LinkedIn Post: Rejection Is a Numbers Game

Source: /opt/gcv-portfolio/captions/TiQwTqXI6lM.en.vtt — GCV canvassing talk with Kennedy, ~00:00:30–00:06:30 (Jehovah's Witness origin + "soul mate" close)

I've been canvassing since I was three years old.

I was raised Jehovah's Witness. My grandmother was devout, and knocking doors was the family business. Every congregation runs a meeting they don't call sales training. They call it the Theocratic Ministry School, and it's role play. One person plays the householder, one plays the Witness, and you practice getting past the objection, reading the person's mood, matching your words to it, steering them toward the literature.

I didn't understand I was in sales training until I was grown.

The part that actually formed me was the door slamming. When you knock doors as a kid, getting told to go away is most of the job. Somebody taking a brochure off you is a win. It hardens you to rejection so early you don't even register it happening.

Here's the line I keep handing people who are scared to pitch. If you knew the tenth person you talked to today was your soul mate, you'd get out the door. You wouldn't think twice about one through nine saying no.

Most of us have it backwards. We treat the ask like a talent. It's a numbers game. You knock the doors, most of them close, and enough of them don't.

I ran the same math in Cobb County a while back. Newt Gingrich country. Knocking doors about COVID relief money that was already earmarked for housing and sitting there while the governor sat on it. Most of those doors didn't open either. Some did.

Whatever you're avoiding right now, you already know the tenth person is out there. Go find them.

draft from corpus — based on Brandyn's GCV canvassing talk (TiQwTqXI6lM.en.vtt)