“Objections,” more specifically, “Objection Handling” have been a fundamental part of sales training, probably since the first sale. I can imagine Adam saying to Eve, “But that’s not a Granny Smith, I prefer those…..”
Fear strikes at the heart of too many sellers. “This call will be great as long as they don’t bring up these issues?” Sellers do everything they can to avoid objections. Sometimes they finesse them, sometimes they just can’t answer them.
Our mindset about objections tends to be combative, it’s the customer resisting our pitches, objections are something to overcome. We study all sorts of techniques to overcome the objections. In our team meetings, we sometimes workshop different objections we might encounter.
It’s amazing that when we think of “non-sales” related conversations the concept of “objection handling” rarely occurs. Sure, we might have to come up with ways to get our kids to do their homework or eat everything on their plates. Or a partner might have different Ideas on what to do over the weekend. But we don’t spend time rehearsing techniques for dealing with these things, or how we overcome them.
They are parts of normal conversations.
And in any conversation, there may be differing points of view or perceptions. There may be differing understandings of a situation. There may be differing experiences people have had about certain situations.
And we resolve these, coming to agreement, in normal conversations. We may have disagreements, and in productive conversations we try to understand and resolve them.
We recognize these conversations are collaborative conversations, and seek shared learning, understanding, and agreement in moving forward.
Questions, differences of opinion, differences of experience are normal parts of any conversation. The greatest challenges we face are if a customer doesn’t raise their concerns, doesn’t present their point of view, doesn’t seek to better understand and develop their confidence. The absence of this may be telegraphing their lack of caring or indifference. The absence of this shows their lack of engagement in the conversation.
And when this happens, we can’t move forward.
The very worse thing that can happen is the customer doesn’t care enough to object!
And here we are seeking to avoid, minimize, or eliminate them!
Can you imagine a greater disconnect?!
Rather than training in objection handling, what if we focused on enabling higher impact collaborative conversations? Rather than learning tricks and techniques to overcome objections, what if we learned what our customers are most concerned about and work with them in resolving them.
What if we banished the concept of “objection handling” from our thinking as sellers?
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of this post. Again, the perspective generated is fascinating! Enjoy!
David – I was so pleased to receive this post by email just now!
I wholeheartedly agree with your suggestion to banish “objection handling”. This mindset is guaranteed to undermine collaboration and value co-creation.
No wonder buyers don’t want to meet with salespeople who want to “overcome their objections”!!
In the UK, I am a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Sales Professionals. Today, the Institute has published their “Sales Capability Framework”. Sure enough, “Overcoming Objections is seen as a core competency. I am hugely disappointed. https://the-isp.org/isp-framework/
Thanks for calling out this wholly anachronistic practice.
For some years now, I have had a small but growing measure of success with the theme of training salespeople in how to coach their customers. The goal of such coaching is to enable customers to define more accurately the outcomes they’re seeking from a potential investment. These better defined outcomes can then be placed at the centre of co-created proposals and business cases.
It’s so encouraging to hear your strong rejection of such a deeply embedded and fundamentally flawed approach to selling.
Thanks so much Peter! I love your approach on helping sales people coach their customers. We, at least theoretically, have far deeper experience in these problems/challenges than our customers. We can create huge value in coaching our customers how they might look at the situation.
An interesting Topic, Thanks Dave.
The Objection as the “Opportunity”,
is as big a myth as “The Cheques in the Post.”
If only they knew WHO Caused the Objection.