Welcome back to Selling with Sabine. I'm Sabine Taylor, your host. I've spent years working in sales enablement, cybersecurity, and telecommunications, helping large sales organizations train B2C representatives to confidently sell complex products using real-world experience and practical storytelling. If you'd like to connect or explore sales training support, you can reach me at:

In this episode of Selling with Sabine, I introduce Word of the Week and unpack the power of a footnote. I talk about letting go of what no longer deserves center stage and why that mindset matters in sales. Rejection happens—but dwelling on it drains your energy. Customers are waiting to hear your enthusiasm, and if you carry the last loss into the next pitch, you start behind before you even begin.

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Transcription

Welcome. My name is Sabine Taylor, and I'm the host of Selling with Sabine. Thank you so much for giving me your time and for listening to this episode, where I am introducing a new feature on this podcast called Word of the Week. This week's word is footnote.

When we think about a footnote in a book, it usually sits at the bottom of the page. It's small, often italicized, and sometimes you almost need a magnifying glass just to read it. A footnote provides historical context or a data point we need to acknowledge, but it's never the main part of the story. And I want to share how I've used this word in my own life to help me move forward from a very traumatic situation connected to my father's transition.

About two months ago, my father passed away. His passing itself was very expected. What was unexpected and deeply traumatic were the funeral arrangements and the family dynamics that surfaced during that time. You see, my father had a lot of kids, so I have stepbrothers and stepsisters. Although we lived in the same household, there was a significant age gap, and we often felt like strangers.

Later, my father remarried someone more than three decades younger than him, and that honestly raised some eyebrows with me. That created distance between my father and me because he wanted me to form some type of close relationship with his new partner. I have my boundaries. I was clear with myself that I would remain cordial out of respect for my father, but that was all I felt emotionally able to do.

At the funeral, all of these unresolved dynamics came to a head. Allegations were made about me. Lies were told. There were claims that I wanted my father's money and accusations that I was never there. I was honestly shocked because since graduating college, I never asked my father for a single penny. I also haven't talked to my cousin since junior high school—since seventh grade. So I was left wondering, where are all of these allegations coming from? And most importantly, where's the evidence?

When I returned home, the events of the funeral replayed in my mind over and over again. Because I have a background in algebra, I did what I knew how to do. I created a bar graph showing the number of years I lived with my father compared to his other children. I sent it to a sibling along with a twenty-five-minute audio message because I felt that no one was going to talk to me that way.

But then the thoughts kept coming—ideas like contesting the will, questioning signatures, and even considering legal action. While I may have had grounds, I started to notice something important. The situation was taking up too much of my time and too much of my energy. Instead of focusing on my podcast, my book, and the business moves I wanted to make, my mental space was consumed by the conflicts surrounding my father's transition.

That's when it dawned on me: my father should have had an end-of-life conversation with all of his children, explaining the will, the funeral arrangements, and his wishes—but he didn't. And I realized something else. That wasn't my responsibility to fix. So I made a decision. I acknowledged what happened, but I reclassified it. I made it a footnote—a historical fact, something I could learn from but not live inside of. I closed that chapter and moved on to the next one.

Five weeks later, after my father's transition, I took a trip to Italy. I visited Rome, Milan, and Florence. When I returned, I poured my energy into my podcast. As you can see, I've been releasing many episodes, and that's because I needed to replace the bad memories of the funeral. I began working on my book again, and I started searching for an editor. That's how I moved forward.

Now, if you're asking, "Sabine, how does this apply to sales?" that's a fair question.

In sales, we face objections and rejections constantly—hourly, daily, and weekly—and that level of rejection can be emotionally draining. What I've noticed is that there are generally two ways sales professionals handle objections. The first is what I call destructive dwelling. Some sales reps replay a failed sales conversation over and over in their minds, like a broken record. They relive every objection, every misword, and every moment they wish they could redo.

The problem is that when they walk into the next sales meeting, they're not fully present—and customers can feel that. They can sense it from a mile away. Customers are waiting to hear our enthusiasm, and if we walk into the next sales pitch still carrying the weight of the last deal that didn't close, we show up with an energy deficit. Customers can hear that in how we respond and how we sell.

On the other hand, the healthier approach is documentation. Strong sales professionals take the objection out of their heads and put it on paper. They journal what went well, what could have been improved, and what they learned from it. In doing that, they turn the experience into a footnote—a data point, not a defining moment.

In sales, we have to make the main thing the main thing. And the main thing is always selling—being emotionally present, mentally clear, and ready to give the best version of ourselves to the next sales opportunity. That means recategorizing losses as insight, not identity.

We have to learn from them, but not let them loop in our heads. We have to put them at the bottom of the page, make them a footnote, and then turn the page.

I hope you found this episode helpful. If you'd like to talk with me about working with your team to help grow their business-to-consumer sales performance, I'd love to have that conversation. You can reach me at [email protected], and you can also visit my LinkedIn profile to learn more about my background.

With that said, thank you for listening, and have a great day.