This week's tip on objection handling comes from my friends at Ask a
Sales Pro. A no charge weekly ezine I highly recommend.
Experienced sales people know that objections from prospects are
good things. It means that they have considered purchasing your
product/service seriously enough to come up with reasons why they
might not spend money for them. Prospects with no objections may
not be taking your sales process seriously.
Of course, objections can take many forms (hidden objections, false
objections, etc.) and they will always be tied into your specific
offerings and the particular market that they are targeted to. As a
consequence, it is impossible to provide anything more than a framework
for developing information for overcoming most objections.
However, most sales people encounter Price Objections in their daily
work. So let's use the example of a price objection to create a model
for figuring out how to develop ways to overcome objections, in general.
Price Objections generally arise because of one of two reasons:
1. Your prices are much higher than your competitors' pricing and you
do not offer any additional benefits to the customer.
2. You have not properly sold the value of your products/services to
the prospect.
If your problem is #1, there is not much that can be done, other than
finding customers that are completely unaware of your competition. This
is extremely difficult to do these days due to the permeation of
television, the Internet, etc., around the world.
If, on the other hand, your product/service is priced competitively or
you offer substantial benefits to the prospect over other solutions,
generally, you will encounter price objections only if you have not
properly sold the benefits and value of your solution prior to
attempting to close the deal. The following steps will help you to
ensure that you have properly sold your prospects on the value of your
product/services:
1. Keep in mind that customers buy 'benefits' not features. This means
that the value of your products/services (and, therefore the price that
you can charge for them) lie in the benefits that they provide to
customers. For example, the fact that a new car gets 40 miles per
gallon of gasoline is a nice feature, but will not cause me to buy the
car. However, the fact that this same new car will save me $20 per week
in gasoline bills is a benefit resulting from that feature that will
cause me to consider buying the car and will certainly help to overcome
any price objection that I may have.
So be sure to identify all of the potential benefits that your
products/services may offer a prospect, so that you will be better
prepared to sell the true value that you are offering.
2. Now that you have a good list of benefits in mind, go back to your
company's current customer base and ask a few of the best customers
the following questions:
a. Why did they look for your type of products/services? What
problems were they trying to solve? Why did they think that your
products/services would help them?
b. Why did they select you?
This will help you to understand which of your benefits are most
important to your future prospects so that you can bring up these issues
as part of your sales presentation and hopefully overcome any pricing
objections early in the sales process.
You can use the above model of:
1. Analysis of why you are encountering the objection
2. Development of a list of Benefits that may overcome this objection
3. Validation of which Benefits are most important to your current
customers
Using this tried and true technique will enable you to handle just about
any objection that you may encounter during your sales process.
Reprinted from the no charge weekly ezine "Ask a Sales Pro".
You can subscribe to this newsletter or get no charge, personalized
email responses to your sales questions from one of their experts by
visiting: http://www.AskASalesPro.com.
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