A key skill of a sales person is to overcome objections.

Often we think the best way to overcome objections is to answer them. But often we just make one of the most common mistakes in sales.

News flash: it is not the primary role of salespeople to provide answers.

It’s to help the customer avoid a pain or get what they want faster.

To do this well you must be able to overcome objections. Which often is done by asking the prospect questions to bring them to a conclusion.

See the example below:

Prospect: I’m not sure this is valuable to me. How do you increase efficiency?
You: We’ve helped company x, y and z increase efficiency in a, b and c ways. What inefficiencies are you currently trying to avoid?
Prospect: We’re trying to avoid spending too much time documenting processes.
You: Right, documenting processes, that can take up some time. But what processes specifically?
Prospect: Well, across our 14 teams we spend 4 hours documenting our internal systems.
You: 58 hours a week, that’s quite a bit! In the past 6 months how could your teams have spent that 58 hours differently?
Prospect: Increasing our revenue, and so many other ways!
You: Would saving half, say 29 hours a week be important to you?
Prospect: Yes!

Verses

Prospect: I’m not sure this is valuable to me. How do you increase efficiency?
You: We’ve helped company x, y and z increase efficiency in a, b and c ways. We’re ranked globally in being able to help teams reduce time. 89% of our clients report a benefit to themselves, their teams, their husbands, their dogs, their grass is greener and they find their keto diets to be more tolerable.

Three important things happened here: 1) specific on what inefficiencies the prospect was trying to solve 2) quantified impact & validated it was important to the customer 3) part of the solution, not the whole solution.

Let’s get this preverbal grain and handle objections correctly by asking good questions and directing a prospect to a conclusion that they validate.