Most human beings have a problem with rejection, a fear of rejection, and we don’t want to step out into the possibility of being rejected. But when you’re a service provider, you need to face the possibility of rejection. You need to get out there in front of your prospects and ask for the job.
Now, there are a couple of things I’m going to suggest that you do to reduce the chances of rejection, and I’m going to suggest that rejection doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means. I think a lot of us fear rejection because it means something personal to us. It feels like we, as an individual, are being rejected—that there’s something about who we are, something about what we care about, something about our personality that gets rejected. In some circumstances, that may be true.
When you are a service provider, a competitive service provider, and you are engaged in an interview process where the decision-makers are interviewing you and the competitors for a particular project, and you’re all equally qualified, what they’re looking for is chemistry. They’re doing a chemistry experiment between their personalities and your personalities, and they’re trying to figure out, “What’s it like? What’s it like to have a conversation with them? What’s it like to work with them? What is it going to be like if we bring them into this project and interact with them day after day? What’s it going to feel like?” And so, you want to give them the best possible experience in an interview so that they can decide, “Ooh, actually, this is nice. This is what we want. We can communicate with these folks. We can listen to these folks. We can understand these folks. They understand us. We can work with them on a regular basis for a chunk of time, and it’s going to go well.” And this hour together is giving us that sense.
Now, when they say no, they didn’t necessarily say no because there wasn’t chemistry. They aren’t necessarily saying no because your chemistry was worse than the other chemistry, but it might be part of the mix. So, one thing to consider when you are pursuing a project in the first place is, “Is this the kind of team that you want to work with? Do they have the personality that you want to work with?” I say this because this is an empowering perspective that not a lot of service providers take on for themselves.
Everybody who provides a service does have the choice of defining the folks that they want to work with. Some people will say, “You know, I really only want to work with forward-thinking folks,” or “I only want to work with people who kind of have my sense of humor,” or “I only want to work with people who are philosophically compatible with how we approach things.” One of the biggest reasons it’s useful is it empowers you; it puts you more in the driver’s seat. It positions you as a decision-maker for them.
“Do I even want to work with these folks in the first place? Are these folks a good fit for me?” or “Are these folks a good fit for us?” If you can do that, if you can start to put thought and language into that aspect of a go/no-go, it can empower you so that when an interview does get selected, you have already chosen them. You have already chosen them as someone that you would like to work with, and you can walk into that interview in a more confident mental space. That creates the ability for you to stand up and say, “Yep, we are a fantastic fit with you,” but you believe it because you have pre-vetted them. You have already decided, “Yep, these folks are a good fit for us.”
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