The 2 Hardest Objections You Face Every Day
I love buying things. I love being a customer, receiving a great customer service experience, and feeling like I’ve made a friend along with my good purchase. But I, like everyone else in the world, will often question things before I make a decision to buy.
Can I afford it? Is this something that really makes sense to me? Do I really need another 5 books when I have 3 I haven’t read yet at home? Maybe my old car could last me another year? And so on.
Suffice it to say, concerns before buying are natural. We all go through a sales process at one point or another where we have an underlying hesitation that may impact on our ultimate decision.
When you’re a salesperson, then, you need to expect objections. Quite frankly, if objections didn’t exist, most of us would be out of a job.
I could go on for hours about the best way to handle objections, and you can expect to see more from me on this at a later stage. Today, though, we are honing in on the two most difficult objections: The ones that will stop you from selling if you do not deal with them effectively.
The Secret Objection
The first one is the concern that you have not uncovered. Sometimes a customer simply doesn’t give you a reason for suddenly being hesitant in proceeding with a sale.
It’s the equivalent of being asked to solve a mathematics question that simply says
=
If you don’t know what the problem is, you’re certainly going to have a questionable time trying to solve it. Now, if you were in school and you were given the above mathematics problem and asked to solve it, surely your first question would be ‘well what is the problem?’
Amazingly, though, when we are faced with what we perceive to be a frank rejection in salesworld, we can be hesitant to take further action.
There are many ways to deal with a customer who doesn’t reveal their objection – ultimately the goal should be to decipher the problem using questions, which may include:
‘Thank you Mr Customer, can I ask why it is that you’re not interested?’
‘What is it exactly that you’re not interested in?’
‘What in particular is holding you back?’
‘What part of the process has made you change your mind?’
‘Just so I can make sure you leave with all the information, what is it precisely that you’re concerned about?’
Ask enough questions and you’ll get enough information to deal with a substantive concern that the customer may have been too shy to articulate in the first place.
The Objection You Create
We’ve all been there. Sometimes you can pinpoint down to the second the moment that the salesperson decides the prospect isn’t buying.
Always be observant, but never presume anything but a sale. As soon as you decide that this prospect is too poor, not interested, doesn’t like you, won’t want it, too old, too young, too big, too small, too anything; you have hit yourself with the one objection that is guaranteed to lose you a sale.
As a salesperson, you should always operate with a keen eye for what the customer is experiencing. That said, when we decide someone is not going to buy it is usually a self-fulfilling prophecy; mostly because people won’t buy without our help and when this happens we stop helping altogether.
How to avoid this? Stay positive, stay self aware and dismiss any little objections that pop up into your head. Do not take the opportunity to buy away from your customer!
What are some other hard objections that you face regularly?
Make Today the Day,
Sonia
This blog post was originally posted on my training website, Statusone.com.au, on Dec 3, 2016. I have since been moving some of my favourite blog posts from there over to here, as this is now my ‘content hub’ and I want you to have access to some of the cool stuff I’ve written about before. You can still check out the Status One site if you’re interested in corporate training if you want. Also, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter below for updates and weekly exclusive content.