Turning Objections Into Objectives

As a salesperson, I’m sure you’ve been in the situation of being in front of a great prospect or customer, about to make a big sale, and everything seems to be going well, and then – boom, the customer throws out the dreaded objection. You scramble in your mind to try and figure out how to overcome the objection and still make the sale. Does this sound familiar? I’m sure it does. If you are a salesperson that struggles with overcoming objections, following this simple process of turning the customer’s objection into a sales objective will not only help you close more sales, but will also add value for your customers and build deeper, longer term relationships with them:

1. Restate the customer’s objection as an objective

The first step in overcoming objections is to actually turn them into a mutual objective. Here is an example of how to overcome the typical price objection: When your customer says, “Your price is too high”, you respond with, “So our objective is to ensure that you are getting a good value with respect to the product or service that we are providing, correct?”

What this does is it changes your customer’s objection into a positive. Usually your customer will respond to your question with a ‘yes’, and you can continue to the next step in the process.

2. Ask some additional qualifying questions

Now that you both know what the objective is, you can ask some additional questions to assist the customer in defining what it is they really want. To continue the conversation from above, you might ask some of the following questions:

What problem will my product or service solve for you?

What is that problem currently costing you and your organization?

How will my product or service solve that problem?

Looking at the long term cost of your problem, how valuable do you see our solution to it?

When you say that the price is too high, what are you basing that on?

Basically, you are assisting your customer in identifying what the problem is, what it is costing them, and how your product or service solves their problem. As long as your product or service adds more value in the customer’s eyes than what it costs, you will make the sale.

3. Re-state the value and close the sale

Now that the customer has answered your questions, you simply need to recap the conversation you had by re-stating the value, and then asking for the sale. For example, “So Mr. Customer, I understand that the problem you are currently having is _______, and it’s costing you ______. I think we both agree that my product or service will solve your problem and provides a solid value based on the price, so, how would you like to move forward?”

By using the above steps to turn your customer’s objections into objectives, you can easily turn their objections into a sale, and build a stronger, longer term relationship at the same time.

Happy selling!

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