Do you leave ‘objections’ to the end of your client conversation?

Objections are a pain point in a conversation          

Our suggestion to you is that each and every one of you will know what the two, three, four and five common are almost every time you go and see somebody. They are thesame ones, the ones that always come up and we're crazy not to have something prepared for that. I’m amazed at the number of people I talk to go “Oh yes, that objection comes up all the time. How do you handle it?” Oh, that as best I can at the time.

You need to work through something when you know it's going to come up so that you're ready for it. However, what we're talking about here is timing.  At the end of a conversation if you leave everything up to that point you're getting to that stage where you go, “well what do you think?” and they go, “well, here are the things I don't like…”. You’ll find it that you're now in the negotiation stage of a conversation and this is where the heat can rise. You have an alternative. You can handle those common objections on your way through your sales journey.

Now what happens if you do that is that everyone has a certain amount of resistance when they first meet someone in sales by handling each of these contentious points before they become contentious. As you go through a sale, what you do is lower that resistance until by the time you get to the end of the line and the end of the sales process. You've handled most of the stuff that might cause heat and you just step through into the next step of your sales process which is agreement and on to delivery and follow-up.

There is a magic about what I call the Ben Duffy approach, which is the mind-reading approach. People have a lot of confidence in you when you can pre-empt what they're thinking.  They have the opinion that you really know your stuff if you can bring up what's already in their mind and so by doing that as part of the conversation you also get a lot of credibility and you can build a much deeper relationship and a lot of trust because people start to relax and they go, “This one's actually very good. They know what I'm thinking. This is going to work”.  

So here it is in a very very simple way as part of your fact-finding and your questioning use.  Some of the techniques we always use, name the elephant. 

If there's something very obvious, if you know you're not the cheapest person in the market all those sort of things when you name those upfront before they do, you take away a lot of the bite that could come with it because you own it instead of them. You can always use a third-party. 

Another one of our standard techniques other people have found is that the same with you so you might say something like, “Okay Mr. Customer, now one thing a lot of people do notice that we're certainly not going to be the cheapest option in the market. We don't pretend to be. It's not why they buy us, but price is”. One of those things is that something that will be on your mind and having raised whatever it is and they go, “Well, yes. Certainly price is always a consideration”. You can then frame the next step which is, “Well, obviously then, what I need to do is show you that we're worth that extra price, that we have the value and show you why so many other people will buy us even though we're not the cheapest. I use that third-party game so many other people will buy us. Can we, would it be ok to work through that with you?” and gain their agreement.

Now put that objection handling process together in whatever way you do “Well, here's what we offer… here's what you get... here's the guarantee… here's the terms of that… and so you can see other people provide a basic box, but we have a box with all the bits on and so when you look at it you find we're not actually bad a value for money.” and then tie that down so you know that they're happy and go, “That sort of makes sense, was that something you'd look at seriously?” and they go, “Yeah, that makes sense. I could go with that.” and so you've handled that one during conversation. So as I've said, if you do one here, one here, one here, one here and you go all the way through what you've done is you've removed a lot of the objections and obstacles before they've even come up a word of warning.

Don't put 27 objections up there. I've worked with people and they go, “Are there's 20 of them?”

Don't give people objections they hadn't thought of work with the obvious ones you hear three times out of four; “we've already got a supplier”,  “I'm not sure about the timing”, “what about the price?”. 

Whatever may happen to you often in the way of objections are the things that you put into that process. If you do that, you gain more trust, the whole process flows, and by the time you get to the end there's nothing left that's particularly contentious to stop you moving forward.

< Back