Newsletter Archive - Sales / Marketing
Defense Preparations
07/20/2010 - We received the following response from a Yellow Pages supplier in response to our suggestion they advertise in the YP Talk newsletter to reach the greater Yellow Pages industry:
Hi Ken,
We're a very small company and cannot afford advertising. Thank you for offering.
For those of you in sales especially those local sales people, does this sound familiar? If there is one thing I hear repeatedly from reps in this industry, it’s that the objections list is getting longer each day. So how do you get around this and the other hundreds of objections you seem to encounter each day?
Probably one of the best summaries I have seen for anticipating and dealing with objections was in Jeffrey Gitomer’s – The Sales Bible: The Ultimate Sales Resource (link on Amazon). Even if the book was written back in 2008, it still has a bunch of great ideas if you haven’t looked at in a while. In it Gitomer suggests that “…prevent objections by discussing them in your presentation before the prospect has a chance to voice them…”
Be prepared to defend. How? Gitomer’s suggests the following process to defend against those objections, with some additional thoughts from me:
- Identify all possible objections – everything from the “no one uses the print books” to “we don’t have any money”
- Write them down – helps in your memory process as well as definitively quantifying what the objection is
- Script responses to and closing questions for each – remember the goal is to get past the objection to move to a close
- Develop sales tools that enhance and support each response – that could include testimonials letters, videos, comparison charts, supporting documentation or stories about other customers who had similar problems/concerns and how they handled them. Anything that will enhance the objection to objection–to-close process
- Rehearse the scripts, use role plays – practice, practice, practice
- Tweak your scripts -- just as it suggests
- Make final revision based on real world situations – how did the responses work in live discussions with your clients?
- Keep a master notebook with the scripts for future reference, and to share with a co-worker
Oh, and that supplier that said they couldn’t afford to advertise, well, they didn’t, and now they are no longer in business. Better believe I have them on my list of testimonials on what happens when you don’t advertise with the industry leader….