You arrive back at the office on a beautiful day. You just got turned down at a sales call. You open your email and see your sales proposal was rejected by a key client. You check your voice mail and hear that an important sales call was canceled for the afternoon. You check the fax and see that your request to speak at an association meeting was not agreed to. You open your snail mail and learn that your team sales call won't be necessary next week because the account was given to your competitor.
   Is it still a beautiful day? It is, if you are a true sales professional. Why? Because handling rejection is at the heart of selling. It's in the life blood.
   How about you? How well do you deal with rejection? Do you have a plan for bouncing back from it, to make it a part of your selling success plan? Here are nine selling strategies to help you cope with rejection and to use it to reach higher levels of success.

• Believe It--No Pain, No Gain.
  A salesperson who experiences no rejection does not exist. To sell is to be rejected. Learn to accept rejection, deal with it and learn from it. Don't seek to avoid it or minimize it. You can only learn from it, not stop it.
• Study Your Selling.
  Do you analyze why you win and why you lose? Do you know what selling strategies work and which ones fail? Keep a scorecard on each sales call and try to see cause and effect in your tactics and outcomes.
• Keep A Rejection Journal.
  When you read about people in any walk of life who overcome adversity, rejection and set-backs, cut the article out and put it in your notebook for inspiration, reflectionand strategies.
• Use the GIGO Mind Principle.
  GIGO is a computer term meaning Garbage In, Garbage Out. What are you putting into your mind? Monitor your mind and accept nothing but positive thoughts. What you put into your mind, you get out in results.
• Keep Your Funnel Full.
  When you have few potential clients in your pipeline, you can feel the pressure to close every sale. So can your prospects. Reduce that tension by filling your funnel so you have breathing room.
• Say NEXT and Take Action.
  To keep from feeling depressed, and to build momentum, say NEXT after every sales call. That means to pick the phone up and dial the next customer, without brooding over the last failure. Action is a huge antidote to combat feelings of failure.
• Pump Up Your Brain With Music.
  Before your next sale, presentation or phone call, get out your favorite motivation-making music and get charged up. Take that heightened focus, go into your meeting and let it loose with palpable enthusiasm. The client will feel the difference.
• Use Your Own Mind Medicine.
  Your brain has powers to help you sell. Go inside your head to meditate, to relax, to clear your mind, to refocus on selling well. Don't run around non-stop so you feel frantic. Slow down and recapture the positive feelings of well-being that meditation brings. Then go out and sell out of your mind.
• Bring A Coach.
  When you are alone on a sales call you can't see what you are really doing and how the customer is reacting. Bring along a friend, sales manager, or sales coach with you and have them observe and take notes. They can debrief you on what went wrong and what you did right.

   Expect rejection. Have a plan to conquer it. Use it as mental fuel. Be an expert at handling rejection. Pride yourself on knowing how to use it to boost your selling to the next level. Do that and rejection will become just another part of your selling day, not a traumatizing event. Then rejection will be mental fuel for you.