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Like so many women I have interviewed, Linda Richardson never intended to have a business career.

She did not plan on starting a sales performance company (Richardson) that has been named a Top 20 Sales Training company for six consecutive years.

She did not plan on starting a company that would have a global presence.

She did not plan on selling that company.

But, for Linda, like many of us, life does not go as planned!

An English major and an avid reader, Linda pursued a graduate degree in educational psychology. Soon thereafter Linda serendipitously found herself hired at the Institute for Emotive Therapy’s (now known as the Albert Ellis Institute) school. I say serendipitously because working there was one of the turning points in her career. While teaching there Linda regularly observed world renowned psychologist Albert Ellis’s clinical sessions. His masterful questioning of clients had a profound impact on Linda’s way of thinking and eventually lay the foundation for her concept of consultative selling.

In 1975 New York City hovered on the brink of bankruptcy. All teachers who had not earned tenure were let go. Linda, who was an untenured principal, was among them. It was a discouraging time for Linda and the city. Jobs were difficult to find and Linda was having no luck in securing another education position. A friend arranged for her to interview with Manufacturers Hanover (which became Chemical Bank and eventually part of JP Morgan Chase). Linda was reluctant to go,(“I know nothing about business” she told her interviewer) but lacking a viable alternative she went on the interview and was hired to head up the bank’s training.

Banking was just becoming competitive (deregulation opened opportunities and changed the landscape) and banks were actually competing for customers. Linda was charged with “finding a sales training program” for the bankers. Much to her chagrin they were all not relevant to the bankers sales situations and had examples like “selling tractors and things.” Linda was convinced that she could develop a better product and the first thing she had to do was sell her boss on the idea. Having sold her boss on the idea she partnered with the trust department which needed this “new” skill set. Relying on her experience as a teacher and using her observations of Ellis’ clinical questioning, Linda changed selling which to that point was product focused.

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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 a consummate change-maker and a Games-based learning pioneer, Ken Thompson writes, speaks and deploys Games to teach corporate teams, the consequences of their decisions and help them manage change in business processes. He is the managing director of BioTeams Design and Swarm Teams.

RD:> Are you a gamer?

KT:> My kids are fanatical gamers. They humiliate me all the time, when I play with them. In fact they no longer include me even when they play Xbox soccer. So! I would not describe myself a gamer.

RD:> How did you get into Games and stuff like that?

KT:> I am a social mathematician. My educational background is in mathematics. Then I worked for more than thirty years in change management. I wrote books about teams, social networks and change management. I gave a TedX talk about high-performing teams.

Over  two decades, as a hobby, I have been building these models, simulations and games. In the last five years or so, my clients started asking me to commercialize these simulations and games.

Some are pure simulations. For example, I have a simulation that optimizes how one organizes a sales process; another is about determining ROI from social campaigns.

Many are games and are based on immersive-learning principles. Most of these games are paper and pencil and role-based games, i.e. hybrid or blended learning game. Typically, a game runs for a full day with a leadership team.

RD:> I completely relate. We did those for twenty years prior to starting PAKRA.

KT:> Yes! In these games, I add:

(1) Realistic and relatable constructs i.e. stories with artifacts.

(2) Then there are, what I call, “golden rules”. By “golden rules” I mean: You should “Always do this” or You should “Never do that”.

(3) Basic resource constraints.

(4) Dilemmas and conflicts. Dilemmas, such as, “I want six pack abs” and “I love chocolates”.

(5) There are, of course, roles and metrics.

(6) The component of social learning where I facilitate in-person or online.

They typically play these games for 3 rounds. The first round is to normalize the mechanics and at the end, the players will be supremely confident. Then in the second round, the unexpected happens; for example, the suppliers increase prices, the market demand collapses, competitors eat their lunch, Euro spins out of control etc.  In the third round, the innovation happens. Almost all participants find these blended experiential learning as the best way to learn.