Hello My Friends, and welcome to this week’s #SolutionsSaturday”. In this week’s solution I wanted to take on a really important subject, and that is dealing with objections, specifically pertaining to your customers or prospects.
As a former contractor, turned freelancer, I have heard the word “No” far more times that I have heard “Yes”. While it is never easy, the word “No”, understanding the meaning behind their objections can help us tremendously create very successful offers in the future. In this article I will cover 3 of the most common objections.
“It’s too expensive” – As an objection to your product or service, most of us have heard this one before. The reality is, there are really two possible reasons for this, and neither of them are your prospects fault, they are YOUR fault. These reasons are:
- You have not properly qualified your customer. It may be very well true that your product or service is too expensive, that the customer simply cannot afford it or does not have the necessary means to purchase. This is true in many cases, however if the necessary steps are taken to properly qualify your customer and make sure they have the financial means to afford your product then you have done your job.. While it may not be as simple as asking them if they have the money, you may want to gather some pre-proposal questions in order to make sure your prospect has the financial means to make a purchase. Some well-targeted questions can pre-qualify your prospects long before you make your offer.
- You have not properly conveyed the value of your product or service. Too often when I a prospect state “It’s too expensive” they are simply conveying that they perceive the value of your service or product is LESS than the amount of money you are asking in exchange for that product. So instead of lowering the price, we must properly convey the value of our offer. As soon as the prospect feels the value of your product or service is at or above your offered price, and they have the means to purchase, they will buy. So your job is to make sure that the value conveyed is far above the price you are asking.
“I am not interested” – This is a common response we have heard and there also could be a few reasons to this. If we can dig a bit deeper with some follow up questions, than this can be an amazing learning experience for us and for future prospects. What is it about our offer, service or products that they are not interested in? Again, perhaps we have not properly qualified them. For example if I try to sell my Advanced Excel Dashboard Reports Masterclass to someone who just started using Excel, the chances of me hearing “No” or “It’s not for me” are extremely high. The reason is that this course is for intermediate or advanced Excel users and so if I am making this offer to an Excel newbie I have not properly qualified this prospect, and therefore the chances of a sale are extremely low. When you pre-qualify your prospects, the chance of a sale raise dramatically.
“Maybe another time” – This is a common objection I have heard many times. A great way to handle this is to make sure that within your sales pitch, sales copy or video is to make sure to convey to your customer why now the right time for them to make the purchase. There are many ways and methods to do this such as adding some type of urgency (a limited time price or coupon offer) or some type of scarcity (limited quantity of items sold). Our offers should always contain reasons why now is the right time for the customers to purchase. 98% of the time when a prospect states “Maybe another time”, they are not coming back. So we want to make sure to take full advantage of THIS opportunity to make the sale.
Handling customer objections, while not always the fun part of sales, can be an amazing learning experience when we really listen and understand our prospects to provide offers and products that will help them advance in their own goals and dreams.
I hope you have enjoyed this Solutions Saturday and you get tons of value from this post and our Excel For Freelancers Group. (If you have to join, please feel free to join here: http://bit.ly/groupexcel ) If you have a question that you would like me to answer, just put it in the comments below and I will try and get to in in a Solutions Saturday.
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Thanks so much,
Randy