There are many ways to impress a publisher.
The most obvious and effective way is to show them that you're a professional. Make sure your manuscript and cover letter has been proofread and edited. Make sure there aren't any typos or glaring editing problems, those are sure signs that you're not a professional. Make sure you have a neutral third party go over your manuscript and give opinions and look for errors. Your close family and friend don't count, they're going to tell you the love it and that's not what you need. Never /ever/ send them a first draft. You should go through at least a half dozen drafts before you even consider sending it to a publisher.
The next step is to make sure you do your homework about the publisher. Make sure they accept the genre of manuscript you have. Don't send a mystery publisher your romance novel. Also make sure that they are accepting manuscripts. 396
Some publishes only accept new submissions at certain times of the year.
If the publisher does reject your manuscript, move on. Don't try and argue with them, you're not going to win and you'll be making sure that they never want to publish anything of yours. And publisher do speak to each other. Especially in the smaller houses, at lot of staff work for multiple publishers. So if you make an ass out of yourself to Publisher A, and they happen to work for Publisher B and C as well, you can bet they've passed along the memo to them not to consider you. A lot of editors and publishers have blogs and Facebooks, and you can bet there will probably be a post saying "Guess what this jackass just said to me..."
In general, acquisitions editors know what they're doing. If they reject your manuscript, it most likely means they don't think it will sell very well with them. Most of the time (unless you make a jackass out of yourself like I mentioned earlier) rejections aren't personal. Publishers are in it to make as much money as they can and if they don't feel they can make money off of your manuscript, they won't try.
And don't let that discourage you. 99% of writers have tons of rejections under their belt before they finally get an acceptance. 396