Pre-empting Your Objections

How can a holiday home jog your memory about how to handle objections in selling?
Well, this year on holiday with my family, I was reminded how effective the pre-empting technique is. It was a scorching afternoon in the Vendee, France at Les Dunes Camping Site. We’d just arrived after a long drive and Sharon, our Rep, was showing us to our caravan which was to be home for a few weeks. Now this is always a scary moment as you are in their hands for the choice of location.

Would we be next to the family from hell?

Would we be next to the Bar or worse still, the Karaoke?

No, we were being led back towards the entrance to the park, with the main road and amusements. Before I even thought of the noise issue, the Rep turned around and said confidently.

“The people before you were a little worried about being close to the entrance but when they left yesterday they told me what a great location they had. They mentioned how close the van was to all the amenities and how quiet it was at night.”

I hadn’t even thought about the noise problem until she mentioned it but because she’d gave me a customer testimonial and some benefits of the location, it didn’t even cross my mind that it would be a quandary.

Clever girl.

I wonder if she was a trained salesperson? But the point was she did just the right thing. Let me explain further.

No product or service is perfect. There’s always downsides or disadvantages or the competition has the edge in one or two areas. No one has a “killer application” for long these days as competition is so swift and reactive.

There’s always going to be something the customer might not fully appreciate and just might lead to an objection later on, usually when we ask for the order or close the sale.
Now I’m not saying that you should tell the customer all the main problems of your product early on in the process. What I’m saying is, if there is a particular feature that the competition beat you on, and previous customers have mentioned it before, then pre-empt it.

Just like Sharon did with the caravan location.

It might not be a problem with your product or service. It could be just a hurdle your customer has to cross before they can enjoy the product. Something that potentially might cause them to stall when it comes to purchasing.

Seek out your product deficiencies, if you don’t know then ask your competition as they’ll be sure to let you know! Then think of a way of making the disadvantage or potential problem not seem such a big deal early on in your sales process.

Some examples to assist you. Say X was an issue. You could use Sharon’s technique with a customer testimonial.

“One thing about our product is X however only yesterday I had a letter from a customer who really found this to be a benefit to them.. I’d happy share the letter with you.”

“Naturally you have to think of X, but what this really means to you is incredible peace of mind”

Notice the words “however” and “but” really emphasise the second part of the sentence, which is what I want to do.

Price is sometimes an issue. Maybe your product or service is on the pricy side. Now price is merely a reflection of value. If there is enough benefits to the customer, then the price is merely what needs to be paid to achieve the value. If we don’t pile on the benefits to the customer, then they won’t always see the value.

But if price can seem to encourage a “how muuuch!” response, break it down into bite sized chunks. This morning I was downloading some songs from an on line retailer and they were trying to sell me their monthly instalment plan so I could download 25 tracks a month. Cleverly they’d made the point that each track would cost me less than 30p and compared to other sites who charge 80p or more, this sounded really good.

If your product is payable monthly such as life assurance or health insurance, be sure to break it down into a daily cost. People aren’t stupid and we should never do it for this reason – it just sounds better.

There’s a few ideas to assist you but I’m sure at this stage you’re thinking of your proposal and how to pre-empt potential objections at an early stage.

Another story I heard whilst on holiday was Virgin Money’s decision to offer staff eBreaks. You see call centre staff at their offices were taking time out from making calls to check on eBay to make bids or to see how their product auction was faring. It got to such a proportion that the managers gave all staff a 15 minute eBreak during the day so they can do their eBay’ing.

Clever.

You can’t stop staff doing it so build time in the day for it to happen so you can control it.
Remember, think of your product or service, seek out the problems or deficiencies and build ways into your sales process to pre-empt the issue, so it doesn’t become a problem later on.

By the way the caravan location was perfect and I heard my wife explain to Sharon that we’d had a wonderful few weeks and would like the same spot next time.

Paul is an international sales speaker, sales trainer, author and coach based in the UK.

He specialises in rapport selling and rapport coaching and can ignite his audiences large or small.

Sign up to my weekly eZine of sales and coaching tips and get a free report on getting the best out of 2009 plus a free hypnotic relaxation MP3 to download. www.archertraining.co.uk

01452 730276

paul@paularcher.com

Blog – www.paularcher.com

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