DIMENSIONE PULITO INTERNATIONAL ::: Monthly magazine for industrial cleaning sanitization and environmental hygiene

::: How to overcome OBJECTIONS during sales pitches
management by Claudio Serra
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The successful outcome of any negotiation depends on the seller’s ability to handle this delicate stage when a difference in opinion and interests may lead to a stalemate. Here are a few tips ...

Sooner or later, in any sales pitch, the customer is bound to air a few objections.
These may concern the characteristics and technical features of the product, the terms and conditions or the services offered as part of the sale. The successful outcome of any negotiation depends on the seller’s ability to handle this delicate stage when a difference in opinion and interests may lead to a stalemate.
A seller’s most frequent reaction to any objection is to counter it by pointing out a series of advantages to prove that the objection in question is unjustified. By doing this, however, he ends up in a no-win situation: if his arguments are successful, then the customer must admit to being wrong and, as no one ever likes admitting this, the customer will then attempt to defend his position even in the face of obvious proof to the contrary. This is because his image, dignity and self-esteem will be at stake.
If, on the other hand, the seller fails to convince the customer to change his mind, then the product will not be seen as advantageous.
In either case, the result is always the same: a lost sale. So is there a way to avoid this trap? Is there a way to make someone appreciate the benefits of a product despite their own prejudice against it or an unfavourable opinion? The first thing one needs to do is to ask: Why is the customer raising an objection?
There are many reasons for this. It is most certainly not simply because “He doesn’t understand anything”, the most common alibi used by sellers who are unable to see things from the customer’s point of view.
Customers make objections:
• because the information provided or their personal experience do not coincide with what the seller is saying;
• because they have certain fears and wish to be reassured: the fear of making a mistake, the fear of paying over the odds, the fear of being conned if the proposal seems too attractive, the fear of changing products, the fear of changing suppliers, etc. Such fears are seen as a sign of weakness and so people are most unlikely to express these willingly;
• because they want to defend themselves in the case of a hard-sale. Objections help keep the salesman at a distance and maintain a kind of “safety zone” giving the customer time to reflect and take his decision without being unduly influenced;
• because they are truly and strongly interested in what the seller is proposing and want to be absolutely sure that there are no other unmentioned reasons why they should not buy the product. Paradoxically, in this case an objection indicates great interest;
• because they want to obtain further benefits: objections are used to haggle over the price in the belief that the salesman will drop the price or offer something more in desperation, not wanting to lose the sale;
• because the product or the service being proposed by the seller appears to be less advantageous than a similar one from the competition: the seller stresses the economic advantages while the customer points out its lower quality. If the customer is mainly interested in quality, then all his arguments will pivot around this.

::: How does an objection come about?
Another important aspect to bear in mind is the origin of the objection: does it come from personal experience or from a conviction, a belief? One needs to understand the mental process behind his objection. Here are a few possibilities.

1. Comparison
The customer compares the characteristics and advantages offered by a product to those of another. This is quite normal when faced with a choice between different solutions and offers. Comparison may, however, be limited to certain aspects: the seller stresses the most advantageous aspects of his product and the customer makes his decision on the basis of what is most meaningful for him. This means that the seller must understand what is most important for the customer and what criteria are or should be used to make any comparisons.
When choosing a cleaning machine, for example, various different criteria may come into play at this stage: its economic viability, its technological content, its efficiency, its expected working life, its ease of use, the spareparts policy, etc. Each customer/user has his own criteria and will adopt these when comparing different machines. If the seller fails to recognise these, any attempt of his to convince the customer with arguments and advantages that reflect his own criteria, rather than the customer’s, will be a waste of time.

2. Experience
When making an objection, the customer may well refer to previous personal experience, which may be positive (“I need a machine like the one with great value for money one of my competitors uses. It’s really good for large surfaces…”) or negative (“I thought I could save money, but instead I ended up spending much more than I thought, what with servicing and repairs…”). When a customer enters the sales outlet, asking for information on technical matters and the price and then makes a few objections, we have no idea about his previous experience with such a product. It is easy to claim that a machine is “high performance” and “low maintenance”. However, if the customer has already had some experience with a similar machine that worked out to be more of a cost than a problem-solver, he will inevitably raise objections to the seller’s claims.

3. Convictions and hear-say
A customer objects by referring to another person’s experience. If a friend or relative, this will have the same value as though it were his own. If, on the other hand, it is a classic case of “hear-say”, the seller enters more difficult, slippery terrain: an opinion based on rumour, sometimes deliberately spread to discredit a product and raise doubts in potential customers’ minds.
Such opinions are harder to confute and more abstract, because they appear to be true and so tend to be confused with reality.
If a customer complains about costly repairs, the seller should ask him what steps he took to avoid machine breakdowns and so suggest what he should do to avoid these in the future.
A customer saying “this type of machine will inevitably become worn, regardless of its use and servicing” will be harder to convince, because he has no direct personal experience. He confuses his convictions with reality, believing and behaving as though such an opinion is the truth.

4. Ideology
By “ideology” in this context we mean a set of beliefs, values and principles that a person holds and wishes to respect when choosing a product and through his behaviour. Ideologies share a few precise characteristics:
• a core belief in a positive, absolute and abstract value: nature, health, life, justice, etc.;
• a particularly abstract ideal or principle: one thinks, evaluates and judges starting from this abstract principle and quickly loses sight of reality, especially when there are many facets to this;
• extreme judgements: things appear either black or white and broad generalisations abound (all natural products are healthy / all man-made products are harmful);
• convictions based on ideology are strongly held and tend to resist all evidence to the contrary.
Ideologies are not simply political or religious, but can be found in everyday life, such as a person’s choice of cladding or the materials to be used to build a house. People will tend to choose the “natural”, “organic”, “ecological” product despite its obvious limits and disadvantages.
Objections based on an ideology are easily the hardest to handle, as the customer thinks and evaluates the product on the basis of abstract criteria and ignores reality.

::: How to understand the nature of the objection
If we consider all the possible motives for an objection and the real or abstract values that influence the customer’s way of thinking, it is clear that no amount of persuasion or stressing a product’s advantages is, on its own, likely to deal with the objection. One must first understand the nature of the objection. So how does one do this? By asking a few crucial questions.
If a customer is looking for an ergonomic machine, but doubts its efficiency, one could ask: “How come you doubt this? Have you had any negative experiences with wax treatment in the past?” If the customer has had a bad experience, he will most likely go on to describe it. Here one should ask him some more specific questions:
• What type of machine did you use?
• What surface did you use it on?
• When did you use the machine?
• What do you normally use to clean the floor?
• How long after the initial treatment did the problem arise?
If the customer has had no negative experiences, but refers to another person’s opinion or hear-say, he must be brought back to reality by asking him some very strict questions, such as:
• How did you hear about this problem?
• Has anyone in particular told you this?
• Has this person had a negative experience that makes you afraid to use this machine or has he simply passed on information that he, in turn, heard from others?
This way it is easily to see if the customer has reiterated an abstract groundless opinion based on hear-say. One should then invite him to express his fears in more detail:
• What exactly do you fear might happen?
• What do you want to avoid?
The customer then puts his fears into words, thus lessening his emotional pressure. This is the right time to shift his attention away from the objection, from what he does not want to happen and towards what he wants to obtain.
One can help him think about his expectations and desired results using these questions:
• What would be the ideal machine to optimize your work?
• If the perfect product existed, what features would it have?
• What is the most important thing for you when using the machine?
• What final results are you looking for? From his answers one can then discover:
• The customer’s goal: what he wants to achieve;
• His criteria when making a choice: what is most important for him.
At this point, the seller can start talking about the product and extolling its virtues. He should present it so as to reflect what the customer is interested in and in accordance with the criteria he adopts when selecting a new product.
His response to the customer’s objection is thus targeted and goes straight to what is important for the customer, without piling on random arguments. With a bit of psychological sensitivity the seller can also deal with the customer’s fears and reassure him with concrete facts and figures: “Would you like to try out one of our best selling machines to see if it meets your needs? I’d be only too happy to show it to you.”

::: REMEMBER
If we consider all the possible motives for an objection and the real or abstract values that influence the customer’s way of thinking, it is clear that no amount of persuasion or stressing a product’s advantages is, on its own, likely to deal with the objection. One must first understand the nature of the objection. So how does one do this?