Often the first reaction to hearing no from the buyer is for the salesperson to panic and go harder. They somehow imagine they can force the buyer to buy. The immediate impulse is to go straight to the answer to counterpoint the objection. This is mainly an emotional reaction based on the adrenalin flooding the brain with the fight response. We need to stop that process.
How do we do that? We need a circuit breaker. We need an interruption between our hearing the word “no” and going in for the rebuttal. That is where the cushion comes in. A cushion is a short sentence which is quite neutral and won’t inflame the situation with the negative buyer.
Answering straight away exposes us to a big danger. That occurs because we are possibly not answering the right question. We hear “it is too expensive” but this is a headline. When we hear that headline from the buyer we need to ask why that is a problem. We also cannot just go down one layer. We have to dig right in for the deeper reasons. We also need to get these out and even when we think we have exposed them all we should ask, “are there any other reasons why you wouldn’t go ahead?”. We need to uncover the hidden objections. Once the list is completed we now need to have the buyer prioritise which one is the main deal breaker for them.
Once we hear the main reason holding them back we have to check if this is a legitimate objection or not? It might be constructed on false information.
If the objection is true, then we should admit it.
We can answer the objection, but we need to know we have our ladder up against the right wall before we embark on a reply. We need to have the breaker in there to get us to a series of why questions to dig down to the highest priority item worrying them. If we can solve their objection then fine, if we can’t fine. We just move on a find another client we can serve.
