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How to Deal with Skepticism & Get Sales Success

Written by: Cheryl A. Clausen

Article Overview: Skeptics are a hard nut to crack. They have strong doubts about what you’re saying, and as long as those doubts exist they won’t buy. Overcoming a potential client’s doubt about whether what you have to offer will work or work for them is a challenge you can win.

How to Deal with Skepticism & Get Sales Success

Skeptics are a hard nut to crack. They have strong doubts about what you’re saying, and as long as those doubts exist they won’t buy. Overcoming a potential client’s doubt about whether what you have to offer will work or work for them is a challenge you can win.

That is, as long as what you have to offer really does work.

This skepticism stems from two types of doubts about your offer. The potential client may have tried a previous solution or even many previous solutions and none of the things they tried worked. Now the potential client believes nothing works. This person wants something to work, but they’ve given up hope that anything does in fact work.

The best way to work with the skeptic who’s tried other options that didn’t work is to talk about those other solutions from the start. Simply talk about how most people have given up in frustration because previous options didn’t meet expectations. Find out what they’ve tried and the experience they had. From there you can point out why those solutions didn’t work, and explain how those are the very reasons your solution was designed a different way. A story about someone who was similarly frustrated and their experience with your solution works very well.

The second type of doubt exists because the potential client isn’t familiar with what you’re offering and wants to avoid being wrong or making a mistake by buying your solution. Again, don’t ignore the elephant in the room take address head on. Talk about how a client felt the same way, what they did, and the results they got.

In both cases you might also ask if there is any particular reason the potential client is concerned what you offer won’t work for them. Ask them follow-up questions until you fully understand their concern then ask what would remove that concern for them. Now you know exactly what to do to help them with their concern. Once you do they’ll be sold.

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Article Tags: doubt, doubts, elephant, fact work, frustration, hard nut, mistake, skeptic, skepticism, skeptics



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