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There are two type of objections: the definite ‘no’ and the delaying ambiguity
So, you’ve got to put yourself in the place of a customer. What are the kinds of excuses you give on a regular basis when you don’t want to buy something? Imagine you’re in a shop and the sales assistant comes up to you and says, are you okay? Oh yeah, I’m just looking. Do you want to buy a pair of jeans? Oh, um, yeah, maybe. Um, oh, by the way, what time do you close? I just want to walk around town. Or you might come up with some excuse, like, uh, yeah, I’m, I’m good. I just got to find my credit card. I’ll, I’ll be back later. See, the reality is most customers don’t really want to be in a confrontational situation, so they’ll just use excuses. It look, it’d be really great if every customer was so straight with you. They said, look, I really don’t want to buy your product because I don’t like this. I don’t like that, and I don’t like something else. And you could have a really mature conversation about it.
Objections really fall into two categories. There’s kind of the definite no, I don’t want to buy it. I don’t like your product. Or there’s the kind of delayed no, which is coming in the shape of things like I want to think about it or I want to speak to someone else. So the problem is when you hear the last two objections, the sales person still has hope and because they have hope, they don’t really want to tackle these objections in the first place. But the reality is 95% of the time when someone says, I want to think about it or I want to talk to someone else, the decision you’re going to get is probably the same decision as they’re thinking now. Salespeople often mistake objections for a confirmation that something’s going to happen positively because the reality is sales people are optimists at heart. They live in a world of hope and they dreamers. But the reality is what they’ve got to understand is that customers are most likely not going to buy something. And, so the odds are when a customer says that it’s just the excuse not to buy.
When you’re getting these objections later in the sale, you should have already understood the customer’s sincerity or not and half the battle really that you’ve got to first to understand is is this objection real or is it a false objection and on balance you’ve got to understand that most objections like I think about it and I want to talk to someone else tend to turn out to be a no, so on balance they probably were a no already.
The type of objections that sales people understand as a confirmation that the deal is going to happen are things like want to just quickly run it past my marketing department, I’ve even heard things like, look, I’d absolutely be mad not to go for this. Some objections that prevent someone from signing something today are yet are, I’m almost definitely going ahead with this. When I hear that objection, the amount of time someone doesn’t do it is more often than someone does do it. Even if they’re going to do it or they not going to do it. Sometimes yes, I will hear salespeople say, you know, but surely some customers want to sleep on things they don’t like making decisions on the day. And that’s true. There are customers like that, but the vast majority of the time, it’s really good to probe a little bit more by probing more.
You don’t want to come across as over pushy, but you still want to come across to just make sure that you’ve covered every single possibility off, okay, so an example of probing off, if someone says, I want to speak to my marketing department, so a good example of asking further probing questions is to simply say that’s absolutely fine. So just to understand if it was solely up to you, would you do it? This is a great question because quite often people will say, well, I’m not sure, and if you hear that answer, it’s going to be a no, because if they’re not sure the way they ask the marketing department, even if they bother to do that, is going to be so half-hearted they’re not going to get buy in. See how you are someone, something is going to affect the answer. You won’t. So the reality is why don’t people want to confront the situation? Because they feel that by confronting the situation, they might weaken the chance of getting the sale later on. But that’s simply crazy. So what we’re going to have to do in the next sessions is understand how do we really tackle these objections on an individual basis while still protecting your chances of getting the dea
