Hello my beautiful friends, welcome back to another episode! This week I’m diving into a topic that I absolutely love and feel will be extremely helpful to so many listeners: how to handle objections.
Sales is something that I think can be scary at times, but is absolutely necessary especially if you're a business owner. Learning how to sell with confidence is highly important, whether it’s through customer conversations, sales calls, or learning how to sell in an online digital space using sales pages, landing pages, and through copy and content. But for the purposes of this episode, I want to focus on the piece of a sales conversation specifically if you are a coach, or if you have an offer that has some sort of sales call component to your sales process.
When you get to the end of the sales call, or invite someone to sign up and actually pay you, this is the point when you typically meet resistance. Sometimes the objection is price. It could also be a timing issue, or that they simply don’t have the bandwidth. There are a lot of objections and sometimes the default thinking is to think that each objection is different.
One of the things that I have learned by leading training and experienced myself through sales conversations is that objections tend to be pretty universal. It's how we move through that objection and handle that objection in the moment, that will dictate the outcome of that sales call.
What I have found most commonly happens with the sales conversation when an objection comes up is that we freeze up, get nervous or we start to ‘feature-dump’, listing all of the features, bells, and whistles to our buyer.
One of the top reasons that I have found is that they don't fully understand the value of the offer that you're presenting. They don't quite understand what your program or service does for them. Always make sure you touch on these:
The second objection type is really a smokescreen over the actual objection/ problem and it is up to us to uncover and understand the true objection. For one reason or another, they aren’t comfortable being fully honest with you about what is holding them back.
The first thing I want you to learn to do instead is to take a moment and acknowledge. Empathize how they might feel and why they might feel the way that they feel. I recommend acknowledging how they feel, not by saying ‘I can understand’, because that phrase can be very off putting in some situations.
Instead try: “I see how you feel that way”. You’ll experience a very different reaction because you are validating their feelings and letting them know that you’re listening, rather than trying to sell them something. When we try to sell to them when they're not in a position of actually listening, we create more resistance.
The second thing I want you to try when an objection comes up is to get curious. Get into discovery mode and start asking questions.
We want to clarify what is going on and when we can summarize back. This allows us to check our understanding of what they said to make sure that we are on the same page. When their resistance is lower and they aren’t objecting, they're more likely to be open to listening. When their resistance is high, we don’t want to keep pushing because our words will fall on deaf ears.
As we empathize and get curious, we understand, restate, and summarize back to them what we heard. That lets us know that we're on the same page. Then we can proceed forward in how we want to respond. Maybe we bring up a few different points that we haven't discussed, or maybe we reiterate some of the benefits of the program and how it's going to help them overcome some of their objections.
The last piece I want to offer you are the things that we can do to reduce the number of objections that we get.
Think about your sales intake form. When someone signs up for a discovery or sales call with you, what are the questions that you are asking on that form? Do they provide you with significant information that will put you in a stronger position when you go into the sales meeting? Or are they vague questions such as ‘tell me about yourself’? Or , can you qualify people before hopping on a sales call? When we can qualify sooner at the top of the funnel, it makes it more efficient overall saving you time and energy.
If you find that you are hearing the same objecting over and over - identify that and bring it up sooner during the call, rather than waiting until the end to address it.
You can also optimize your FAQ’s on your website. Put those objections in there along with your response.
Lastly, figure out your mindset going into sales calls. Are you nervous, excited, steady/ grounded/ confident in your offer? Do you believe in your offer? If not, let's go back and look at your mindset.
Remember, friends:
Repetition builds confidence.
We're not going to win them all, but if we can win one more out of 10, we can increase our conversion rate, thus increasing our revenue. Learning how to effectively sell with confidence takes time. It’s not something we are born doing and we have to learn each step to get better and to keep moving that needle forward.
Until next week, keep doing it your way!