Prospects Don’t Call With Bad News

This morning I made a “cold call.” This person and I had been talking over the phone. In fact he had contacted me by email and asked for a proposal which I had sent a while ago. I had been emailing him and leaving voice mails about getting together, and I was getting “not in” or “no reply.”

This morning at the end of a snow storm I got up early and didn’t lolly-gag around in bed, and using my trusty GPS found my way to this prospect’s door. He was there, had time for me and actually was glad that I had showed up. What he had not been saying to me directly was he had tried to present my proposal to his boss, and he was denied the funding.

Would you want to call a salesman and tell him that you failed in getting funding for a project you personally wanted accomplished? Of course not! So he was just burying the bad news and hoping that he wouldn’t have to face me. Well unfortunately what was happening is that he was preventing me from offering alternative solutions that in this case would be a much cheaper arrangement in respects to his budget. The solution we discussed is not a cheaper program for him, merely a different way of financing it that does not require funding approval from his boss. It does involve many more people and might be a little more complex, but it will accomplish what he wanted.

How often do our sales people work diligently to provide good quotations and proposals of their product just to be ignored and kept at “arm’s length” because the prospect or customer doesn’t want to talk about “bad news”? Or worse yet how many times do they hear “I don’t like your proposal” and not know another solution or offering that will aid the prospect in continuing with the deal they were just told was too expensive?

Handling the “Objection” is a difficult or scary part of the sales process for most people.

Objections are not “Bad”, many times they are really “buying signals” from the prospect that there still exist other things to be addressed before they can say yes. In fact, sometimes certain objections are required in some companies. Recently I was told about a purchasing function in a large company where they have a check off list regarding their purchasing, and they “must ask for a lower price” and check it off on their list.

Do your sales people have experience with objections? Yes! Do they have experience handling them successfully and getting sales because of them? Now that is another question.

There are many things about objections that should be addressed if you are to be a master of them, but let’s just talk about a couple to gain some insight into how to manage objections and use them to create sales. Two points will help you very quickly; the first is to have a method or style of handling most objections and secondly have a store-house of scripts that you have already worked out of how to handle recurring objections.

The methodology is very simple; you need to do four things. First empathize with the prospect, they are asking a valid question about this sale and they have a concern; so let them know that you also understand this. “Yes Mr. Morgan that is a lot of money to spend on xxxx for your company.” Next, restate the question or point you heard them making. “You are concerned how this will impact the moving date schedule, if delivery in more than 6 weeks.” Make sure that you have gotten the essential point this prospect is articulating.

Third, explain your response in terms of their concern, such as: “This investment for your company may be the largest single purchase you have made, but the change in workflow and employee productivity will be dramatic. Remember that we have already discussed the research and study we did with you for the last month, and there will be such saving each month that you will recover the investment in 13 months, even though you will be depreciating it for XX years. That means that you will increase your profits by XXXXXX in the next year.” What we are attempting to do in this statement is not only explain the answer to the objection but also go back to other sales points and features that we have already discussed with the prospect to remind them what they have already heard and sometimes agreed to.

Finally, you want to confirm that this answer is truly addressing the issue and ask for the order. Sometimes “Asking for the Order” may be the clinch to getting the deal, or it might be a “trial close” to see what other Objections are still lingering in the background.

The other point in handling objections is to have “scripts” prepared that when the prospect brings up an objection you have all the answers comfortably prepared. Recently while working with a client who was planning price increases in their service department we assembled all 25 equipment and aftermarket sales people and told them what was coming. We also announced that we were sure they would encounter some objections, so we asked them to tell us the most frequent objections they believed they would encounter. Listening to them, and listing all the objections on the board we documented what they believed would be the problems they would have to address in the field with their customers and prospects.

We broke the 25 sales people into working groups and asked them to write answers to 2 or 3 of these “expected objections.” This took a little time, but working together gave them some new answers and ideas that just one person working alone might not have thought about. Then they presented their “scripts” or prepared answers to the entire groups and other people commented about some of their answers and contributed additional ideas. Completing the exercise we collected the “scripts” had them all typed up and distributed the “prepared scripts” for handling these expected objections to all sales people and some other people in the company.

Each of the five “stages of a sale” are important, but the last two frighten some people. We need to Approach or Introduce ourselves to prospects, we need to Qualify or Investigate the situation with the account about what they need and what we can offer, then you Present your product or solution to them, next they discuss Problems or Objections so that you can see more of their thought pattern and find the important points they want more information regarding, and finally you Ask for the Sale.

Handling Objections is not a bad experience when you are enthusiastic about your product, have done your homework about the prospect’s needs and issues, present yourself and your product confidently and expect objections and look at them as additional sales opportunities.

What have you do to prepare yourself or your sales people to handle objections? What will you do now? Don’t tell me you’re going to put that off, because I know the way to answer that objection.