Manage Any Sales Objection Successfully
this is a guest post by Steli Efti, CEO Elastic Inc. and the creator of the Close.io salesforce automation app (aka an option to Salesforce.com). he’s an insightful guy who shares here a great and simple way to put some thought and process around objections, without getting stuck in complexity! in fact, i should do this myself for my consulting practice 🙂 …
Most people are coming up with answers to objections on the fly.
That’s a huge mistake.
What you need is to develop an objection management document.
I’ll share with you how to do that in a few simple steps.
But first let’s look at all the reasons why ”computing” an answer to an objection in real time is a bad idea:
- It’s going to take focus/attention away from the customer while you’re trying to formulate your response
- It’s going to probably be a much longer answer than you want to because you’re just communicating in a stream of consciousness
- You’re not going to seem very confident
- The quality of your answer will heavily depend on your state at the present moment
So how do you create a great objection management doc?
Here are the 5 simple steps:
- Write down the top 25 objections you’re facing in your market
- Write down the best answers to each objection
- Limit the answers to a max. of 3 sentences
- Have at least 10 people review the answers with you and give feedback
- Train your team/ yourself to know these answer by heart
What are the benefits of doing this?
There are many benefits in doing this exercise and creating a objection management doc but by far the biggest one is the boost in confidence it will give you & your team when delivering the answers.
Here are a few common objections to get you going:
- I don’t have time
- I don’t have money
- Your product/service is too expensive
- Please just send me more information
- We don’t need this
- {add more industry/market/product specific objections}…
[Aaron] Speak them out loud. also practice role-playing and speaking this stuff out loud. i find when people just write stuff down it first sounds canned / fake / jargony, and by speaking it out loud it helps you easily spot awkwardness.
Hope this helps 🙂
Happy Selling!
Steli
[Aaron] you can find out more about Steli on Quora and at Close.io’s website. he writes great stuff.