Rejection is an experience that happens anytime and anywhere, even more so in the business and entrepreneurial space. It is a part of the journey that new and long-time entrepreneurs alike have to deal with every now and then.
A transaction that never prospered, a possible partnership that didn’t come through, a loan that failed, a proposal that was not accepted, and so on and so forth. These are just some of the many scenarios where rejection happens in one’s entrepreneurial journey.
Getting a “no” may often be hurtful, but it doesn’t mean that it’s the end of the road. It is just a bump or a hurdle that one has to overcome to move forward and come out better and stronger. So, how do you move past rejection and make it work for you and your business?
Never take it personally
There are various reasons when one rejects your idea or proposal, but don’t deem it as something against you as a person. It could be that they are not amenable to your price points, they don’t see a fit with their business needs, or there’s just a different opportunity or option that they prefer to take.
“Rejection is a reality in every business and it needs to be used to fine-tune aspects of your business or product offering without taking it personally,” Nitasha Badhwar, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Sunpower Renewables, remarked.
Similarly, David Fastuca, CMO and Co-Founder of Locomote, shared this insight. He said, “Being in marketing and sales for a good part of my career, I'll probably take the line of sales, such as being able to cold call and reach out to people. As a business owner and founder, for your first hundred customers, you're doing whatever you can to get them on board and you get rejected a lot. You're interrupting people's day and you don't know the right time to reach out to them, so the biggest sort of rejection is to have these people telling you to piss off, go away, and them being rude on the call. You really need to have a thick skin and understand that you should not take it personally.”
Be resilient
Take every rejection as a lesson that will only further improve yourself and your business. Many leaders would say that a failure only becomes a failure when one stops trying. And for every success, there are countless trial-and-error and rejections that happen along the way.
“The way I've dealt with it is in light of those ways of being really resilient,” David professed. “It's not about how many times you get knocked down, but it's how many times you get up. I try to instil this ethos into my children as well, wherein to expect failure and that it's going to happen, so anticipate it and agree with it with a smile and know that every ‘no’ gets you closer to a ‘yes’. If you don't hear back from someone, it's always a ‘yes’ until it's a ‘no’,” he explained.
So, keep trying. Keep approaching people. Keep on refining and upgrading your products and services. Never allow rejection to weigh you down.
Stay positive and find an opportunity from the experience
A rejection is oftentimes a detour into something even better and bigger. Find an opportunity in a rejection. Will it lead you to a new client? Will it give you more time to do other projects? Does it give you a new idea to work on?
For David, “it's just having that approach where even if someone gives me a ‘no’ on a call, I'll smile, I thank them and I even try and turn it into something like ‘hey, it may be not right for you, but can you recommend me to someone else you think this might be a right suit for them?’ So, even if I'm taking a negative sort of conversation, I try to flip that into a positive one.”
Use it as a way to improve and progress
When rejection happens, find out the “why” behind it. Knowing the reasons can help you develop yourself and your business by fixing things that are within your control and letting go of things you can’t.
Nitasha gave an example of how rejection has enabled them to refine and enhance their products. “In our organisation, we have tried to use it to deviate from the status quo and redefine the norm. After all, Einstein once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. An example of this would be in the early years of the business where we started with a home power system with a PAYG business model.”
She continued, “We kept reorienting the model expecting better results. That didn’t do as well as we expected due to various reasons: lack of telecom infrastructure in remote places, affordability, and issues with collecting payments to name a few. However, in listening to the market, we evolved our product offering and our business model to redefine our product, thus, creating our independent solar power station. It functions independently, allowing a customer to choose what features to add. It is not restricted by telecom infrastructure and can scale up as much as the prosumer needs. Getting rejected helped us in developing a better product.”
Next time you get rejected, go back to the drawing board and rethink the best approach forward. Have you experienced rejection in your business? How did you handle it? Share with us your thoughts and learnings through the comments section below.