Physical. Threats to your physical safety or the safety of someone close to you. For example, someone shooting at you on a battlefield or a rattlesnake on the trail where you are hiking.
Social. Threats to your social standing: rejection, banishment from the group, looking bad in front of other people, nonacceptance, diminishment, and ostracism. For example, your tribe banishing you from the cave or a customer rejecting your price increase.
Engaging customers in price increase conversations is intentionally putting yourself in the position to face the social threats of conflict and rejection. It means courageously facing down evolution and the natural human instinct that is screaming at you to STOP.
In these situations, fight or flight – the uncomfortable biological response to threats – begins to kick in. What is important to understand is that the fight-or-flight response circumvents rational thought.
As you prepare to tell your customer about the price increase, your sympathetic nervous system releases hormones into your bloodstream, including adrenaline, testosterone, and cortisol, to prepare you either to stand your ground and fight or to run. Your heart rate accelerates, stomach tightens, skin flushes, pupils dilate, and you lose peripheral vision.
The neurophysiological response to the threat of conflict and rejection makes it challenging to maintain confidence and composure. Attention control is difficult; it's hard to think. Your IQ even drops when you are preoccupied with rejection – a big problem when you need 100 percent of your intellectual acuity to get your customer to buy into and accept the price increase.
Fight or flight can in one circumstance save you from certain death, but in another, unleash a wave of disruptive emotions that knocks you to the ground as you enter price increase conversations.
The Obstacle of Rejection
So there you have it. As humans, we are hardwired to fear rejection and avoid conflict. This natural fear is an important guide that helps us maintain harmony in our relationships with others.
But in the rejection-dense environment of professional selling, the fear of rejection acts less like a guide and more like an obstacle. It is a debilitating force that can hold you back from success in conflict-rich situations like prospecting, closing, negotiating, and approaching customers with price increases.
Sales is among the most difficult professions on the planet because to be successful, you must actively seek out rejection. Your job requires you to become a rejection magnet. When you hit the obstacle of rejection, you cannot turn around and go back. You cannot freeze and do nothing. You must find a way to get past it – around, over, under, or through it.
This is why the biggest challenge for sales and service professionals is learning to become immune to the fear of rejection so that when fight or flight kicks in, you quickly regain composure and choose your behavior.
Remember our soldiers. In firefights, soldiers effectively rise above their natural fight-or-flight response and race headlong into dangerous situations that would cause most people to freeze or run, potentially getting other people killed. This is because the military prepares soldiers to fight before sending them into war zones.
Before sending them into combat, the military ran them through endless live-fire drills and mock combat situations. This training conditioned them to control their emotions and become immune to fear in battle. They learned battle rhythm, operational frameworks, and how to respond effectively in firefights. They drilled and drilled until these responses were rote.
For military recruiters, the light bulb comes on when I draw the parallel between how they learned to be immune to the obstacle of fear on the battlefield and how they can apply the same methodology for becoming immune to the fear of rejection. We'll explore this further in the next chapter.
Exercise 3.1 Braver Than You Think
Recall a time when you overcame fear and found success. It could be proposing to someone you love, asking for a raise, facing your fear of horses, or anytime you had to muster up courage to get something done.
Describe the challenge you were facing and why it filled you with dread:
Explain what you did to overcome your fear and meet the challenge head on:
Describe how you felt after rising to the challenge and what made the experience worthwhile:
4 Developing Emotional Self-Control
Imagine that you're sitting at home when suddenly the doorbell rings. You weren't expecting a visitor.
You begin running through a series of images in your mind. Who might be at your door? A door-to-door salesperson, religious group, police, neighbor, politician, delivery, someone who wants to harm you?
With a measure of curiosity and trepidation, you open the door. But it's not any of the things you expected. There, standing before you, is a young, well-groomed Chinese man wearing soccer cleats. With suspicion in your voice you ask, “May I help you?”
Sporting a big grin, he responds, “Yes, I came by to ask if you would take a video of me playing soccer in your backyard.”
Imagine what your reaction might be to such a strange request. Then step into the soccer player's cleats and consider how you might feel standing on a stranger's steps making that same request. Both parties, in this weird moment, would be swept away by a sea of disruptive emotions.
This, by the way, is a true story of how Jia Jiang, an expert in rejection and emotional intelligence, became rejection proof.1 Jiang built immunity to the fear of rejection by intentionally seeking it out.
Each day, he would make these same types of ridiculous requests of total strangers. At times, it was terrifying. He made video recordings of his physical response to rejection and recounted his emotional responses on a public blog. As he faced each new rejection and monitored his response, he became more aware of his emotions and how to control them.
Jiang learned that there is a difference between experiencing emotions and being caught up in them. This self-awareness opened the door to emotional discipline.
Awareness is the act of rising above your emotions and becoming a detached, dispassionate observer. It begins with learning to understand and anticipate the anxiety that comes with price increase conversations.
Through practice, Jia Jiang learned how to control his outward physiology despite the fear he felt. Like a duck, he projected relaxed, confident demeanor above the waterline, even though he was paddling frantically just below the surface.
Developing Obstacle Immunity
An obstacle is defined as something that obstructs or hinders progress – a seemingly insurmountable or difficult problem, or challenge that's in your way. And if we are being honest, that is how most price increase initiatives feel.
I've taken great pains to help you understand why price increases are so unpalatable, with two objectives:
1 I want you to know the
