Objection handling fundamentally means responding to your potential buyer in a way that answers their concerns and changes their mind. In this blog we look at the types of objections you can expect and the ways in which you can deal with them to bring about a sale.
Help your customer to make a ‘new decision’
If buyers didn’t have any reservations about your product or service: the price, value, relevance to their situation, or their purchasing ability, they would have already bought it. Every prospect has sales objections or some reason why they are hesitant to buy your product or service. Why are these objections so unavoidable?
The longer the buyer holds an opinion about your product or service, the stronger that opinion usually is. That means you have to work harder to overcome and change it. With this in mind, you should simply welcome the objections early on rather than avoiding them. You should be able to proactively identify possible objections throughout the whole sales cycle.
In fact, people don’t change their minds, they make new decisions based on new information or a new perspective. These new decisions are made from properly handled objections.
What are the types of objections?
There are three types of objections that you will face during the sales process. These are:
- Known
- Likely, and
- Unknown
1. Known
Experience, early outreach or research will have made you aware of an issue and objection that needs to be addressed and overcome. Often times the buyers themselves have expressed it before the meeting or on the phone.
How do you deal with known objections? Pre-empt them right away. Most sales people ignore known objections. They hope objections will go away or people will forget about them. If you ignore them then you are unlikely to make a sale… The golden rule of handling known objections is that whoever brings it up first, usually wins! If ye don’t bring it up first and move it out of the way, it will be blocking the buyers’ mind thoughout the sales cycle.
2. Likely
These are the objections that based on your experience you often hear in relation to your product or service. Keeping track of the objections you receive most often is very helpful. That way you can devote extra time to practice and refine your responses to them. As with ‘known’ objections, for likely objections, you must bring them up first and pluck them out so there is nothing left at the end in the closing stages of the sales cycle. The key principle is that objection prevention is better than objection handling.
3. Unknown
Unknown objections are the ones that you didn’t anticipate, but they will still come up from time to time regardless of your preparation.
What’s the best way to deal with them? We suggest a very simple formula dealing with unknown qualified objections. It is called Triple F: Feel-Felt-Found:
- FEEL “I totally understand how you feel” (“I understand where you’re coming from”) – which shows empathy and understanding;
- FELT “A number of our customers felt the same way at the beginning” – third party validation which gives them assurance that they are not the only ones who have had the same thought process;
- FOUND “What they found though was that…” (“What they realised was…”) – educate with new information to reassure that our offering will benefit them.
When it comes to Feel-Felt-Found model, you should use your own words that you are most comfortable with. The framework still stays the same.
Objections are an inevitable part of sales. Some of them are legitimate reasons to disqualify, while others are simply an attempt to brush sales people off. As long as you are willing to listen and empathise, you will be much better equipped to answer and handle any objection that comes your way.
