Do We Want To Eliminate Objections

I’ve seen a series of posts offering tricks and techniques to eliminating objections. Every day, we see experts commenting on objections, “how to overcome them, how to handle them, how to eliminate them.” Objections are often positioned as a battle between sellers and the customer, with our objective to prevail, defeating the customers’ objections

On reflection, I thought, “Do we want to eliminate objections? Are we losing the opportunity to leverage objections in more meaningful and impactful ways?”

Most of the pundits talk about objections like, “I don’t have the time, I’m not the right person, we don’t have a need, we don’t have the funding, you are too expensive….” They have clever gambits to back a customer into a corner forcing the customer to talk and reveal more.

Others, talk about pre-empting them, keeping them from coming up in the first place.

The thinking seems to be if we eliminate objections, the customer must understand and agree to what we are saying. In eliminating them, all we have to do is ask for the order–and if they have objections to that, we know how to eliminate those.

The reality is eliminating or avoiding objections probably mean the customer simply doesn’t care.

Think about it for a moment, for a customer to have an objection, it means they were paying attention. At least enough to raise a concern, ask a question, or have a different point of view.

Most of the time, if they take the time to object, they are engaged to some level. It’s much easier to ignore these things. It’s easy to stop the conversation, just end the meeting. They don’t have to come up with an objection to do this. They just stop, hang up, or leave.

We need to encourage engagement, we need to provide customers reason to be engaged. Usually, this is talking to them about things they care about. We measure the quality of engagement by the interaction, not by the lack of disagreement or interaction. What questions are they asking? What differences in point of view do they have? How well are they understanding? How much do they care? Where do they disagree? What are we learning from them and about them?

Sales conversations are intended to be just that, conversations. Two way conversations where people are engaged and interested. Conversations where we learn, and grow. Conversations where we demonstrate our interest and caring for each other. (Don’t overthink this, caring could just be caring enough to continue the conversation.)

The worst advice we can have is to eliminate or avoid objections. The next worst is overcoming them because that shuts down conversation.

Objections? Bring them on, I know if I’m getting objections, people are engaged enough and care enough to object!

Afterword, I’m writing a series of posts on “Basic Selling Skills,” just to remind us what/why we do what we do. The link will take you to that collection.