Some Tactics For Overcoming Sales Objections
Objections are frustrating for most salespeople. However, there are many well-known ways to overcome them, resulting in more closed sales. Here are five tactics to help you overcome sales objections:
Link the feature (or advantage) to benefits
If you are receiving objections on price, you need to show how your features actually solve a customer’s problem or help them reach a goal. On the other hand, if you are getting other objections, customers may understand why your product or service is better, but not necessarily why this solves problems which they are dealing with. You must translate these superior characteristics to customer-satisfying items, which they will then spend money to obtain.
Determine the nature of the objection
Some objections are legitimate reasons why a prospect will not buy from you. Others are simply ways for a potential customer to avoid making a decision at the present time, and yet other objections can serve to hide a true (but unvoiced) concern which needs to be addressed (see next section). When you recognize why the customer is objecting, you will be better prepared to use the right objection handling technique to address the objection.
Ask what other objections may exist
Sometimes, customers will bring up an objection which is only a red herring; their real concern may be with some other issue with your product or service. The best way to find these out is to ask: “In addition to your (price or other) concern, is there anything else which might be preventing you from making the purchase today?” This may be enough to get your customers to reveal their true concerns about why they are not buying.
Practice several different responses to common objections
There will be some objections which you hear more often than others. For these most common objections, you should have several different responses ready, so that you can choose the best one for the customer and circumstances you face in a particular selling situation. If you practice these ahead of time, your response will seem totally natural and effortless, even though in reality you have pre-planned these responses ahead of time.
Prevent objections from occurring early on by not causing them
Often, salespeople can cause objections by assuming that customers will object to certain aspects of their products or services. This can lead to answering objections which the customer is not really that worried about, but which the salesperson brings up. In other instances, salespeople may cause objections by jumping into their presentation too soon, such as before they have built up some initial rapport with the customer. Handling the sales call differently earlier, can prevent many objections from ever occurring.
In short, when you link product or service characteristics to goals customers have, figure out the reason for the objection, discover unresolved concerns, develop several different answers for objections, and prevent yourself from causing objections, it is more likely that your efforts will result in the sale being made.
Pretty good advice in this post.
If you handle the early part of the sales call well and generate rapport and crate a conversation a lot of objections will be covered as part of the dialogue.
That being said something can always come out of left field and handling objections is a necessary skill for any salesperson.