Handling Objections

One of the leading sales training topics is “handling objections”. In this part, we discuss potential scenarios where the customer would come up with some arguments for not buying the product or the proposed service. And we teach the salesperson how to handle such situations and come up with additional arguments and explanations to convince the customer.

Firstly, I was curious whether customers/buyers were trained to develop objections. I always had a hard time understanding that part. Why would they even keep talking to the salesperson if they had valid objections for not buying?

My field sales experience showed me that customers with valid objections did not buy anyway. And for me, it was useless to push or manipulate them to buy. On the contrary, understanding the type of customers having valid objections helped me to increase my sales effectiveness because I was not losing time with them.

I had a hard time to modelize this approach to explain to other salespeople that I recruited… until I learned about the following explanation of the Performance from Tim Gallwey’s Inner game method:

Performance = Potential – Interference

When you consider the Performance as the buying performance of the customer, it becomes evident that objections reflect the interferences that the customers have. 

Those interferences can be a lack of knowledge, time, budget, fear of making a mistake, lack of self-confidence…

In all cases, the customer will not talk about those interferences explicitly because they are not aware of them most of the time. And in a sales/buying conversation, they emerge in the form of objection.  

Objections are just a way for the customers to rationalize their interferences. That is why the best way to handle objections is to focus on the interferences generating them. Because those interferences are preventing customers from are their buying decision.

And here comes the tricky part! How to focus on the interferences. That is where the coaching mindset becomes key to success. Only through nonjudgmental questions can you reveal the customers’ interferences. Therefore, coaching in the selling context is not only about the well-being of the salespeople; it is also about their sales performance. As sales performance contributes to mental well-being, it creates a virtuous circle that would interest any salesperson in coaching.