5 Stages of Grief When Your Great Sales Pitch Goes South
This is a writing sample from Scripted writer Sara Millard
When a project goes south, we may not expect to experience the stages of grief. After all, those feelings are commonly reserved in our minds for something catastrophic, like a death in the family or a natural disaster. However, it’s perfectly valid to experience grief and go through all five stages when something happens in our life that we’re not expecting, like a great sales pitch getting denied.
The five stages of grief are known as the Kubler-Ross Model. Named after Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss psychiatrist, who discussed the model in her now famous book On Death and Dying. Kubler-Ross’ book revolutionized the medical industry and is now credited with starting hospice care in Western hospitals. However, we have since learned that her process does not strictly apply to death. It can apply to a multitude of incidents in life, including disappointing events at work.
Going through the stages of grief for an incident in careers is not a new phenomenon. However, it’s only recently gotten discussed in relation to the workplace. Yes, you’ll work through each stage quicker than someone whose experienced personal loss, but it’s integral to acknowledging your feelings to get over what may feel like a major step back in your career or life. This article carefully breaks down each stage—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—as well as what you may feel during each one and how to get back on your feet sooner than later.
Stage 1: Denial
You’ve just learned your pitch wasn’t successful. You’ve been practicing for weeks, hit all your talking points and were ready to reap the rewards. Then, you find out you’ve been denied. Your first feelings will probably be something along the lines of: “This can’t be happening to me.”
The prime reason for denial is to help you cope by forcing yourself to go numb. You’re probably in a state of shock, thinking about how you expected everything to go swimmingly in your favor only to learn that quite the opposite is happening in real life. You think there was probably a mistake on the pitch listener’s part. They must have misunderstood something you said. You begin to believe they’ll soon discover the error of their ways can call you up to tell you it was a huge mistake, and they’d love your product. This is a completely normal way for your mind and body to react. It’s shutting down to allow you to cope with these feelings of confusion and shock, realizing there’s only so much your mind can take at once. You may:
· Procrastinate
· Forget
· Become easily distracted
· Avoid others
· Stay busy all the time
To make this easier to process, your first step should involve giving yourself some time. You’re not going to be able to accomplish a whole lot of meaningful work during this time, and that is okay. Time will help more than anything, but it may help you to begin looking at some future plans in an effort to better understand where you’re coming from and where you’re going. This can allow you to have a more solid footing for your next pitch and can give you something to look forward to in the future.
Stage 2: Anger
You’ve gotten through the denial stage and are thinking about how everything you did was perfect. There wasn’t one thing wrong with how you presented yourself and your product. You did everything right. They are obviously wrong. You can’t help but wonder, “How could they not want my product?!”
This stage can be the hardest to completely overcome, but it’s also one of the most important. You’re no longer living in your self-created fantasy world of “This is a mistake,” and are coming to terms with the fact your product was rejected. You will probably spend a lot of time blaming whoever denied your pitch. You’ll think about how they’re wrong, and you may even have a long list of expletives you’d just love to say to them. You want more than anything to give them a piece of your mind so they can understand how great your product is and what they’re missing out on. This is a completely normal response. Anger helps you connect with people as you’ll likely begin to take the time to reach out to others so you can express your anger. When working through your anger, you may become:
· Irritable
· Cynical
· Pessimistic
· Argumentative
· Fight
Unlike denial, you’re probably not going to want to spend a whole lot of time in your anger phase. Instead, this is the time to begin to dig into your feelings as a whole. Explore everything you’re feeling in addition to anger, including sadness, disappointment, etc. Your anger is secondary to the pain you’re feeling. Take the time to explore that pain a little further to understand why you feel the way you do.
Stage 3: Bargaining
You’re really not angry anymore, although you may feel a little bitterness when thinking about the person who denied your pitch. You start to look at your pitch deck and think over your speech multiple times a day. Suddenly, all the errors seem to scream out at you. If you had only explained your output a little more or how you helped one of their competitors increase revenue by 30%. If only you’d included a different graphic or changed the colors of your slides. In short, you’re probably thinking something along the lines of, “Maybe if I tweak my pitch a little bit, they’ll change their mind.”
Bargaining, at its core, is a false-hope stage. It your brain’s way of convincing yourself that if you just made a few changes, the outcome would’ve been different. You’ll probably look at your pitch and want to overhaul the entire thing in an effort to make it better/different/etc. The bargaining stage is built on a mountain of “What-ifs,” and you’ll frequently feel that you if you changed just a few things, you would’ve had a much different outcome in your pitch. Some common behaviors include:
· Judging yourself
· Asking a bunch of “what if” questions
· Thinking about the past and future
· Comparing yourself to others
Bargaining can become a manic stage that we relish in. instead, those in the bargaining stage should take the time to avoid overthinking and get some emotional distance from the project they’ve been working on. It’s okay to even take a day off from work if it’ll help you separate yourself from looking at what you now consider a failure. If you can, shift your focus to another project that you can get some fresh eyes on. Maybe you have another pitch deck to work on or need to create some graphics.
Stage 4: Depression
You’ve finally realized that your pitch just didn’t work. You still think about what you could’ve done different to impress the people you presented to, but at the end of the day, you think it was just a failure from day one. You don’t know why you presented to them, and you begin to doubt your ability to complete your job. In short, you feel some variation of: “What’s the point in trying anymore?”
Depression can be tightly connected to bargaining; however, instead of focusing on the “what-ifs,” you’re beginning to question why you even tried to do something in the first place. This is the stage people most often associate with grief because it usually lasts the longest—although nothing with grief is set in stone—and the most consuming. Some scenarios you may experience when in the depression stage include:
· Appetite changes
· Insomnia
· Reduce energy and motivation
· Lack of interest in social situations
· Crying
The thing to remember with your depression is that you’re almost done with this entire cycle (although, that may not bring you a whole lot of comfort now). You need to take this time to think about how you’re going to get back in the saddle. Go out with your friends, try to get some sleep and look to see if there’s anything that you may find interesting at work. Although it may feel impossible to get motivated during this stage, it can actually help you move on to the last stage of the grieving process: acceptance.
Stage 5: Acceptance
Congratulations! You’ve made it through all the stages of grief! You’ve finally realized there wasn’t anything necessarily wrong with your pitch. Instead, you realize that the whole situation wasn’t meant to be. We want to point out that you may never think that your pitch should’ve been denied, but you will accept that you’re going to be okay with that. The main goal with acceptance is resuming feeling like you did before your pitch. You may still get those feelings of sadness occasionally, when you think back on your pitch, but you realize how that experience help you make yourself better than ever.
Going through all the stages of grief after a pitch rejection is a common scenario. However, it doesn’t need to define where you go in the future. However, you may decide to take a different path after accepting what happened. That’s where we come in. Uvaro offers scholastic training through a variety of courses and workshops to push your career to the next level. Learn more about how we can help you improve and accept your new career opportunities by giving you the skills you need here.
Written by:
Samuel is a versatile content creator specializing in business, technology, law, politics, and health and wellness. With a keen eye for detail and a passion for impactful storytelling, Sara crafts engaging and informative content that resonates with readers. Whether writing about the latest tech trends or providing insights into wellness, Sara's work consistently delivers value and clarity.
