Every salesperson will encounter hesitation from customers. What separates good from great salespeople is knowing how to handle objections. It’s up to sales leaders to ensure their teams know what sales objections are, how to overcome them, and how to avoid rejection.
Train Your Team to Recognize Common Sales Objections
Customers communicate sales objections in many ways. They may express minor reservations, concerns, or doubts. They may act indecisively or procrastinate on a purchasing decision. Or they may express overt dissatisfaction with your company and its products or services. Regardless of how customers express sales objections, it’s important that your team know how to recognize and respond to them.Sales objections come in many forms but most fall into one of five categories:
- Price: The prospect doesn’t see the value of your product or service.
- Authority: The prospect doesn’t feel confident independently making a decision.
- Trust: The prospect struggles to take your sales rep at their word.
- Complacency: The prospect is content with the status quo.
- Competitors: The prospect needs what you’re selling but not from you.
The above objections, while resolute, aren’t deal-breakers. Most often they’re simply excuses that prospects use to mask their uncertainty. And so, by removing that uncertainty, sales reps can remove the objection as well.
Provide Your Team Techniques for Handling Objections
What makes a salesperson successful isn’t how many objections they get but what they do with them. If you want your sales team to handle objections like a professional, train them on these five winning techniques for bouncing back after they’ve been shut down by a prospect.- Express curiosity. Encourage sales reps to show genuine interest and move the conversation forward by asking open-ended questions.
- Offer a conditional close. Teach sales reps to take a potential customer’s objection and make it a condition for agreeing to purchase. Solve the condition and they’ll land the sale.
- Reframe the objection. Give your salespeople a two-part formula to help prospects see their concerns in a new light. First, they agree with the concern. Then, they change the frame by highlighting the positives rather than the negatives.
- Come back with a boomerang. This is another two-part formula you can train your team to master. Have them repeat the prospect’s objection then take that argument full circle by using it as a reason to make the purchase.
- Show empathy. Your sales team can put prospects at ease by following a simple pattern: feel, felt, found. Train them to empathize with how the prospect feels, share that others have felt the same, and explain that those people have found the opposite to be true.
Navigating sales objections can be difficult for many reasons. It’s a lot of pressure to come up with a response in real-time, and it may even feel confrontational. That’s why it’s important to prepare your team with plenty of training and practice.
Quickly Deliver Sales Enablement Training to Your Team
As a sales leader, you’ve likely experienced the challenge of trying to quickly create and distribute sales training to your team. Traditionally, content creation apps can be complex and have a steep learning curve. Adding content to a learning management system is cumbersome. And off-the-shelf content is dated and uneditable. But, an online training system such as Rise changes all of that.Because it’s an all-in-one online training system, Rise makes it easy to create guides, walkthroughs, and other training content in minutes. When you finish you can share your training with your sales team in just a few clicks. Best of all, Rise includes templates, prebuilt business lessons, and sample courses such as this sales enablement course, which features the objection handling tactics discussed in this article. So even if you’re not a training expert, you can still easily create sales training for your team.