Let's Reframe the Most-Feared Word in Sales

I have an interesting relationship with the word “no.”

Every so often, I have to recalibrate to avoid giving it too much power.

A good quote or piece of advice will knock it back into place.

But it never stays there for long.

If you’re in a volume-driven business, you probably get numb to the word (and the sting of rejection).

But in our advice-giving world, we don’t need hundreds of leads a day.

We couldn’t handle that many if we tried.

A true door-to-door, cold-pitching approach isn’t our game.

And because we don’t hear “no” often, we’re never fully desensitized.

A few years ago, I found a framework that stuck:

“If you knew you were 24 no’s away from a billion-dollar company, how fast would you collect the no’s? David Meltzer.

I even wrote about it.

It rewired my brain to think of collecting “no” as some part of a game.

But looking back, it still lacked tangibility.

It assumes there’s “a billion dollars” at the end of the rainbow.

Drip-drip-drip-drip-waterfall.

Inspiring, but a little too abstract for me.

This year, I heard a version that felt more concrete:

“Every no has a value.”

I heard it from Shaan Puri, telling a story about relentlessness.

It was about his uncle who sold textbooks door-to-door in the Atlanta summer heat.

100 doors a day.

1–2 yeses on a good day.

Despite probably being desensitized (being a door-to-door-salesperson), what kept him going was a small mental shift:

After doing the math, he assigned a dollar value to every no.

That broke something in my brain.

I realized I’d been treating the sales process as this binary formula:

• Yes = revenue

• No = nothing

But one instance (on its own) is never a representation of the whole.

Zoom out, and the math looks different.

Because a no isn’t nothing.

Here’s a more relatable example for our world: $10,000 consulting service.

• If 'a ‘yes’ generates $10,000

• And it typically takes 4 ‘no’ to get 1 ‘yes’

• Then each ‘no’ is actually worth $2,000

Suddenly, every no isn’t failure.

It’s progress with a price tag.

Here’s where it quietly ties into pricing:

I see it all the time.

One “no” and people start discounting to make sure conversions didn’t tank!

Realizing that was a real feat, I used to help to raise prices without lowering conversions.

But my POV has changed.

I firmly believe many advisors, experts, and consultants should aim for lower conversion rates than they’re used to…

…as long as the price makes the math work.

Time spent on a sales call that ends in “no” isn’t wasted.

It’s part of the cost of earning a profitable yes.

When you price correctly, fewer yeses can still mean more revenue with fewer projects.

So that means this “every no has a value” frame helps you defend you price:

• Hold your price without flinching.

• Stop overreacting to one rejection.

• Focus on the activity (sales conversations), not just the outcomes.

Just wanted to pass this along.

In case it nudges you to make one more call or hold your price a little higher next time.

Because if every no has a value, then every (relevant) conversation is worth something.

See you next week.

Peter

P.S. Rightsizing your price is one of the most powerful levers for regaining margin and authority. I urge you to give yourself an hour this week to seriously consider your pricing and how this “value of no” mindset can help you defend it.

If you can’t quite do it alone…whether from second-guessing or simply being too close to it, I can help you reprice your advice. In under 30 days, we nail four things:

1. What to charge

2. How to frame it

3. When to reveal it

4. How to defend it

But if you’re not 100% sure pricing is the problem, I also run a high-speed audit to find out what is (and by the way, it pays for itself).