Overcome ANY Objection…

By preventing it in the first place. It is that easy, if you want to overcome any objection, all you have to do is prevent it from ever happening.

99.9% of the time you can trace a “no close” back to an early mistake or a skipped step in your sales process. Let me say that again, 99.9% of your “no closes” are because you made an early mistake in the sales process or even worse, you felt it was ok to skip a step. And I only use 99.9% of the time because there is always that salesperson who has that one customer that is the exception.

Now, let’s think about this for a second, if 99.9% of our no closes can be traced back to a mistake or a skipped step, that means that we create the objections that we can not overcome. This can be a difficult concept for a salesperson to accept. Most salespeople would much rather blame the customer, the manager, the inventory, the economy, etc. rather than blame themselves.

The first key to preventing an objection from happening in the first place is to take ownership of the mistakes that you made in the past. You MUST accept 100% responsibility that every “no close” that you had in the past was your fault. Next you need to identify when and what the mistake was that you made. Once you have identified this, then all you have left is to do something to prevent it from happening again.

Here are some examples of the customers objection and the mistake that was made earlier in the sale:

“I am just not sure this is the right car for me.”

Right now, this customer lacks certainty about the vehicle. Most likely this comes from the Customer Profile step being skipped because the customer probably walked in and said they were there to see a specific vehicle. This is one of the Worst Things that can Happen to a Salesperson.

“These payments are too high.”

Right now, this customer does not see enough value in the vehicle to justify the payment. This can happen because of several different mistakes made earlier in the sale:

• Most common reason this happens is we land the customer on too much car. We don’t use the customers current vehicle to help determine the customer’s budget and select a vehicle near that budget to begin with.
• We ask a customer if they want specific (typically expensive) features, such as navigation or All-Wheel Drive). All the while never asking them if they wanted to pay for these expensive features. In this area, we as salespeople set ourselves up for failure more often than not.
• Another very common mistake in this situation is during the Presentation and Demonstration steps of the process you talked about features the customer was not interested in and had no value to them. Every time you tell the customer about a feature that has no interest to them, you are asking them to pay for something they do not want or need. In other words, if 50% of the features you talk about the customer is not interested in, then in the customer’s mind the vehicle is only worth 50% of what you are asking.

These examples are only a small sample of the many mistakes that can be made early in the sales process. This list can actually go on and on. In fact, I could continue to write out examples for a week straight and still not list them all.

The most important thing you can do is to start to track the objections that you can not overcome and study the situations to learn from them and prevent them from happening again. To effectively do this, you MUST be accept full responsibility for the “no close,” analyze what mistakes could have been made in your process, and then identify how not to let them happen again.

I recommend using our Objection Log to start understanding what objections you need to learn to prevent.