How to Handle All Genuine Sales Objections

Contrary to popular belief, prospects aren’t sitting in darkened rooms trying to invent new, more fiendish objections to trip you up with.

DAMIf a prospect has a genuine need for your product or service, then what they require is a great sales person to help them make a brilliant buying decision.

If things seem to be going OK during a sales call and you suddenly hit a brick wall – it will more than likely be because they’ve introduced one of 4 excuses not to buy.

Good news is – if they have a genuine need and fit the description of your perfect, target customer – each one of those excuses has a weakness and each one can be overcome.

At Lucrum House we refer to them as DAMS

– the things that block your way – and DAMS stands for:

Drawbacks

Essentially a Drawback is something you can’t deliver – something you can’t do – so understand it and get over it.

You can’t do it, the product doesn’t do it, your company doesn’t (or won’t) do it.

The thing is, every sales person has drawbacks in their portfolio and for all your concerns your competition really doesn’t have the perfect solution to every customer problem either.

The answer is to outweigh the importance of the drawback with the heavier tonnage of all the benefits that your product or service can deliver.

If all the good things your product does fails to bring the scales crashing down towards a close – then this probably isn’t your prospect, or worse, you haven’t grasped how you really help your current clients.

Apathy

Objection number two wears the colours of Apathy; this is where a customer shows little interest in your wares and can’t see any good reason to move forward. They’re happy with what they’ve got (or at least happy enough) and don’t want to go through the pain of change.

Apathy is a tough one to crack because you’re dealing with someone who sees no need for what you have to offer.

The only way round apathy is to use well honed questioning and listening skills to help them uncover – by themselves – a previously unrealised need

You may have spotted an opportunity; but it’s up to them to recognise the need – great questions will uncover that need – and enable them to see how you can help without any hard sell.

Once you’ve uncovered at least two unrealised needs – that you have the solutions for – there’s more than a fair chance that they will have moved beyond their apathy and consider the alternative.

Misunderstandings

If a prospect goes quiet and then makes a statement that’s totally inaccurate to explain their reasoning – then you’ve got a misunderstanding.

First thing to recognise here – Misunderstandings are never the prospects fault they are always down to the sales person.

Whether you have explained yourself a thousand times, just driven them to the factory for lunch or drawn simple pictures is all irrelevant.

Telling them that “they’re clearly not bright enough to recognise a simple concept when it’s right in front of their nose” isn’t going to win you the deal.

Nobody likes to be told they’ve got an ugly baby.

So you have to take responsibility for not explaining it well enough for this particular individual or group.

You swallow your pride, you hide your annoyance and you say something along the lines of;

“Oh, I’m sorry, I haven’t explained myself properly actually what I meant to say….”

The phrase we like to use is – “Take the Blame and Re-explain”

Scepticism

The fourth type of sales objection is Scepticism – which is essentially your prospect doubting that your product or service will deliver all the wonderful things you say it will.

When this happens you need to introduce a little proof.

You know the kind of thing – customer testimonials, brand presenters, some recent industry data, a demonstration, magazine articles – it might even be something as simple as leaving a sample.

But you need to know your “sources of proof” for everything you sell and be ready to prove each and every benefit, with the ability to tailor them for each individual prospect.

When you introduce your proof, you want to avoid agreeing with the customer’s scepticism, so train yourself to use words which recognise the prospects point of view, but allow you to move onto your new solution.

Zig Ziglar’s “FEEL; FELT; FOUND” is a great example, it works like this;

“I understand why you FEEL that way – Mr Jones next door FELT that way too – but what he FOUND was……”

and then all you have to do is introduce an appropriate proof source.

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