Why you can’t close sales

From the desk of Roy Furr, Wednesday, 5:58 am

We spend our whole life making excuses.

Why we got a bad grade in school. Why someone else got picked over us for the team. Why we haven’t gotten a promotion yet. Why we’re getting fired (or shouldn’t be). Why January’s not even over and we’ve already botched our New Year’s Resolution.

And…

Why I have to say “no” to the salesperson (who’s really pretty nice)… Or ignore the ad (which is really pretty compelling).

In fact, we have a whole arsenal of excuses at our disposal for every little situation in life.

We know just what to say to justify poor performance. We know what to tell others (and ourselves) to skirt our indiscretions.

We’re like Houdini with our ability to get out of taking responsibility for things in our life.

And one of the things we’re particularly good at is getting rid of a sales person or sales message (of course if we weren’t good at saying “no” we’d be dead broke and have warehouses full of junk we’ll never use).

The list of excuses given to a salesperson is endless. However, there are six common objections that come back over and over again — that must be addressed for any sale to take place:

• Not enough time. I don’t have enough time to deal with this right now. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to even think about making a buying decision. Even if I had your product I wouldn’t have the time to use it.
• Not interested. Well, I really don’t see how this is for me. I mean, it’s not really what I was looking for. I don’t think it’ll meet my needs.
• Not a unique solution. Oh, this is just like what Fred’s selling down the street. I know I can get this somewhere else, so I don’t need to buy right now.
• Don’t believe you. Those are some pretty big claims you’re making and I just don’t see how they could be true. Sure, you can promise the moon, but I need evidence… I need proof you’re going to be able to give me what you say.
• Not enough money. Oh, I can’t afford to put money towards this right now. That’s too expensive (for the benefits I expect to get from it). Is this really going to be worth it? How am I going to justify spending this money to (spouse, friend, relative, etc.)?
• Don’t need to decide today. I don’t have to decide today. I can always buy that later. If I don’t buy today it’s not a big deal, I can always get it later.

Sit down with your product, your advertisement, your sales script and seriously think about how to answer each of these objections.

Build the answers into your sales message. So even as the objection comes to your prospect’s mind it’s already been answered.

This greases the skids to the sale and will turn many wavering prospects into happy customers.

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