie Janoff-Bulman proposed in 1979, though later studies disagree on whether blaming the behavior actually protects anyone.
In athletics, Seligman’s swim team study found that pessimistic swimmers given a falsely bad time swam worse after hearing the false information, while optimists didn’t. Studies of combat sport athletes report higher mental strength than non-practitioners, though a snapshot like that can’t tell you whether the mat built it or the mat kept the people who already had it. For a grappler, “between a rock and a hard place” takes on a new meaning when the thing pinning you down is your training partner. During a particularly hard part of my life, I tried to cancel my Jiu-Jitsu membership and my coach wouldn’t let me.
After I explained that I had lost my job and couldn’t pay tuition, he said he controls who gets billed and that he’d see me in class that night. It became one of the most meaningful conversations of my life. When I asked how he knew it would be okay, he said, “Because you do Jiu-Jitsu!” Then he recalled a match where I was almost paralyzed. “Bro, I was about to stop the fight for you, then you escaped and won.” It’s been two decades since that match and that conversation. Yes, I won that match, but I’ve lost countless more while training. He did more than believe in me. He kept me in the room, and belonging was exactly what losing my job had threatened. Whatever trait gets people through, other people help.
Sales, trauma, and athletics have little in common, yet a similar pattern shows up in the people who recover well from a bad outcome, and in the research I found it isn’t extraversion. It’s how they explain the loss to themselves. Handling rejection is not the same as being unaffected. It means you allow the emotion a moment, accept the rejection even if you don’t understand why, and then do the next thing. It’s the stage actor’s rule: the show must go on. Being professional about it also means you log it, keep the account that rejected you around so you can watch for meaningful change. Losing doesn’t end you as long as you use the loss to sharpen your read of what they actually need.
I’m woefully underqualified to speak on how to manage rejection in your personal life, so I won’t speak on it. I don’t have credentials in the emotional psychology of rejection. What I do have is professional-grade experience with rejection in cybersecurity sales, and it still stings. I’d say it stings because I’m passionate about my work, but that’s the analytical side of my brain talking. On the emotional side, I can only speak for myself. In the realm of sales, I find myself studying personal development and communication psychology more than selling techniques that gloss over the hardships of rejection, loss, and expectation management. Seligman’s work points to optimism, specifically how people explain failure, as a major factor.
If you want to know what the larger population of sales professionals experience, that’s a side quest for you. I took a few steps down that path and found the rejection-specific research thin, and mostly practitioner content rather than peer-reviewed study, and what was there focused on the Sales Exec more than the Sales Engineer. When I looked for research on the impact of rejection on Sales Engineers, I found none. In my view that absence is telling. Technical sellers are selected for competence first, then asked to do rejection-facing persuasion or objection handling later.
The Sales Exec is the proverbial jock while the Sales Engineer is still seen as the nerd brought along. For over a decade I’ve heard the phrase “I’m not the smart one here, I just pay for the dinner,” and I can never predict when it’s coming. It’s the opening the pragmatic thinker uses to speak. The extrovert and the introvert win and lose together as one sales team. The seller and the engineer both get hit with the open hand of rejection and neither crumbles. That isn’t proof, but it points the same way the research does: extraversion is not what carries a seller through. The dividing line looks more like optimist versus pessimist, and that is a mindset in how you explain the loss, not an extrovert or an introvert, a gender, or a physique.
Janoff-Bulman, R. (1979). Characterological versus behavioral self-blame: Inquiries into depression and rape. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37([issue]), 1798-1809.
Malcarne, V. L., [remaining authors]. (1995). Cognitive factors in adjustment to cancer: Attributions of self-blame and perceptions of control. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, [volume]([issue]), [pages]. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01904771
Segovia, F., Moore, J. L., Linnville, S. E., Hoyt, R. E., & Hain, R. E. (2012). Optimism predicts resilience in repatriated prisoners of war: A 37-year longitudinal study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 25([issue]), [pages]. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.21691
Seligman, M. E. P., Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Thornton, N., & Thornton, K. M. (1990). Explanatory style as a mechanism of disappointing athletic performance. Psychological Science, 1(2), 143-146.
Seligman, M. E. P., & Schulman, P. (1986). Explanatory style as a predictor of productivity and quitting among life insurance sales agents. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50([issue]), 832-838.
I left out the Taiwan study because I don’t have its authors or journal name, and the combat sports paper because I couldn’t open it. The Malcarne title comes from its own reference list, but its authors and volume are unconfirmed. The Segovia pages I saw were the early-view pagination, so check the final ones. I left the Seligman and Schulman and Janoff-Bulman DOIs off because I’d be recalling them from memory.
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