The Art of Dodging Objections

Most sales pros hate objections. When you think you’re doing a good job presenting, the last thing you want to hear is “I want to think it over” or “I heard your service department sucks” or the myriad of other reasons prospects give when they’re leery of buying.

There is another way to think about objections, though. When you want something, it's human nature to come up with a reason why you can’t have it. Take, for example, the grandd...addy of objections: “It’s too expensive.” Every time you’ve treated yourself to a luxury hasn’t the thought “it’s too expensive” run through your mind? In fact, isn’t the fact that “it’s too expensive” part of its very desirability?

Most, if not all, sales objections contain the seeds of a successful sale. “I want to think it over” implies that the customer secretly wants to buy. Even the “your service department sucks” has the hidden message that “if it weren’t for that, I’d be buying.”  Tom Hopkins, arguably the dean American sales trainers, puts it this way: “Until you hear an objection, you’re not going to make a sale.”

So there’s no reason to lose heart when the inevitable objections surface. The challenge is what to about them.

There are two generic approaches to handling objections. The first approach is “persuasion”, where the sales pro convinces the customer that the objection isn’t really an objection or doesn’t really matter. The second approach is “leverage” where the sales pro delves into the objection in order to move the sale forward. Note that the two methods are exact opposites. However, they both can work, but under different circumstances.

Let’s start with the most basic technique, which I call “the artful dodge.” This is strictly carnival barker stuff and I've seldom used it, but other sales pros tell me that it does work, at least sometimes.

TECHNIQUE #1: THE ARTFUL DODGE. To execute, simply acknowledge the objection and then shelve it without answering. Like so:

Sales Pro: “…our list of satisfied customers include…”
Customer: “I’ll bet that this is going to cost us an arm and a leg.” (The objection.)
Sales Pro: “Are you worried about the cost?” (The acknowledgement.)
Customer: “Yes.” 
Sales Pro: “Value for your dollar is always important. I’ll get to the price in a minute and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. That’s certainly been the case with our customer base, which includes…” (The Artful Dodge.)

Hopkins says that shelving the objection works because you don’t want the customer to continue focusing on the objection. If the rest of the presentation is strong, there’s a good chance that the customer will no longer have that objection or even have forgotten all about it.

Be forewarned, though. This technique runs the risk of annoying the customers who may feel that you’re brushing them off.  So in my next posts, I’ll give you some more sophisticated and customer-savvy ways to cope with objections.