Most sellers say they’re handling objections correctly
Do you know why they make recruits in the ARMY crawl under barbed wire on obstacle courses?
I was in the ARMY, and I loved it, tank driver & assault trooper (M113), it was enormous fun. The reason they do the barbed wire trick is, so you learn to stay low when moving around the battlefield. BECAUSE if you stay low, you’re much less likely to get shot. The number one thing a soldier needs to do is …. stay alive….. if you get shot, you can’t do much else. Therefore, a critical skill you need to master is moving around the battlefield without being killed. – Make sense? Stay low and go, go, go.
The way they trained us in this skill has some merit in today’s business world. The ARMY leaders (SGTs, CPLs) made us do this repeatedly and slowly increased the level of difficulty of the skill.
And as a result, we got better and better at this critical skill.
My point is. If you need to be good at something, to do your job well, practise it.
Objections are a pretty good example of where this works well.
Objection training (Basic drill).
Step 1 – Figure out what the top 4 objections are you, and the rest of the team are getting every week.
Step 2 – Find who, in your team, is doing the best job right now at handling these objections and get them to tell everyone else what they are saying or doing to get past these objections.
Step 3 – Practise it, then increase the difficulty to secure the learning.
If your objection response strategy is sound and you’ve practised it. Then you and your team should be able to handle ‘standard’ objections with ease in your everyday selling situations whenever they come up.
Most sellers say they’re handling objections correctly, but I’d argue they’re not really. My observations indicate most are easily ‘baulked’ by the very simplest of objections. No time, No need, No budget, We use someone else. Stammer, stammer, stutter, pause… crickets. Ask a team member today what their objection strategy is for “we’ve already got one”?
Does this all sound too hard? Well, chances are you’ve already done it.
Remember the McDonalds, 2 All Beef patties competition from the late ’80s? – I do. They said if you could say the entire ingredients of a Big Mac in 4 seconds or less, you ‘won’ a free coke. This was an example of marketing genius. To this very day, I can easily rattle off the recipe for a Big Mac in well under the 4secs. Just as most of us could back then.’
I’d argue if you can force yourself to remember, practise and regurgitate a burger recipe for the equivalent reward of about .90cents of Coke. Do you think you should practise your objection response strategies so you can sell more, make more commission and have a better week/ day/ life? So why haven’t you?
I don’t know why you haven’t either, but you really should.
