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Dealing With Objections

Guest post by: John Cameron

Article Overview: "I'm Not Interested" is something that anyone who does business development, sales, cold calling, appointment setting, making new friends or smiling and dialing has to be able to deal with. You will learn a new way to agree with your customer's concerns and move on with the sales process.

Dealing With Objections

Most sales people see an objection as a barrier to sales. The goal for this article is to show that the first objection, especially I’m not interested, is an auto response your future customer has learned to get rid of bad sales people and that objections are actuallyOGGIs.

Opportunities to Gain and Give Information

And we will learn to use a process from Improvisational Comedy called YES AND rather than the NO, BUT! that most sales people use to counter these objections!

Our potential customers are busy and don’t have time to do all the things they have to do. They certainly don’t think they have time to listen to unsolicited sales pitches. Because they have invested time and energy to pick their current supplier of financial services, insurance, IT services or management consulting, and have to defend their investment, their first answer is to simply blow you off.

In many cases, the customer hasn’t invested the time and energy they know is warranted in picking a vendor so they are even more defensive about their decision.

It you don’t believe that the first objection is an auto-response, call up fifty of your prospects and offer to sell them $100 dollar bills for $50 as a marketing promotion to get your organization’s name out there. Don’t worry. You won’t need a lot of $100 bills.

Our job is to be different and not too different when we call so that we actually get through the passive resistance of the customer and engage in a conversation to show ease of purchase, low risk and high ROI.

Customer: I’m not interested

Salesperson: Of course you aren’t interested Mr. Customer, if you knew how much we’d helped Joe over at Joe’s Insurance increase his appointments and sales, there is a real strong chance you would have already called us. Do you have two minutes for me to ask a couple of questions to see if we can help your sales team make more appointments and sales, just like we helped Joe and Bob’s Insurance?

Customer: Well, If you can really make it two minutes, go ahead.

Excellent Mr. Customer. Now, are your sales people getting on the phone or knocking on doors as much as you’d like?

Customer: That’s a stupid question Mr. Salesperson. Of course they aren’t. Do you have a magic wand you can wave to get them to pick up the phone and knock on doors?

Salesperson: No magic bullet or wand, just a real good, reasonably priced, self-paced training program that gets results. If I were to send you a link to download an evaluation copy of the first hour-long audio in our program, at no charge, would you have one of your good reps listen to it?

Customer: Yes, if it really is free.

Salesperson: And if you saw good ROI, do you have the authority to spend $200 a rep?

Customer: If I was convinced the ROI was there, yes.

Sale person: Excellent! Give me your email address and I will send you the link to download the audio file.

Customer: Customer#1@greatinsurncecompany.com

Sales Person: (This is where you, the salesperson, repeat each letter and number back and if there is any doubt spell it phonetically. John could be Jon, Jian, or Jhawn. F's and S's are very similar on the phone. And just because someone handed you their business card, don't think you will get through their spam filter. Best would be to have them add your simple email address to their address book.)

Customer: Yes

Sales Person: You will get the link in about 5 minutes from XYZ consulting and I will check back next week, if that’s OK. Oh, and one more thing.

Customer: What?

Sales Person: That was one minute 38 seconds, not two minutes. Have a great selling day.

So what did we do in this example? We agreed with customer that they had a valid reason not to be interested. It is very hard for the customer to create an adversarial relationship with us when we agree with them. See if you can find places in the example where we made a promise and exceeded the customer’s expectations about it, valued their time, got a commitment from them, set an appointment to follow up, and qualified them, all in less than two minutes. Also find how we made it risk free, other than one hour of their sales persons’ time, for them to evaluate our product.

Happy Selling!

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Article Tags: appointment setting, business development, objections, sales calls



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