Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

The ability to effectively handle sales objections is without doubt one of the biggest factors in getting prospects to make the decision to buy. An objection is first and foremost an indication that at some level the prospect has or is considering buying, and should be welcomed by the salesperson.

An objection is a reasonable concern on behalf of the prospect, an objection is not an unreasonable expectation. This is an important difference because managing expectations and more particularly unreasonable expectations requires a different skill set, and requires a different set of sales techniques.

Conscious Communication

One very effective way to deal with objections is to preempt them as part of your presentation, you will be aware of the four or five concerns that your average prospect has, so you can incorporate these objections into your actual presentation.

This can be very effective objection handling technique, because rather than operate a head in the sand approach and wait for the sales objections, you choose to tackle these reasonable concerns as part of your pitch/sales presentation, coming from a position of strength and demonstrated to the prospects that you do not run from the hard questions.

Unconscious Communication

When dealing with objections, it is important to be aware of your body language and unconscious communication. I recently sat in on a sales presentation where the salesperson was interrupted mid sentence by the prospect, and then asked a hard question with regards to a competitor.

While he verbally came across quite well and was able to deal with the issue using words, this difficult question prompted him to fold his arms and promote a closed and defensive stance.

Unfortunately this subconscious communication gave away the fact that he was uncomfortable with the question and probably was one of the reasons that he was unable to secure the deal.

4 Steps

I will not be dealing with particular objections as part of this piece but rather giving you a four-step technique for dealing with any sales objection. Again, try to remember that objections should be welcomed, they mean that you are in with a good chance of selling.

The first step when dealing with the objection is to acknowledge the concern.

Ensure that you make the prospect aware that you understand where they are coming from.

The second step is to qualify the objection.

Find out exactly what they mean, for instance “time to think” means what exactly? What is it that they need to think about? Are there still some issues that you haven’t dealt with? What are they not convinced about? Find out where the real issue is.

The third step is to re-sell the corresponding benefit.

Once you have discovered the objection, resell but this time been aware that your approach the first time didn’t work, so you will at least have to expand and possibly take different angles to re-enforce the point and convince the prospect.

The final step in dealing with objections is to seek agreement with the prospect.

Ask them if they are happy and understand what you said, have you have been able to relieve their concern. Obviously if the answer is no, you will need to do some more convincing.

Practice

You need only to become skilled at handling the most common objections, don’t worry about strange or once off objections. Practice and role-play objections as the more times you deal with the particular objection, the better you will become. Remember an objection denotes an expression of interest and should be welcomed as part of the sale. Learn to love em.

Tags: objection handling techniques, overcoming sales objections, sales tips, sales training ireland

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.