Expert Insight From STEVE HACKETT

What’s the ‘Real’ Reason Why the Prospect Says “No” or “Not Right Now”?

As a business owner or sales manager, we constantly hear the same responses from our sales team when they fail to close a deal. Here are some common examples: “The competition bought the business;” “Everything is on hold right now;” “Budgets are frozen;” or the number one response, “Our price was too high.”

What’s the real reason they turned us down? We’ll never really know, unless we ask the right, and sometimes tough, questions up front. The more accurately you identify the issues and the prospect’s concerns, the easier it is to qualify the opportunity.

Identifying our prospect’s resistance to buy also requires listening between the lines. Not everything said in conversation represents the whole story. Your sales team needs to read body language, eye contact and voice inflection throughout the sales process to identify where their prospect is raising an objection – even when they don’t say it out loud. For example, did they cringe when the salesperson mentioned price, delivery schedule or quantity. When that happened, did the salesperson seize the opportunity to ask direct questions on that issue?

By asking the right questions and ‘reading’ the prospect, salespeople may not always get a “Yes” answer, but at least they’ll find out why the prospect said “No” or “Not right now.”

This month’s newsletters offer valuable insight into what objections are really about, as well as some practical ways to manage them earlier in the sales process, so they don’t become unnecessary challenges in the end.

Objection-Testing Questions: A Preemptive Approach to Anticipating and Eliminating Objections

In the many years that The Brooks Group has been involved in sales training, we’ve seen time and again that one of the most popular topics that salespeople want to address is managing objections. What they’re often hoping to learn is a way to “overcome” an objection once the prospect has stated it.  But if your salespeople only begin to deal with objections after the prospect has verbalized them, they’re starting too late.

The truth is that salespeople have to effectively manage unspoken and potential objections throughout the sales process. In this month’s issue we’ll take a look at common objections and develop a method for managing those objections (and others) through a series of questions that you can coach your sales team to ask in the Probe, or questioning step of the sale, to determine:

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The Truth about Objections

Perhaps one of the reasons so many salespeople struggle to master the art of dealing with objections is because they fundamentally misunderstand what objections are all about. In this month’s issue we’ll uncover some little-understood truths about objections:

• Truth #1 – Highly successful salespeople generally don’t encounter many objections.

That’s because they uncover the most likely objections they’ll ever hear while in the Probe (or questioning) Step of the sale. Uncovering these objections through careful questioning allows them to present their solution in a way that eliminates the objection from ever surfacing (See this month’s Sales Management Newsletter for a list of Objection-Testing Questions and how to use them.)

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