Sales Objections – My Opinion of the Opinion

Salespeople overcomplicate objections, giving life to a statement that is nothing more than someone’s temporary opinion.  They try to handle them, defend them, explain them, reframe then, minimize them, reverse them, and a myriad of other tactics to get around them.  It drives me nuts!

When they successfully handle the objection they run into more bad news – another objection.  It’s because the prospects will continue to object because they aren’t sold, aren’t ready to buy, haven’t arrived yet.  It really has very little to do with the objections themselves.

It’s a lot like turbulence.  While the air is unsteady, it doesn’t matter a whole lot what you do with the plane, the turbulence will continue until the plane reaches more stable air.

If salespeople take the same approach with objections, considering it simply turbulence, objections become easier to navigate.  Instead of attempting to handle objections, why can’t salespeople just ask questions like, “assuming that I can show you that it is just as effective, what would you do then?”

That question moves beyond the objection, and tells your salespeople whether they’ll get the business or whether that objection was simply a smoke screen for something else, like, “I still don’t know whether it will solve our problem”.

So the sequence goes something like:

if that wasn’t a problem, then what?
and if that wasn’t an issue, then what?
and if you didn’t have that concern, then what?
etc., etc., etc.

When and if your salespeople finally get to the point where the prospect indicates they would do business, then they can go back and deal with the issues, but only once they know what will happen next.