Sales Coaching Tip – Overcoming the
‘Not Now’ Objection for High Ticket Items!
There are hundreds of sales coaching tips out there that offer clever but canned responses you can use for your prospects’ objections. I want to provide you something even better than that. I want to show you how you can set yourself up in order to have easy sales conversations without being “salesy”, so you can enroll new clients effortlessly.
One of the greatest sales skills you can have is listening. If you listen to your prospects long enough, they’ll tell you how to sell them. I refer to “selling them” not in a manipulative sense. “Selling” to me is about speaking in their language based on the way your prospect makes decisions.
Here are 3 effective sales coaching tips to help you overcome the “not now” objection, especially for the high-ticket items.
Sales Coaching Tip #1: Answer the “not now” objection BEFORE it comes up.
The best sales strategy to shorten your sales cycle is not to fire back with a stale, overused and gimmicky reply after the objection, but to eliminate the objection from occurring in the first place.
You may be selling a product or service that you think practically sells itself, but if it’s a high-ticket item you’re bound to be met with some hesitation and delayed decision making. Responses like “I need to think about it” or “I need to talk to so and so and get back to you” requires weeks and even months of added follow up that most people end up losing the discipline and motivation to properly do.
Very often eager entrepreneurs and sales professionals dive into presenting your products, services and pricing too early in the conversation without first properly qualifying the prospect. Here are 3 key qualifying questions you can be sure to ask in your preliminary conversations to establish the value they want to receive now:
- What is the result you are trying to achieve?
- What is your “why” for wanting to seek this outcome objective?
- What if you did nothing about it? What is at stake?
Sales Coaching Tip #2: Identify their level of urgency. Key questions to ask your prospect:
- Is your company (or are you) seeking formal proposals for this work?
- How soon are you looking to get started?
- Are you still analyzing or have you already made a commitment to move forward with the project?
- How much time and money have you already invested in addressing the problem?
If the answers to the above questions leave you with the conclusion that your prospect has no or little urgency, then you need to focus on creating that urgency for them.
Sales Coaching Tip #3: Find the economic buyer.
- Do you need anyone else’s approval on this?
- Who else in involved in making this decision with you?
- Who is funding this project?
- Who can immediately approve this project (or purchase decision)?
The reason I ask similar questions several different ways is because I undoubtedly end up uncovering that the prospect I am speaking to does actually have someone else who they will need to gain the final blessing from to move forward, particularly with higher ticket transactions. In those instances, be sure to schedule your appointments with both or all decision makers present.
Step 3: Understand their decision making process.
Similarly, if you want to avoid or eliminate the “I’ll get back to you” response, you need to ask them questions that will help you understand what they need to make their decision and how they make their decisions. Ask questions like:
- Are you seeking other proposals at this time that you’re waiting on?
- If I were to submit a proposal to you tomorrow how long do you need to make a decision yes or no?.
- What is your decision criteria for choosing the right ____?
Asking these questions during the preliminary stages will have your prospects telling you exactly how they buy and what decision criteria you need to match in order for a sale to occur. For those of you in the serving professions who prefer not to use words like “selling”, think of it as asking the right questions to help your interested prospects to decide if they should hire you.
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