Ryan Dohrn argues that letting prospects say no is healthier than forcing a sale. When people avoid saying no out of fear, they ghost instead. He recommends acknowledging the possibility of rejection while keeping the door open, and maintaining a full pipeline so one no doesn't hurt.
Hey friends, Ryan Dorn here, your global sales coach, and I've got a good one for you this week. Keep your listener questions coming into ryan@ryandorn.com. Hey, we feature all of these listener questions over on the podcast. You can find that over on iTunes, on Spotify, Google, the iHeartRadio app, wherever it is that you are, search for Ryan Dorn, D-O-H-R-N. All right, here's a good one. Tammy from From Charlotte. Charlotte's only 2 and a half hours from me, Tammy. Hopefully your boss doesn't come down here after this question. All right, Tammy from Charlotte. Ryan, you talk a lot about telling a client that it's okay to say no. My boss said you're crazy. Can you help me and he better understand? So, okay, first and foremost, you're nobody in the media business until you have a couple of haters, right? But let me try to give you some insight on this. And maybe you can change your boss's mind. All right. Typically, most sales trainers, most sales coaches would tell you, never give a client, a prospect, an opportunity to say no. Now, as much as I have mad respect for the late, great Chet Holmes, the late, great Zig Ziglar, and people like that that used to say things along those lines, I feel that in today's selling environment, It's okay for somebody to say no to you. As a matter of fact, it's now so easy for people to ghost you that if they don't feel comfortable saying no to you, that's their only option. So here's the thing. You're, you're a great person. You're a nice person. I'm a nice person. Tammy, I'm sure you're a nice person. A lot of times people just don't want to say no to us because we're pretty nice people. People just don't like saying no. The reason they don't like saying no is because they're afraid of confrontation. They're afraid to say no because you and I, as sales professionals, have been taught to jump back through the phone and give them 5 reasons why they shouldn't say no to us. Here's my thought on it. I want people to be comfortable. I'm going to sell to them at some point. They're going to buy from me at some point. But this is the piece of advice I'd love for you to take to your boss, Tammy. People are going to buy when they are ready to buy, not when you're ready to sell. It's— if you remember that and you keep your pipeline full, you'll be fine if people say no. Here's the thing, I don't want anybody to say no. I want to be great at my sales job so no one says no. But I'd almost rather have somebody say no than be chasing people down for weeks, have them ghost me and never call me back. So I like to say something like this to people. I hope that you'll do— we'll do business together, but after you consider this, if you feel like the timing's not right or your answer is just no, it's okay. We'll work together at some point. And what I find is I feel like we take that wall and we break it down a little bit as we're trying to build trust and build a relationship. So for me, I don't want to get a no, but if I get a no, It's just— I'm just a little bit away from being able to sell them. Maybe something else is wrong in your sales process. But friends, if they tell you no and you jump back down their throat and try to keep selling them, more than likely you won't close the deal. And I can promise you this, they'll probably never take your call again. We're living in different times, we're dealing with different people. So with mad respect for all the great sales trainers that have come before me that I've learned a lot from, One of the things that I have changed my philosophy on is it's okay if somebody says no to me. I prefer yes, but it's okay. So, Tammy, I hope that helps. All right, friends, love to train your sales team, love to give you inspiration and motivate you even more. Find out what I do over at ryandohrn.com. Remember, friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it, and they're not. So we're either crazy or we found careers that'll feed our families for a lifetime. All right, we'll see you next week.
