208: Virtual Selling - Handling Objections

<p>Most buyers are hurting at the moment, as entire industries are under assault and many of the remainder are in a perilous state. The common American style of aggressive salesperson reaction to pushback from buyers just doesn’t work in Japan in normal times, let alone now.  We need to recognise this when we are sitting in front of the buyer, when we are both online and we need to change our mindset.  We hopefully will have thought about the possible objections from the buyer ahead of time and will have dealt with these already in the solution provision stage.  There may still be concerns and we will have flushed these out with our trial close.</p> <p> </p> <p>We have to see objections are good to have.  The worst thing is to have no objections and no sale.  There is nothing to work with in this situation.  The buyer is hiding their objections because they have decided not to buy, but don’t want the aggravation of the seller arguing with them up about it or being annoying.  Getting an objection then is good news, not as good as getting a ”yes”, but still giving us something to apply our sales skill to.</p> <p> </p> <p>We know there is never a “no” answer.  It is just a “no” at this time in the market, in this budget cycle, for this offer, in this current context.  We have to see the objection as a signal that we didn’t do a good enough job educating the buyer about the value our solution will bring.  Remember, we made the decision for them to buy.  We looked through our solution line up and selected a solution to match their issue.  If we didn’t have the right match we would have moved on to find a buyer we could serve.</p> <p> </p> <p>There is a structure we can follow to make sure we are going to be able to help the buyer who is in doubt still. In this order we need to listen, cushion, question, provide evidence of value and then evaluate their reaction.  Listening sounds easy except that most salespeople are not skilled at really listening.  They jump around between pretending to listen and selective listenin