The issue of handling and overcoming objections always seems to be a hot topic among the sales teams I work with, and I have included several proven techniques for dealing with objections in How Customers Perceive Value and Risk and Accelerating the Buying Process. But the best way, by far, to deal with an objection is to recognize it and handle it before it becomes an objection.
In our workshops, we dedicate a whole segment to the topic of overcoming objections. We start with a clean flip chart or whiteboard and ask the group to name every possible objection they have ever heard or can think of. Some examples include:
- ‘We’ve decided to just keep things the way they are for now.’
- ‘We are too busy with other projects right now.’
- ‘We have depleted our budget for this quarter.’
Some of them are rather unique and others are downright comical:
‘We wouldn’t want to automate this process because several of our best people would be out of work.’
Or . . .
‘If we provide our people too much training, they’ll start looking for a better job.’
Once we list every objection that the participants can imagine, we break them down into groups. There are two major kinds of objections: objections about buying in general, and objections about buying from you specifically. Once we separate the two and look more closely, we see that the objections to buying from you specifically can be quite varied and have to do with matters of choice. Many of these objections refer to what I call ‘Choice Drivers,’ which we will explore in depth in Anatomy of a Buying Decision.
When we look at the list of general objections, we normally see that every one of them is directly related to the absence of, or a weakness in, one of the six Action Drivers. The overwhelming majority of all the objections you will ever hear reveal one or more of the following:
- Lack of Motive
- Lack of Urgency
- Lack of Payback or Return
- Lack of Consequence
- Lack of Resources or Means
- Excessive Perceived Risk
Wouldn’t it be a good idea to find out early exactly what objections, potholes, roadblocks, or brick walls we might encounter down the road? I encourage you to memorize this list of Action Drivers and their related questions so you can weave them into every customer conversation. Some people find it easier to memorize:
- Motive
- Urgency
- Return
- Consequence
- Means
- Risk
Others prefer to remember the first word or two of the related questions:
- ‘Why . . . ?’
- ‘When . . . ?’
- ‘How much . . . ?’ or ‘How many . . . ?’
- ‘What if you don’t . . . ?’
- ‘How would you . . . ?’ or ‘How do you plan to . . . ?’
- ‘Is there any downside . . . ?’ or ‘What could go wrong . . . ?’
However you do it, make asking these questions as natural, and as much a part of your normal discovery process, as asking for their phone number and their e-mail address. The value and importance of these six questions is second only to the questions that reveal your customer’s vision of an ideal point ‘C.’ Without the answers to these six questions, which illuminate your customer’s desire to reach point ‘C,’ you really can’t understand much at all about why your customer would buy.
The Customer Results Model (i.e., ‘A,’ ‘B,’ and ‘C’), and the six Action Drivers (along with their related questions):
I encourage you to quickly review these two ideas presented in this chapter to make sure you are comfortable with them before moving on. You may also want to come back to them whenever you feel the need to in the future. Yes, they’re just common sense. That’s what makes them so powerful and important. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to remind ourselves of them from time to time.
Everything in this chapter relates to better understanding what your customer really wants and the reasons they want it. It’s all part of what most sales professionals would call qualification. The value of sales qualification is in determining the ‘quality’ or close-ability of each sales opportunity in our pipeline in order to prioritize our efforts and properly allocate sales resources. Therefore, answering a question like, ‘How many do they want to buy, and when do they want to buy them?’ hardly scratches the surface of what we should know. What we really need to know is why they would want to buy something in the first place and how they could buy it if they wanted to. That’s why I decided to make this entire book about ‘How and Why Your Customers Buy.’
Unless we have a clear understanding of these two basic elements, we have not really qualified an opportunity, because either of these can make or break any deal. It is actually very common to discover that your buyer hasn’t yet fully considered both of these things and all of the specific details of each. To conduct a bulletproof sales campaign, we’ll need to understand-and help our clients understand-all of the variables we have discussed in this chapter and many more.
I happen to believe that . . .
Qualifying sales opportunities is not difficult. What is difficult is accepting what you learn when you do qualify.
It might be tough to take when you discover that your customer has no real urgency to buy right now, or despite their motive and their urgency, they simply don’t have the means to take action. But I’d rather find out now than the last two days of the quarter, wouldn’t you? I’ve heard it said that ‘ignorance is bliss,’ but in my experience it doesn’t pay much.