Overcoming Objections
The Dynamic Manager’s Handbook On
How To Handle Sales Objections
by Dave Donelson
Donelson SDA, Inc.
Copyright 2011 Dave Donelson
ISBN: 978-1458172099
Smashwords Edition
A note from the author
The Dynamic Manager Handbooks are for entrepreneurs, managers, and others who want to succeed in small business by learning more about management techniques, operations, and best practices. Each volume in the collection is devoted to a single topic. The material was extracted from the Dynamic Manager Guides, my series of books based on my experiences as a business journalist, consultant, and entrepreneur.
Table Of Contents
Chapter 1 Objections In Four Steps
Chapter 2 Four Non-Price Objections
Chapter 3 The Path Around Price Objections
“The first step in handling an objection is to listen to the prospect.”
Among people not in sales, the misperception persists that a salesperson makes a living by glibly making presentations, overcoming objections with snappy comebacks, and closing sales with slick, smooth verbal maneuvers. That may be the way you sell aluminum siding to the dimwitted, but it’s not the way you sell anything to an even minimally intelligent businessperson or today’s educated, wary consumer.
But the image persists, perpetuated by books and training programs constructed around Sure-fire Answers to Every Objection and Make Objections Disappear in Three Easy Steps. I confess that my sales training programs—just like this book—devote a section to handling objections. That perception of the salesperson as an objection-fighter is so pervasive I couldn’t sell them without one.
But my approach to managing objections is very different from the traditional one. That’s because I don’t believe you win sales by winning arguments with your customers. And that’s what “overcoming objections” really is—trying to win an argument.
What Is An Objection?
In the broadest sense, an objection is any obstacle that prevents the prospect from buying your proposal. It can be a totally irrational reason to not buy that the prospect believes to be absolutely true. He may believe your product is inferior to your competitor’s, for example, or that he doesn’t need what you are selling. The reality may be different, but the prospect’s perception is what matters.
It may also be a maneuver that the prospect is using to satisfy an internal need. He may tell you the price is too high or that your proposal includes some feature that he doesn’t want. The purpose of the maneuver is to get you to change your proposal in some way to better fit his perceived needs.
Many, many times, a prospect will object—or throw up an obstacle to buying—simply because that’s his job. Prospects in business-to-business sales are professional buyers, even if their title isn’t “purchasing manager.” It’s part of their function as decision makers in their companies to purchase goods and services under the most advantageous terms. And part of a good buyer’s job is to throw up obstacles in order to test the product and the salesperson’s ability to deliver it. They will also, of course, want to test the bottom of your pricing and the top of your proposal’s value. It’s a little game they play.
Some of these obstacles are real and some are not. What you need is a way to identify which are which and a strategy to deal with each kind of obstacle.
Your Attitude
The Creative Selling System way to deal with objections is to adopt the attitude that you are going to be an ally to your customers, not their adversary. You’re not going to prove them wrong for refusing to buy your product, you’re going to create a way that they can buy it. You’re not going to demonstrate their ignorance, you’re going to educate them so they can make better-informed decisions. You’re not going to overcome their objections, you’re going to answer their questions. Above all, you’re not going to win the argument, you’re going to win the sale. It’s a different attitude.
This Creative Selling attitude is designed to build solid, long-term customer relationships, not make an individual sale. There’s a lot less testosterone involved, but a lot more income received over the long run. And you’ll be surprised how many individual sales occur when you adopt this attitude.
Are you negative or positive? Do you believe that the prospect will buy if you remove all objections? If you do, you’re actually a negative seller. Salespeople who approach their prospects with the conviction that objections are the reason the sale doesn’t occur are starting from the position that the prospect will buy only if they can just remove all the obstacles. It’s basically a negative outlook.
It’s also pretty short-sighted. I’ve seen plenty of prospects still refuse to buy after all their objections have been answered and all obstacles removed. Why? Because they don’t have a positive reason to want to buy. People don’t buy just because they can, they buy because they want to. If you want to be a positive seller—a true Creative Seller—approach each prospect with the attitude that you’re going to keep adding reasons to buy until the sale occurs. You’ll find your closing ratio will go up tremendously.
My preferred method for dealing with objections is to step around them. Don’t fight the objection, ignore it. The second is to use the objection to close the sale. It’s sort of a jujitsu approach to dealing with objections—you use their own weight and momentum to further your goals.
Step One: Listen
What a surprise. The first step in handling an objection is to listen to the prospect. Listen to what he says and how he says it. Give him time to talk and get it all out of his system. Make sure you hear what the prospect is saying—and react accordingly.
You need to really listen. The next time you encounter an objection, step back and observe yourself in action. When the prospect is talking, are you processing the information they are sending to you, or are you preparing your reply? Are you listening or getting ready to talk? These are two mutually exclusive mental activities. You cannot do one while simultaneously doing the other.
One of the most helpful learning techniques (or tortures) I use in training is videotaped role-playing. In one of my basic courses, I have the person playing the prospect make a comment designed to catch the salesperson who isn’t listening and trap them into answering an objection that doesn’t exist. It’s kind of sneaky, but it teaches the lesson very well.
In my little drama, the “prospect” waits until the salesperson asks for the order, then makes the comment, “Gee, this is a lot of money.” That’s all. No explanation or other comments. Just those words. You’ll notice that the prospect doesn’t say, “it’s too much money,” or “I’m not going to pay this,” or anything else judgmental or argumentative. They simply make an observation.
Invariably, the salesperson will launch into their favorite answer to the ever-popular price objection. They’ll deftly demonstrate the relationship between price and value. They’ll reduce their price to absurdity by calculating the cost-per-hour of their annual contract. They’ll calculate return on investment. They’ll start bad-mouthing their competitor’s product, service, management, and ancestry. In short, they’ll raise all sorts of issues that the prospect never even mentioned.
Believe it or not, salespeople in my training sessions have been known to do this even when they’ve been forewarned that it was going to happen! When I play back the tape for the critique, the salesperson often has to watch it two or three times before they actually hear what the prospect says. The urge to argue is real, real strong in some people.
Salespeople who “overcome objections” are invariably preparing their comeback while the prospect is talking. They practice what every good adversary practices—they are prepared. When the prospect starts throwing that punch at them, they strike back. They truly believe that in sales, the best defense is a good offense. It’s the old “Ready—Fire—Aim.”
This is one of the most common causes of failure to close. More often than not, the salesperson who’s not truly listening to the prospect will answer an objection that doesn’t exist! And, what’s worse, this salesperson not only doesn’t manage the real obstacle to the prospect’s satisfaction, he may easily plant some new ones of his own.
I’ve seen it happen thousands of times in the field and even repeatedly captured it on videotape in my training seminars. Don’t let it happen to you. Make sure you listen to what the prospect is saying before you start dealing with the objection—you might just learn that you don’t have to deal with anything at all.
Step Two: Restate
Just to make sure you’re hearing what the prospect is really saying (and for a couple of other pretty good reasons), restate the objection after the prospect stops talking.
You accomplish several things when you restate the objection. First, you make sure you’ve got it right—that you understand what the prospect is saying. It also gives the prospect a chance to correct your understanding before you do any damage by answering the wrong objection.
Secondly, it gives you a little time to think about what your next action should be. Is this a question or an objection? Is it sincere or a smoke screen? Is it a misperception you can correct? Is there some information that the prospect missed or that you forgot to provide? You need some mental processing time to consider these things, and re-stating the objection gives you that time.
It also gives the prospect time to reconsider the objection. Have you ever made a statement, then realized how wrong it was when someone repeated it back to you? Your prospect may have the same reaction when he hears his own words. He may even withdraw the statement and remove the obstacle. It happens often enough to make it worth trying.
But the biggest reason for restating the objection is that you get a chance to soften it—to put it into your own words so you can deal with it on your own terms.
Any salesperson with some experience will tell you that they encounter the same objections over and over. This is both a blessing and a curse. The curse is that you learn to give the same answers over and over—and that you start giving those answers as soon as you think you hear the prospect raise one of the common objections. That’s what happens in my videotaped exercise.