The Secret to Disarming Sales Objections

Do you hate getting sales objections?

Do you feel a pit in your stomach and you feel as though the sale is going south when you get objection after objection.

Well look, handling sales objections is a critical skill in the sales sizzlers arsenal. You've really gotta be able to deal with those objections. And here's the big secret, right .  They're not a bad thing to be avoided at all costs, right?

If you don't get any objections in the sale, it would be very, very unusual and I might suggest  your prospect is fears voicing them. You don't provide an environment where they can express their concerns. They don't really want to offend you, but they're sitting there in their head and they are gestating in the back of their mind.

And if you don't do something with them, they become all consuming and overpowering. And so we've gotta be able to get those unspoken or unwritten objections out. Otherwise, they're gonna emerge at some point. Right. And um, I, I find there are two places where they generally emerge and neither of them are good.

So the first one is that objection that is in the back of their head. They're not just talking to you, they're talking to somebody else and they might, they might feel more comfortable or that objection might   be more well formed so that they can express it to your competitor.

And if your competitor successfully addresses it. Then they've elevated their status. Your competitor has elevated their status with your buyer because they're seen as being responsive. This competitor, you know, understood me. They understood my concerns and they addressed my concerns. So now that they, . See your competitor. As somebody who is a problem solver, I can raise things with them and I know that they're gonna be addressed in a certain way. And if you are, you know, in a, in a project, you're selling a project post the sale, that typically in construction projects, there are always many things that deviate the project go off kilter, and if you've demonstrated in the sales process that you are quick to respond to concerns, even poorly voiced or unvoiced concerns, they start to believe that you will see problems earlier, that you will bring them to life, and that you will find ways to deal with them. So you don't want those objections to be raised with your competitor before you.

The second place that objections typically happen is right at the very end of the sales process. Just when you think you thought you were going to ink the contract a big objection pops up out of the floorboards. But here's the thing, you've already forecasted this deal. You sat in the sales meetings, which you hate with your boss, who you don't really like.

 You even used a lot of your own personal capital to convince your operations manager to give you your best installer because you said this is gonna be a strategic project, you know, it's got great margins we're gonna get more work in doing this. And you know, I need Stan. Stan's the man, and you've got Stan.

And now Stan's gonna be sitting there adrift, he's been taken off another project and he is gonna have downtime. You don't, you don't want that. Your, your boss has already baked the numbers into the budget, right? He's put those in there and so he's counting on those numbers. And maybe you already spent the commission, , you bought that electric truck that you always wanted, right?

It's so cool, So you're in a bit of a pickle now. Um, and, and, and the problem is when it comes right at the very end of the sale, you don't have time to disarm it, right? It's a ticking time bomb. It, it, it's, it's gonna go off and you just don't have enough time to take all the wires out, whether it's red or blue.

So, so what do you do? You got three options.

Option A, you can grovel and apologize and be obsequious, but it makes you look weak. And if it's still competitive, which many deals are until the, the, you know, this, all sales sizzlers know this. You've never won the deal until the contract is signed. So assume always that it could go to competitor.

Never assume that it is yours by right. And if you are groveling and you're looking weak and apologetic.  it makes your competitors look more professional better, and it could completely take you out of the deal at the last minute.

B, you, you give something up, you know, you concede something on price or you agree to take more risk, but it's negative.

It's all negative. There's no upside for you in all, in all of that and, and

C you ignore it because it's too late to deal with it. . Ultimately, the consequence of that is you will lose the deal.

So not getting objections out on the table early enough in the sales process is a big problem, right? And you want to be the one who solve that problem.

Don't let it to be a ticking time bomb that goes off or by yourself. You need to be in control. And here's, here's the thing, when they're buying services or products, it may be the first time that they've done that or they're little inexperience. Often, you know, companies will put interns in place to manage this selection process.

They may have juniors and they don't really know all of the intricacies and all of the pitfalls. That are associated with installing your products and services. So they, they, they don't know what questions to ask. They don't know what objections to voice. Now your job as the salesperson is to manage that sales process, which also includes managing the decision making process. You have to, you have to shepherd them through those hurdles. You have to say, these are the things that are important for you to consider. These are the things that we need to discuss. These are the people that we need to involve.

Often they won't know. In their organization, they should involve. And you might say, well, this is a particularly complex installation. We really need to be talking to your project manager on this one. Can we have him in the next meeting when we talk about this? And that might not have occurred to them.

So you're adding value by showing them what questions they need to ask. And the key part then is once you are shepherding them through the buying process, you need to be able to deal with those,  objections and have a response.

Now, objections are signposts to the sale.

They are opportunities for you to demonstrate your expertise, to show empathy and to build a personal relationship with your prospective buyer.

And there are really three ways in which we can, deal with objections. I call it, you know, seed them, sprout them, and disarm them.

So first of all, seeding objections. This is where , you might try and preempt certain objections that you know are gonna come up.

you should know the most common concerns and objections your buyers most often raise. That might be price, it might be risk management.  What happens when a project goes off course? How will you respond?  how do you deal with change orders? what do you, what do we do, you know, on a Sunday?

Who do we contact? Are you bonded?  So that you can financially fund this project. Can we defer some of the payments until after completion?

You know what a lot of these objections are, but here's the thing. In your organization, everybody's been through this, right? It's the same kind of objections. So, and I find it funny that people don't sit down and say, well, how would you deal with this objection. People. Wanna fall over themselves and make their own mistakes as opposed to learning from that tribal knowledge. I would suggest this, and I've done it with, with organizations, I've got a team of salespeople together. I've got a same team of installers together, and I've asked them, what are the most common objections?

And then role play, how we handle. Objections, and you'll see you'll have some very, very different ways of looking at an objection and of handling it. So I would, I would take an afternoon or at least an hour with maybe, maybe, you know, your business directors or your business owners, the people who've been there a long time, other salespeople.

 How about, you know, your installers? How about people from your administrative department? They're getting tons of questions. They're the first person to get a complaint cuz the bill's not being paid and they're, and you know, when the AR person calls up to find out why, then you know, something comes to the table so they don't know what the, the challenges are and get together.

And have that session where you get the top 10 or top 15 objections and you get you, now you've got maybe two or three responses for each of those and have somebody scribe that  down and put it into a manual. And that manual should live on your desk. Now, ultimately you will have memorized that manual cuz you deal with those objections.

 But you've got that goto document, it dramatically reduces the learning time for new people. And if somebody new comes into your organization, you'll say, look, here are the, here are the 10 most common objections. We're gonna have a little practice sales call tomorrow. And I'm going to use three or four of those objections and I want to see your response.

Gets new salespeople up to speed really, really quickly. And now that you know what  some of these objections are we can, we can,  seed. So that was, seeding the objections.

We're on seeding. We're on seeding objections. Okay, so we are, we're planting, we're almost planting a seed because we know how to handle some of these common objections and we want to deal with them proactively. We don't want 'em to surprise us at the end. Some of them are pretty big. Some of them might be to your advantage.

So let's take an example on complex projects. Over a certain scale and dollar amount, you know that you've got to have a dedicated project manager on site and as part of your bid, you know this because you've done projects when you haven't had a PM on site. And in those projects, invariably overrun decisions are delayed.

The coordination with other trades falters and projects go south and the people that have to pick up the pieces and eat those overruns are you.  You're gonna lose money on those. So, you know,  it's not possible to do this project without having a project manager, a dedicated project manager, which course adds cost to the project.

Now it's an objection.  you've heard your client say, well, we don't wanna pay for a project manager. We've got our own project manager.  you know, take the project manager fee out of this bid and it'll make it cheaper. So you've gotta deal with that objection at some point. Better to deal with it early.

How about seeding it? So what we should do is we can use,  language, like when you're in your bid discussions early on as you're shaping your bids, you might say, we have successfully executed over 30 similarly complex projects. And what we've found is that having an onsite project manager reduces  surprises, keeps change orders to a minimum, and ultimately delivers the project on time and on

cost. And the, the value of being able to have somebody to coordinate with all the other trades where there's madness in mayhem happen at any moment is priceless.

So now you've turned an objection and made it into a benefit. You've said that your project management skill is a necessity. You've articulated the benefits of why it's important and you've disarmed that objection even before it was formed.

So, Seeding seeding objections, key objections you know, you, you, and, and there might be a, an area in your business that you're really, really good at and , you want, you want to make sure that you have that discussed.

So let's talk about sprouting those objections. Because we want to get objections out of the way early on in the sales process. Deal with them. The common ones you know are gonna happen.

Let's say you are installing door and window systems. You know that dealing with the transitions is never really fully covered in their bid spec, right? They just don't understand that nuance and all of the things that can go wrrong

but you know your company, you and your company are experts. Your geniuses in this regard, you're far better than your competitors, so you might sprout this objection to your advantage.

You might ask, what concerns do you have, particularly in this area on the plans where the door transitions on one side from carpet to concrete on the other. And then you educate them about.

That particular challenge. And it's almost like you, you are setting a trap for your competitive cuz they're gonna ask that question and now of the competitor, well how are you gonna manage this transition? And they won't have such a good answer of you. So you've sprouted an objection, you know it's gonna come up and know it's gonna be a problem on the project.

Right? And now you've made it to your advantage.

The third area is disarming the objections as they come up and. if you get an objection, the first thing to do is, well, first thing to do is to listen actively. You know, if you're seeing some reticence or there is a quizzical look or there is a question, right?

Make sure that you are, you are paying attention. And then acknowledge that objection. Oh, okay, so you're concerned about whatever it is. Repeat that back, but , stop right there. don't go and answer that objection. You think you might have the most brilliant answer to that objection, but first of all, ask some questions.

Ah, interesting. So you said, tell me a little bit more about that. What is it that particularly concerns you? What are your misgivings? Where what? What do you worry about the most? And as they. Start to describe why they're concerned. Their objection might be, you know, very oblique to that first opening statement.

So as you get more information about what it is that they're really concerned about, you start to get to the root cause of their objection. And at that point you should answer, handle how you deal with that objection now that you've got it down to its naked root cause element.

We've talked about this before in other podcasts, that people don't make rational decisions.

They make emotional decisions. So a great way of handling objections is to use a story of, oh yes, we've, uh, in, in, in fact what we found with such and such a builder. We had that same challenge and this is how we, this is how we dealt with it. And talk about the success involved in solving that particular objection.

So you've got some emotion and story associated with it. And then lastly, you know, follow up  test for Success. Have. Have I adequately answered your concern because you don't want that concern festering.

So there we have it, a very simple process to navigate sales objections. 

Sales objections are signposts to the sale.

You should welcome those objections. You need to master handling objections, do your homework, and have answers to the most common objections.

You've got three techniques you can seed some objections very early on, so they're brought out early to your advantage.

You can sprout by guiding your buyer through the decision making process and making sure you cover the objections that you know you are always gonna get, but you don't wanna leave to the end.

And thirdly, disarming those objections through active listening, empathy, questioning to get to root cause, and then showing how you solve those root cause objections through example stories.

Hope you enjoyed this episode. Go out there, sell, sizzle, and handle those objections, and we'll see you next week.

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