Sales objections and… Success and…

Sales objections and …Service problems

Sometimes we have to wear our sales hat and other times not. But where’s that dividing line? Ironically in some (admittedly rare) selling situations we may not have to. And just as oddly there are those non sales situations where we better have it tightly fastened and ready to use!

That’s especially true when we’re confronted with that exasperated customer who’s venting over what they feel are unreasonably high costs. Or perhaps it’s a complaint over a persistent results issue that you know isn’t of your doing – or for that matter really even in your direct control.

So, what to do?

First, it’s time to remember our sales training where we hopefully learned that objections need to be treated like roadblocks. That is we don’t crash into them head on. Nope, we follow the tried and true path of first acknowledging the objection as being totally reasonable and then restating it to make sure what we heard was the real issue. Finally we explain how our proposal addresses it.

Here the steps are a bit different but that first one is critical. If we don’t acknowledge the complaint as legitimate, we’re not in a constructive discussion.

Once we do that we’ve moved to their side of the table. Now we can explain that the results problem might be the result of an operator who’ll benefit from your training. Or if it’s a high cost complaint perhaps its’ cause is an issue that you can (or already have) rectified.

Success and…Great tales

We all love a good war story. You know, some yarn that involves a sales or service call that was either entirely wrecked by some random occurrence that nobody could have seen coming, or that was salvaged by some stroke of genius.

And of course there’s always the one where a brilliant comment made (by a never named) soaper put that harsh prospect in his or her place and that also somehow miraculously still made the sale. Yea sure…

Those stories are fun to tell as well as hear, but we all know that the truth is never (or nearly never) so cute or entertaining. Nope, most of the interactions we have are more humdrum than humiliating, or especially heroic.

The sales we make, or our service successes, are rarely the result of a rabbit pulled from a hat or some clever repartee. To the contrary, they’re the result of multiple calls, hard physical work, a lot of preparation and sometimes even a bit of luck.

What all that means is that success isn’t necessarily the result of something that’s only worthy of an entertaining story. Moreover those everyday efforts are a lesson reminding us success is more the result of hard work than histrionics.