Time to listen…Knowing it and…

Time to listen…Time to switch?

Ever heard the baloney line that sales objections are just the buyer saying, “I want (or need) to know more”? Well, you know better. Almost certainly the simple truth is that they’re just trying to fend off your effort to sell them.

But there is a small kernel of truth hidden there.

It’s that we’ve likely fallen short of giving them what is best called a “motive reason” to listen and consider making the change. Add to that the possibility that if they say yes, then they’ll have the unpleasant task of firing their current supplier – and that can be a material issue in their mind.

Offering a motive reason simply means presenting a reason that’s compelling enough for them to go through the pain and misery (in their mind) of making that change.

So maybe when that objection is presented, what we need to do (after following the steps to the right) is adopt a completely new benefit to offer.

If our proposal of even a sizeable cost reduction isn’t hitting home, then maybe we need to explore other ideas like employee training, better results, more thorough service, improved general sanitation, or maybe regularly delivered and well written service reports.

Next up: Bridging the opening to the presentation.

Knowing it and …then there’s doing it

Knowing what to do is obviously important. But there’s a wide gulf between knowing what to do and doing what we know.

Let that sink in…

And while we’re musing, let’s think back to the last time we broke that hard learned lesson. Was it a technical matter like not waiting for the wash tank to reach temperature before we set the concentration? Or maybe we didn’t take time to measure the feedback rate on that conveyor machine when we did the install.

Or perhaps it was asking that closing question and then instead of waiting for the prospect to reply, we spoke first and lost the chance to make the sale.

Or was it a simple sales objection where we didn’t practice the three steps of: acknowledging it, rephrasing it to confirm it and then explaining how our proposal solved it.

Regardless of the situation of not doing what we know, it’s a mistake we all make – and maybe a lot more frequently than we’d like to admit.

Next up: The secrets of closing