REALITYWIPE

RESEARCHERS

The science of sales rejection: why fear of 'no' costs more deals than the 'no' itself

4 the researchers behind it — Pick up the phone and you might hear 'no.' Don't pick up the phone and you already have. Decades of research on 'call reluctance' show that fear of re

Behavioral Sciences Research Press

George W. Dudley

Known for:Coining and diagnosing 'sales call reluctance' — the fear of self-promotion that blocks prospecting — and building the SPQ*GOLD assessment used to measure it

Key findings

  1. 1982

    Constructed SPQ*GOLD, the first diagnostic instrument built to systematically measure sales call reluctance rather than treat it as an unmeasurable personality quirk. ↗

  2. 1992

    With Shannon Goodson, published 'The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance,' describing twelve distinct subtypes of the syndrome and arguing it is common among otherwise skilled salespeople rather than a rare personal defect. ↗

  3. 1999

    Validation research on the SPQ*GOLD instrument across eleven industries and four countries found the twelve-subtype structure of call reluctance held up outside the original telesales samples it was built from. ↗

Behavioral Sciences Research Press

Shannon L. Goodson

Known for:Co-developing the sales call reluctance framework and the SPQ*GOLD diagnostic with George Dudley

Key findings

  1. 1992

    Co-authored 'The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance' with George Dudley, contributing the field taxonomy of twelve reluctance subtypes drawn from clinical and sales-training case data. ↗

  2. 1999

    Contributed to cross-industry and cross-country validation studies of the SPQ*GOLD instrument, supporting its use as a standardized diagnostic rather than a single-culture tool. ↗

Columbia University

Geraldine Downey

Known for:The rejection sensitivity model — how anxious expectations of rejection shape and can sabotage relationships

Key findings

  1. 1996

    Rejection sensitivity — anxiously expecting, readily perceiving, and overreacting to rejection — leads people to read intentional rejection into ambiguous behavior of new partners, and both rejection-sensitive people and their partners report lower relationship satisfaction. ↗

  2. 1998

    Rejection expectancies operate as a self-fulfilling prophecy: in daily-diary and observational studies of couples, high rejection sensitivity predicted conflict processes that eroded relationships, and couples with a high-rejection-sensitive woman were far more likely to have broken up a year later (44% vs 15%). ↗

Erasmus University Rotterdam

Willem Verbeke

Known for:A contemporary meta-analysis identifying which factors actually predict sales performance across decades of published research

Key findings

  1. 2011

    With Bart Dietz and Ernst Verwaal, synthesized sales-performance studies from 1982–2008 and found selling-related knowledge (β = .28) was the single strongest predictor of performance, ahead of personality-based measures. ↗

  2. 2011

    Found adaptive selling behavior (β = .27) and role ambiguity (β = −.25) were also strong predictors, indicating performance hinges more on learnable skills and clear role expectations than on fixed traits. ↗

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