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Ability to Overcome Objections is one of the most important Influencing Skill an employee can have

Thursday, 20 June 2013

Madhurima Basu Dutt

Metrics and Skills

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1 Comment

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Whether you are trying to influence a team member to step up their participation in a new project or you are influencing a customer to upgrade their services or a prospect to consider your product or service versus your competitors, objections will come your way and you have to overcome those objections.

Overcoming customer’s objections is a skill you use to influence people. This is needed in collaborative projects, in sales, in customer service and any human-interaction. If you can hook others to your story or to make others listen to your Point of View (POV), then it allows you to move the sale forward. How well you or your employees overcome objections, impacts the sales cycle, the reputation factor, and the trusted advisor factor. These factors affect both long-term and short-term customer experience. To achieve that, your sales and customer service reps and team leaders must preemptively know the objections that will be raised and appear to be knowledgeable when they overcome the objection.

Explicit Objections are objections that are clearly communicated by the prospect or customer or stakeholder. When it is communicated, you have an opportunity to analyze their understanding and reposition your argument. Keep in mind, only acknowledging their objection is not enough. Minimizing the emotion behind the objection is as bad as ignoring the objection. The response (whether it be social media, face-to-face, email, phone, chat etc.) must add to your credibility without appearing to be dismissive. In particular, this trait is important when you are handling outbound customer interactions. Employees who plan their call (or interaction), make a list of common objections, understand and can communicate the talking/talk-off points, typically overcome objections better. They are also better at delivering solutions that the customer desires. As they do this right, the customer or the person they are interacting with, begins to trust them.

Implicit objections are objections that exist in your prospect or customer or stakeholder’s mind (sometimes without much clarity) but are not spoken aloud. They might not be sure of what they are objecting to. It might be color or font size or something more important like the amount of re-learn they have to do. The reasons are infinite. Eliciting that information is a skill that comes with active listening and asking open-ended questions. Employees who can do this appropriately, increase their sales conversion, have lower sales cycle and can manage their work-load and WIP (pipeline) better.

Jim Keenan in his blog gives a wonderful example about overcoming implicit objection. Also a great list of typical objections that a sales rep faces and the ways to overcome them is given at this here.

Do you care about successful conversion? For example, if sales conversion is your KPI, then you should learn and measure “overcoming objection metric”. Think about the lost opportunities or delayed projects or lost sales you had, you are very likely to find that there were perhaps more than one objection that was not addressed appropriately.

As Jill Konrath writes in Sales Call Planning Guide.

"These are the types of responses every seller dreams of hearing at the end of their meeting. Unfortunately, more often than not they hear:

“Thanks for your time; if we ever need one we’ll give you a call."

“We’ll think about it and get back to you."

“It’s not exactly what we were looking for."

"You’re too pricey for us."

There are three critical reasons why most sellers don’t win large contracts from big companies:

- They don’t invest enough time preparing for the meeting.

- They don’t understand the components of an effective initial sales meeting.

- They focus on their own offering – not the prospective company’s business needs."

Our results show that sales reps, customer service reps (CSRs) and team leaders who are trained and coached (in a targeted way) on Overcoming Objection skills can convert 130% of customers more than those who are not formally trained or coached or practice these skills.

PAKRA^®Games simulate your work processes and provide a practice environment where your employees acquire critical-thinking and decision-making skills—before they engage with prospects and customers. We measure various metrics for every action and click that a learner makes in our Games. All our games provide a real simulation of the operational situation.

Our Games can teach you a real learning experience in overcoming objections. We score “overcoming objections" in all our cross-selling customer service, sales, customer interaction and leadership games.

Instructions for the game-player or learner emphasizing influencing customers. Here are samples of instructions of some of our games:

"Make sure that you are positive, polite and respectful to your customer and express yourself clearly and effectively. Overcome their objections."

"You must accurately identify and communicate whether your caller's issue is within the scope by asking probing questions."

"You should proceed at acquiring a customer with adequate background research."

"Address customer's concerns. Overcome Objections."

"In order to increase the likelihood that you will close the sale you must create a product value that matches your customer's needs. You must effectively overcome any objections that your customer has."

"You should be thorough with your research about the customer’s type of need; where required, before you call a customer."

1. Gage R&R measurement system is used to score our games.

2. Instant feedback to change behaviors, especially when the choices indicate unacceptable behavior, is provided.

3. Our Games can be implemented to teach sales associates how to leverage information while contacting B2B prospects.

4. Our games can be implemented as better targeting techniques for learning appropriate skills.

The following is an example you can use when you coach your sales rep or CSR.

Lili Anderson from Connector calls Wylie on a busy day

He manages Investment bank's data networks and connectivity. He cannot walk 1 feet outside his office, without someone stopping him and telling him about some connectivity issue. Where is the time to think this through?
Not another call! Seriously! Why should he answer?
Can you stop him from being a firefighter?

1. Overcome Explicit Objections (Bad response from sales rep Lili from the company Connector)

2. Overcome Explicit Objections (Good response from sales rep Lili)

Lili: Hello Mr. James. This is Lili Anderson from Connector. Is this still a good time for us to chat?
Wylie: Well! Actually no. I can only give you 5 minutes because I was called into another meeting. Too many things going on. And Lili you can call me Wylie.
Lili: Thanks Wylie. We have to reschedule. You would love your problems to be addressed. Would it be possible to take a look at your calendar and let me know your availability during the rest of the week
Wylie: Actually that’s a great idea. Hang on. (checks calendar). How about 3:30 pm Thursday? Can you send me a meeting invite.

3. Overcome Implicit objections (Bad response from sales rep Lili)

Lili: I was only going to make this meeting an introduction to our company but more importantly learn the connectivity needs of your company. Based on the research I did about your company, is it correct that you have three office locations?
Wylie: I’m not sure if I am ready to switch yet? Yes we have three office locations.
Lili: Do most of your employees access the network via VPN?
Wylie: Yeah. I have little time and I do not know what you are learning from this interaction. Just email me the stuff you have.

4. Overcome Implicit objections (Good response from sales rep Lili)

Lili: I was only going to make this meeting an introduction to our company but more importantly learn the connectivity needs of your company. Based on the research I did about your company what connectivity issues are there in your locations, is it correct that you have three office locations?
Wylie: I’m not sure if I am ready to switch yet? Yes we have 3 brick and mortar locations, 150 active users and 17 different data feeds that are accessed back-end to integrate with our portal. We have to buffering issues, data does not flow and stuff like that.
Lili: Thanks for the information. We actually work with companies like Glasshouse, Triametrics and Zoomvest, where we dealt with similar if not same problems.
Wylie: What did you learn from them?
Lili: Well! They had situations where their switch modes and software updates were sometimes congruent to the availability. By switching from MotoConn to us because we are able to provide newer fiber-optics at an affordable rate, they were able to solve those problems.
Wylie: Really.