01608 644144
Handling Customer Objections - a starting point
Sales training experts recommend that all professional in sales should work by appointment. Appointments allow the prospect to set aside time in their diary for the sales person. The sales process should then be followed by the sales person. As a start the call should be opened well. The prospective customer should be asked probing. The product or service benefits need to be presented, supported by excellent visual aids. These aids must be in pristine condition. Then the salesperson should ask for the business and the deal is done.
However, millions of salespeople every week appear to follow this process but when they do ask for the business, they don’t get the order. This results in the salesperson feeling rejected, becoming demotivated, and so their standard of performance and sales results suffers. Subsequent calls become weaker and weaker, as the sales person's mindset of “Here we go again” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Life for the sales person can be pretty miserable under these conditions. But why does this type of scenario occur? The simple answer is that whenever the sales person concerned is faced with an objection from their prospect, they don’t know how to handle it. They may ask for the business again, but without any further justification, or they may simply cave in and leave without even trying.
So what can be done? The starting point for being able to handle objections has got to be an understanding of why they occur in the first place. This, as sales training experts teach, can be for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, the prospect may not understand the benefits of the sales proposal; secondly, they may want to purchase the product, but feel that they can get a better deal if they pretend that it’s not quite suitable; or the sales presentation by the sales person may not have been convincing enough - it may not meet the prospect’s requirements. Even when working with experienced sales people, this last reason occurs the most frequently, but we’ll take a look at each one in turn.
Sales people - especially those with a strong technical background - will ply the customer with the jargon of their industry. The most often quoted example of this would be from the IT industry - where words like MIPS, bytes, RAM, or version manager are used with abandon. All sound impressive if you’re in the know, but only serve to confuse the great unwashed. There’s even a story going round about a computer user within the Arctic Circle rang his software support helpline and was told by the sales person on the other end to open all the windows, and froze to death!
The next reason for objections being raised is the attempt by the buyer to secure a more favourable deal. In many ways, these objections can be the most difficult to get round. Nowadays, professional buyers are very skilled at squeezing sales people for an extra one, two, or three percent.
Finally, we have the situations where the sales person trys to close the deal when the prospect really hasn’t been persuaded. There is an old saying that went “the sale isn’t lost until the customer has said ‘No’ six times”. The tragedy of this attitude to selling is that it implied one of two things; either that it was acceptable to bully the prospect into submission, or that the sales person, and not the customer, best knew what was good for them or their business. The idea that maybe, just maybe, the sales person was recommending the wrong product or service, never occurred to anybody. Yet nine times out of ten, this was and is the case.
If you are a new sales person it is important that you recognise that even the best sales people face the above objections as part and parcel of their sales role. Whilst we wouldn’t be so bold as to say that you can close every deal, ensuring you attend a sales training course early in your new career will help you succeed in sales. It will give you a variety of techniques that will help you handle the objections you get professionally and so close more business.
