I'm not the first person to draw the analogy between a roadblock and a customer objection during the selling process. Both can prevent progress: one in driving and the other in selling.
Most road barricades are there for good reason. Maybe a bridge is out, or a power line is down, or the road is under construction. In northern Minnesota where I went to college, there were often logging trucks on the roads, and sometimes trees would fall off those logging trucks. That's a good reason to place a road closed sign on a road. These are the reasons someone invented road closed signs in the first place.
And prospects' objections, too, are often legitimate. They might have the desire to buy, but no money to pay for your product. They might have the desire to own what you're selling, but their spouse would kill them if they came home with it. They might have the desire to purchase from you, but the bank will not approve their loan.
These are merely a few examples of how objections can be legitimate, or true, objections.
But things are not always as they seem. This is true with road barricades and it's true with customer objections.
When I was in college my freshman year, a bunch of guys loaded a road barricade into a pick-up truck and moved it from a road construction site (luckily, there were additional road closed signs on the road to prevent disaster). They moved the road closed sign to a road without any road construction. In fact, the sign ended up on a stretch of rural highway that was perfectly fine.
It was a college prank, but I'm sure at least one driver must have driven up to the sign, stopped, and turned around. This happened even though there was no road construction, no bridge out, and no tree on the road from a logging truck.
These drivers assumed the barricade was legitimate and heeded the warning of the sign. And I recommend this to all drivers who see a road closed sign.
But the freshman prank is like half the customer objections you hear from prospects. There's no legitimate reason for the road barricade, and, with this 50% of objections, there's no reason for the objections. Over centuries, consumers have developed A.R.M. - an automated response mechanism to blurt out objections to salespeople even if the objection isn't legitimate. Over centuries of history, mankind has learned that suddenly uttering "I have to think about it" will get rid of most salespeople.
But often the goal of the prospect isn't even to get rid of the salesperson - it's to prevent them from having to make a decision, from taking a stand, from making a change. Even if a prospect wants, needs, and can afford your product, they may still blurt out one of these false objections, such as "I have to talk to my husband."
So how do you know if a prospect's objection is legitimate or not?
1. You create selling hang time.
With continued dialog between salesperson and prospect, things often work themselves out and the salesperson is able to understand that the objection was simply the automated response mechanism in action.
2. You investigate.
Wildly successful salespeople have a healthy dose of skepticism. Interviewing your prospect (in a non-threatening way, of course) can help you to flesh out the facts and identify the real, and not real, issues surrounding the potential purchase.
3. You offer new perspectives.
The prospect shopping for a new stove but announcing the "I have to talk to my husband" might need to hear this: "Your husband would want to make cooking and baking easier for you, wouldn't he?" Sometimes we have new perspectives that shed new light on the potential purchase, and that new light helps create a new paradigm for the prospect.
If you like this post (or don't) please leave a comment.Skip Anderson is the Founder and President of Selling to Consumers Sales Training.
He works with companies that sell to consumers in
all B2C sectors to increase sales by realizing the buying potential of every prospect.
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