What if they say no?

Hello, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. Happy Tuesday. It is Tuesday, the Tuesday before Christmas. The days just seem to all blend together. Tomorrow, I'm so excited. I get to go to Cape Cod. It's a seven hour drive, but Luna and I are making it to spend Christmas with my family. And for those of you who aren't getting to see your family this year for whatever reason, Covid related or otherwise, first, before I dive in this live, if you're gonna be alone on Christmas Eve, I have an invitation for you. Okay, so my being brave call that I host every single Friday at 11am Eastern. This Friday, I am repurposing it into a Christmas party. Okay. This Christmas party is going to have a lot of celebrations around what you have accomplished this year. We want to. I want to give everyone on that call the credit that they deserve, even if they're not getting it from other places in their world. And I want everyone to be able to tune in to a community and to be surrounded by people who get them for at least an hour over the holiday season. So if you want to join, I have another post on my, on my wall that you can go and click on and register if you want. If you can't find it, then just DM me and I'm happy to send it to you. Otherwise, tonight I want to talk to you about hearing a yes and hearing a no and the meaning we make out of it. Okay? So when I started out in sales, before I even started a business, one of the things that I had to get desensitized to was hearing the word no. Hearing no. I don't want this. No, I'm not going to buy this. No, this is not for me. When I started out, those words, even though it wasn't directed at me, were soul crushing because they were saying no to the thing that I really believed in that I was selling. It's even worse when you are selling your own service, when you're selling your time, when you're selling your expertise. And so one of the things that I did early on in my career was I did the no game. I went out on a street corner and I asked like 100 people if I could give them a 30 minute coaching session. Now, this is not something I have my clients do, okay? It is great in building a thick skin, but there are better ways to reach there to reach that same goal. So here's, here's what I want to talk about tonight. Our minds are meaning making decision machines, right? So Our minds, like humanity, has this beautiful way of attaching meaning to anything. This is the birth of all poetry, of all theater, of most of our stories. Anything that has this element of higher meaning. Okay, this is where marketing comes from. This is where art comes from. That has a deeper meaning than just, you know, colors on a canvas. It's a beautiful part of us, and it also doesn't serve us very well in our business. And why is that, do you ask? You might ask. It's because we hear the word no and we immediately make it mean something about us. So you tell me, no, you don't want my service. And my brain could kick in and say, oh, my God. This means that you're probably not good at your job. Could mean you're probably giving the wrong impression. It means you're bad at sales. It could mean that you're bad at this, anything. You could also make it about them. Oh, my God. Well, they suck. They're the worst person in the world. Of course they don't want this. They don't see the value. None of that is helpful. None of that is helpful. When you're selling something and when you are rolling out of business, attaching meaning to things that are just data are not helpful. If you. If you constantly attach like, I'm amazing to every yes that you get, then what's the downside? When you hear a no, it's going to mean that you suck. So what happens when you're in the sales cycle, which is really typical to hear like a few no's in a row, right? So maybe you heard a high and so, or yes and so you're on high and you think you're amazing, and then you hear a no, and then you drop, oh, well, I suck a little bit. Then you hear another no, and you suck worse. And then you hear another no, and you've, like, hit rock bottom. And then you hear another no and, oh my God, you didn't know you could get much worse. It's this emotional roller coaster that we unintentionally sign ourselves up for when we attach meaning to what the yeses and no's are that we get in our businesses. So please don't do this. Please don't attach anything, any meaning to. I'm getting yeses and no's. Yes and no's are just data now. They're data that maybe you need to work on your sales call. Maybe your sales process just isn't working. Maybe you're attracting the wrong kinds of people in your business. Okay, that's just data. Cool. You can. You can edit your sales call, you can edit your marketing, you can edit your sales call signup process. It's all just data. And you want to make small incremental changes to adjust for the outcome that you want rather than making big sweeping changes. So when you think that you're a big failure and this is just never going to go your way, and it's just like everything is crashing and burning, it's really easy to throw the baby out with bath water, right? You want to, like, throw out the whole process and start from scratch. Don't do that, okay? That's you making a mountain out of molehill. You're turning data into meaning, okay? It's just data. It can't mean anything. You're attaching the meaning to it. Now if you look at it and you say, okay, the last three people I've spoken to, they all didn't sign up, but they all had these. These three things in common, okay? And maybe one of those three things is something that makes them not an ideal client for me. Maybe I stopped marketing to that portion of it for, like, the next month. And the next month I change my marketing, so I drop out of the other, you know, thing that they all had in common, and I don't market to that, okay? It's just, you need to come at it with a logical mind. And I know it's really hard, especially when you're tied to this. And just so you know, another thing about what I do with my. My clients is that even my clients who come from a sales background, I have to retrain them on how to sell their own service. Because a very different sales cycle, okay? It's a very different process because it is emotional. You're selling your own time. You're selling your service. It's different than selling a car. It's different than selling a house. You're not attached to the car or the house. It doesn't mean something about you when they reject either the car or the house. So my ask of you, I'm going to keep this short tonight because I'm tired. I've been talking all day. But my ask of you is if you find yourself riding that emotional roller coaster up and down and you're like, flying high and crashing and burning, every time you hear a yes and every time you hear a no, I need you to take a step back. I need you to take a step back, and I need you to see where you are attaching meaning here. Where you're attaching meaning that it means that you're amazing and it means that you suck and start looking for where the data is, what's the feedback that you're not actually seeing that you could adjust your whole cycle with. Because I guarantee you when you do that, you're going to get better results. Also when you do that, when you stop making it mean something about you, you have less of a need to get the sale. No one likes to sign up with someone who like needs the sale. There's like this neediness is like being chased quality to it and no one wants that. So if you find yourself in this, take a deep breath, look where you can see the data and if you need help, just shoot me a dm. This is what I'm here for. Anyway, I'm exhausted. I still have to pack to go. We're driving to Cape Cod tomorrow, the seven hour drive. Luna has had all the exercise today and I have to clean up my fridge because I don't want to come back to any science projects anyway. So. Happy Christmas everyone. Happy holidays. You're going to be seeing me, going, seeing me going live for the rest of this year, this year, like it's such a long time. And like I said, if you're alone on Christmas Eve or you just want to boost and to be around some other entrepreneurs who are doing brave, brave ass shit, sign up for being brave. I have the link to register on my LinkedIn and I will share it in other places as well over the next couple days. Anyway, good night, thank you for joining and I will talk to you tomorrow. Bye.