Negotiation Skills for Handling Sales Objections More Effectively

Handling sales objections effectively is crucial for any salesperson. Too often, objections are taken at face value, leading to missed opportunities and failed sales. The Black Swan Group's approach focuses on understanding the deeper emotions behind objections to address them more effectively.

Common Mistakes in Handling Objections

Too many people take sales objections at face value. For example, if you hear "your price is too expensive," you take that at face value. You don't gather any more information or you try to explain or justify the reasoning behind your pricing.

Explaining or justifying sounds desperate and never really works the way that we think it's going to work. Asking questions to make the other person think about what they're saying with the objection, in my opinion, it's tiptoeing around the real issue. It's not direct enough to go at the core issue of what the person is saying and it normally doesn't get us the response that we want.

Effective Techniques: Labels and Mirrors

Instead of asking questions, I always like to use labels and mirrors, trying to figure out what they are not saying. Let's take a couple of common objections and talk about some ways that we can handle those objections.

For "that's too expensive," a lot of people ask, "What are you comparing us to?" I don't think that's going at the core issue. My initial response is one of my favorite go-to labels: "It sounds like the value just isn't there for you." If the value is there, the price isn't an issue. Test it with "It sounds like the value just isn't there for you." You'll likely get one of two responses. The first response is a correction: "It's not that the value isn't there for us. It's just we don't have those sorts of funds right now and we can't make that payment up front." The second one is, "Well yeah, for that price the value just isn't there for us." They can't justify making that payment, so dig deeper with labels and mirrors and say something like "justify that" to elicit a response to dive deeper into that objection.

Handling Specific Objections

For "I need some time to think about it," my first way to approach it is with a mirror and I would say, "Some time to think about it?" If they say something like "I'm gonna need a couple of weeks to think about it," that's a red flag. If they say a couple of days, they might be genuine. You could also label that and say, "It sounds like you're not confident that this is the right decision." If somebody needs time after you've established trust and built rapport, that's a yellow flag. So, sounds like you're not confident that this is the right solution for you to elicit a response.

If they need to go back to their superiors internally and discuss how to make this work, now you've got more information. You can start to ask calibrated questions like "What specifically are you going to tell them about our conversation?" You can say things like, "They will probably have a few issues with what we talked about today. What will you tell them to reassure them that this is a good idea?"

Conclusion

Understanding the root causes of sales objections is key to addressing them effectively. By using labels and mirrors, you can uncover deeper issues and respond more appropriately. Implement these techniques to see a significant improvement in handling objections and closing sales.