How To Overcome Any Sales Objection
By Jennifer Bleam, MSP Sales Revolution
If you are in a sales role, you’ve experienced this situation: you just attempted to close a sale and you heard what almost every salesperson dreads: AN OBJECTION. You know that if you can’t overcome the objection, you’ll likely lose the sale.
Always remember the fact that you can learn these types of sales skills. No one is born a “natural salesperson.” Every salesperson has to invest time learning this valuable skill. Once you know how to handle any sales objection, you’ll have successfully increased your confidence, grown your personal income, and will be regarded as a success. how to handle objections. This is time well spent that yields significant financial rewards, success, and increased confidence.
Mirror, Mirror
When analyzing the objections you’re hearing, it’s important to consider the Law of the Mirror. In short, the objections you experience when you’re selling are often the same objections you GIVE when you are buying. So take a hard look at the man (or woman) in the mirror. When you are a buyer, do you lie to the salesperson, use stall tactics, always look for the cheapest price, or go silent on them? If so, then it should come as no surprise when you experience those exact things while in the sales role. If you get a lot of smokescreen objections when you’re trying to close the sale, then take a long, hard look at your buying behavior. Chances are your prospects are mirroring your behavior. Change your behavior, and you’ll change your prospects’ behavior.
Reframe
The next step you’ll want to take is to reframe the way you see objections. If you’re normal, you see objections as brick walls that signal the end of the conversation. In reality, an objection should be seen as the opening of a real conversation.
I teach my students to see sales objections as a gift. When a prospect shares an objection with you, he/she is being vulnerable. Keep your ears open and don’t freeze up; the prospect trusted you (and saw you as an expert advisor,) and they revealed that there is a gap in their ability to justify your recommendation to themselves. Perhaps they have a detail they aren’t clear on, are confused about why your recommendation makes sense, or need clarity on the delivery schedule.
Asking for more information from you (the salesperson) means:
- The prospect is comfortable talking to you as a peer.
- The prospect recognizes that you will be honest with them and won’t manipulate the situation to benefit you (at their expense).
- The prospect trusts that you have the skillset to not only make valid recommendations, but that you can explain it to them, tie into their emotions, and allow them to justify the decision logically.
Said a different way: when your prospect expresses an objection, they are non-verbally recognizing that you exhibit the “know/like/trust” factor that we all work so hard to cultivate. An objection is truly something to celebrate, as it gives you a chance to answer the prospect’s question.
Understand
Before you attempt to answer their question, make sure you understand the reason behind the question. Are they asking out of curiosity, or is the answer a deal-breaker? There are few things as agonizing for a salesperson as spending 5-10 minutes delivering a perfectly constructed monologue. You carefully weave in the buyer’s pain points and artfully reiterate exactly which business implications you will resolve. Then you hear, “Thank you for all that information. I was just curious.” If you had uncovered the fact that this was just for curiosity’s sake BEFORE you droned on forever, you could have used a single sentence to answer a question, as opposed to assuming you were overcoming an objection.
However, there certainly are times when a prospect has a legitimate question or objection. In these cases, you must seek to understand. What is it about your proposed solution that has caused him to be concerned about this issue? You must uncover specifically what he is concerned about. Then either help him see that your solution will not cause the issue he’s concerned about, or truthfully share that you can’t deliver precisely what he wants and find out if that fact will cost you a sale.
Prepare
Most salespeople hear the same objections repeatedly. In fact, you probably only hear 10 objections (at most) across all your sales calls! It sometimes feels like your prospects almost have a script they’re following.
Inexperienced salespeople walk in with a hope and a prayer. They “hope” they won’t hear the objection again (even though it comes up in nearly every sales call.) And they “pray” that this time – when they hear that objection – they will magically come up with the perfect way to diffuse the situation.
There is ZERO reason to be unprepared for a standard sales objection. It’s time for you to do what professional salespeople do: create your own sales playbook. List the top 10 objections you hear. When you are calm and clear-headed, script the best way to answer each question. This script then acts as your framework moving forward. Memorize the script and practice it out loud until you feel relaxed and sound confident. Then weave these scripts into your sales process.
If you want to kick this up a notch or two, take your top 3 sales objections and turn each one into a question and use your perfect script as the answer to each question. Then compile those questions into an FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) document and deliver that document before your sales call. In this way, you’ve overcome the most common objections before the prospect even has a chance to voice those concerns.
With these four simple preparation steps, you’re now ready to hear, understand, and answer the next sales objection you hear. Happy selling!
About The Author
Jennifer Bleam is the owner and founder of MSP Sales Revolution.