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How many times have you have been hit with an objection that you really didn’t handle as well as you might have? What would it mean to you, if you had the perfect sales techniques to be able to handle any objection that came up - at any time and in any situation? What would happen to your income if you (and your team, if you're a Sales Manager) dealt with each and every sales objection just that little bit more effectively. Objection Handling is probably one of the most important sales techniques. Top salespeople appear to do it effortlessly, yet most of us recognise that we don’t deal with objections as well as we would like. Strong objection handling skills will enable you to uncover and address the exact concerns that can make it hard to close a sale. They’ll help you secure more business, and earn more commission and bonus. However, fail to improve your objection handling and you’ll continue losing deals you should have won… and you won’t even know why you missed out. In this article, we’ll cover three areas: - Identifying where so many salespeople go wrong with handling sales objections - Introducing some basic principles for objection handling, and - Outlining a best-practice, 6-step process for successful objection handling Where do salespeople go wrong? Typically, it’s right at the start of the process. When an objection comes up, it’s so easy to see it as a threat - to the deal, your commission and your bonus – and therefore you address it as though you're under attack. You try to get it out of the way as quickly as possible in the hope to move nearer closing the business. On the one hand, you may become overly defensive, delivering a weak answer and leaving an unconvinced customer. Alternatively, you may over-react and go on the attack - leaving your customer wondering what you are hiding. Either way, its certainly not the outcome you’re looking for. When emotions are running high, we often find ourselves saying things that we wouldn't normally contemplate. So it is vital to find a way to control our emotions, so we can continue to communicate effectively with our customer. Basic Objection Handling Sales Techniques: So what is going to help us 'rein in' the emotions that block effective communications? Firstly, you have to buy yourself some time – to calm yourself down and construct a compelling answer. It would also be useful to minimise any potential conflict in the situation, so we’ll need to demonstrate some empathy. Put yourself in the buyers shoes. A buyer seeks out someone who understands their concerns and who can help to address them. So one of the must have sales techniques to be good with questioning skills to get to the root of the customer’s concern. You also need to be sure that you’ve addressed the issue to the customer’s satisfaction, so you’ll need to check this by asking the customer. If as salespeople we can alter our mind-set from ‘overcoming sales objections’ (defensive) to ‘improving customers’ understanding (assistance), it positions the objection handling process in a whole new light. 6 Step Advanced Objection Handling Sales Technique: Our free sales techniques videos on our SERIOUS™ Selling website go into a lot more detail on how to overcome sales objections, but for now, let me outline our 6 steps to take your customer through, when they “seek some assistance” to address their concern. Listen and Acknowledge - don’t interrupt in your eagerness to defend yourself, your product and company, but instead, let the customer talk and then acknowledge their concern. Ask for More - Yes! Ask for more objections, or put another way, ask if the customer has any other concerns that would stop them doing business with you. Note it’s also a test close. Explore the Objection - simply ask questions so you fully understand what the customer has concerns about and that you aren’t making any assumptions. Confirm your Understanding - paraphrase back the customer your understanding of what they’ve expressed; this also buys you some thinking time. Answer or Defer - Answer the question/concern to the best of your ability, but don’t be afraid to defer your answer and promise to come back to them. Checking and Closing - Ask the customer if you have addressed their concern to their satisfaction, then use this opportunity to close the deal Each of these steps is relatively easy, so by not getting defensive, by looking at the situation as the chance to help your customer and by stepping slowly through these 6 points, overcoming sales objections will become one of the simplest sales techniques to apply, and you’ll soon see the rewards in the form of large commissions. As well as owning and running 3 businesses, Mike Willshare and Brian Conway have 25 years of professional Sales Techniques training between them, helping both individuals and large blue chip organisations to significantly improve their sales results. Their sales framework http://www.seriousselling.co.uk has been delivered Worldwide and is now available in book and video. Get their Free Sales Techniques Videos at http://www.seriousselling.co.uk/free_sales_techniques_videos/
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