Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.
This is the 10th in my series of the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies That Are Key to Building a Sales Culture.
#10 THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN OBJECTION
There is nothing worse than when salespeople handle objections. Not only does it cause them to rack up reverse progress, they are usually not even handling the real problem.
Here are the things you need to know about objection handling that should cause you to stop handling them forever:
- if you handle one you'll get another one
- they object when you get too close (to closing time) for comfort
- handling objection increases their resistance
- the objection is not usually the real problem
- objection handling, by nature, is a correction and people don't like being corrected
- how often have you handled an objection, only to have the prospect say, "then let's do it!"? Right.
So if you can't handle objections what should you do instead?
First, it's even more important to stop getting objections all together. Sounds good, doesn't it? Just the simple act of identifying an objection will cause trouble for you. Every time your prospect says something and you say to yourself, "@#$%, a !@#$% objection", you'll tend to become emotionally involved, and then go into some kind of presentation mode (bad), and while causing an increase in your prospect's resistance, attempt to solve the wrong problem.
Do you remember the singer formerly known as Prince, who before that and after that WAS Prince? Do the same thing with objections, except skip the formally known as part. When your prospect says something that you used to identify as an objection, simply hear it as their opinion. You don't handle opinions, you engage in discussions. So if your prospect has an opinion that is different from yours, you can ask any of the following questions:
- why do you feel that way?
- when did you start feeling that way?
- what if that wasn't the case?
- how does that manifest itself?
And you would use words like:
- Of course
- I agree
- I understand
- You're right
The other thing you can do to eliminate objections is to sell the right way! See Sales Competency #4 - Get a Sales GPS.
Speaking of objections and #4, putting them in the same sentence causes me to object to just how quickly people can steal material these days. Thanks to this platform and the fact that most people aren't creative enough to come up with their own content, they just borrow it from others. Don't believe me? You just reread #4 - Get a Sales GPS, which I posted on Sunday, October 18 and the title, "Get a Sales GPS" was listed in my original article for this series on October 5. Now check out the this post to someone else's Blog, which was posted just one week later, on October 26. She claims to talk about this concept in her most recent book. So I checked. "GPS" is not in the book. Neither is "Navigation". She uses the word "navigate" four times in the entire book. Coincidence?
(c) Copyright 2009 Dave Kurlan