Handling noise

As far as your prospect is concerned, unless he is playing games (which I address later in this chapter), any objection that he raises is valid and needs answering, however trivial you may think it is. An objection that you consider noise may be a big deal to your prospect, so never dismiss an objection as being irrelevant. Let your prospect know that you consider the only silly questions to be the ones left unasked that continue to cause worry.

You know much more about your solution than your prospect does, so something that you take for granted may be a big deal for him, or he may not fully understand it. You need to take the time to understand the concern and satisfy it before moving on; otherwise, it will fester, and a noise-level objection can become a deal breaker.

Your role is to guide the prospect through his discovery process as part of his buying cycle, and in doing so you need to address all the issues, real or imaginary. You can deal with the noise-level ones easily and quickly. I’m not talking about dealing with a prospect who objects just for the sake of it but rather handling reasonable objections that you consider to fall into the category of noise level. Consider the following ideas on dealing with noise.

Getting to the crux of the issue

A prospect usually doesn’t raise objections to be awkward or to deliberately stop you from making a sale. If a prospect objects to something, it generally means that he’s unsure of the way you’re proposing to address his problem area. Keep in mind that the prospect has a very big stake in getting the correct solution. Getting his issue resolved is more important than you making a sale.

The real objection may not be immediately obvious if the prospect uses terms that are familiar to his industry and not necessarily to you, so you need to seek understanding to move forward. Don’t be afraid of admitting that you’re unsure of exactly what he’s asking and that you need further clarification to understand and address the objection.

Fully understanding an objection may require a fair bit of digging. The stated objection may only hint at the underlying issue, and it’s vital that you get to the real objection. You’ll likely encounter situations where the prospect just won’t tell you the real reason for raising an objection, which obviously makes resolving it a little difficult.

Ask for help here. Let your prospect know that you’re on his side and are working toward a solution that meets his needs, but don’t be surprised if he’s unwilling to open up. Some prospects are reserved by nature, and some see buying as a power game. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer for you here. You need to use your powers of persuasion and observation as well as try to come at the problem from different angles, and then use a bit of lateral thinking to get to the crux of the issue.

After you understand the objection, determine whether you have a ready answer, and close it off if you do. For more complex issues, you first need to understand the severity of the problem and whether it’s a deal breaker. If so, don’t attempt to provide a stock, off-the-top-of-your-head answer that doesn’t meet the needs. Take time to consider your response. Let your prospect know that you understand the issue and, if necessary, will come back to him with a considered response, after discussing with colleagues who perhaps are experts in that particular area. Agree on a timescale for doing this, and then move on with the call or meeting, covering the rest of the agenda. With this approach, you’ve dealt with the issue for the day and haven’t left it as a festering issue clouding the rest of the contact.

In this situation, you should also agree on the priority for seeking a resolution. As well as demonstrating to your prospect that you’re taking the matter seriously, the priority he assigns to it will give you a good indicator as to the relative importance of the objection.

You may discover a ready workaround to the problem or one that you can implement without too much of a compromise. Explore this workaround both internally and then, if it seems to fit, explore it with your prospect and get agreement that it resolves the issue and overcomes the objection.

You need to recognize that some objections can’t be overcome. In this case, either you agree to continue with the sales cycle with the understanding that this issue won’t be addressed, or you end the sales cycle and walk away. The choice comes down to understanding whether the objection is surmountable by other means, and this feeds into what I call second-level qualification, which I cover later in this chapter.

Seeing opportunities rather than problems

As a mindset, you should treat objections not as problems getting in the way of a sale but as opportunities to restate your case and to demonstrate both your understanding of the issues and your determination to work toward a solution. Be a glass-half-full person and not a glass-half-empty one.

Depending on the severity of the problem or objection, you can proceed in a number of ways. If the objection can’t be completely overcome or addressed in its own right, can you offer an alternative solution? Perhaps you can offer something that hasn’t been previously discussed or an additional service or product that can augment the sale value further.

You can learn a lesson from the way politicians answer questions and handle objections. How many times have you heard a politician give a direct answer to a question that he doesn’t want to answer? Generally, the way of proceeding here is to acknowledge the question with something like “I’m glad you raised that point,” and then go on to talk about something else, preferably in a related area so you can at least pay lip service to the question but delve into an area that you’re more comfortable with and that your solution addresses very well. If you can “answer” the question in this way and draw out your answer to several minutes, then chances are that you’ll get away with it because the prospect will have forgotten the original gist of his question and will consider it to have been answered. You shouldn’t, of course, do this with deal breakers or objections that are so fundamental as to cause your solution to be unworkable — but have you ever seen a politician let that get in the way?

You need to remain positive and upbeat when addressing these types of problems-to-opportunities because you’re the solution champion, the one offering to solve the original problem. You need to give the impression — true or otherwise — that you have a dedicated team behind you to work on the details of any problem area and will come back with a workable solution. It’s always worth restating your key case and focusing on how your solution delivers the benefits sought by the original problem area that you’re addressing.

Turning the tables

In overcoming objections, part of what you’re doing is continuing to qualify the suitability of your solution to your prospect’s needs but also qualifying him as a potential client. Does the company you’re selling to meet your criteria to be a client?

Although winning a piece of new business is important, winning isn’t the only consideration. You have to be sure that the deal is right for your business and that not only will your solution do a good job but also that you want that company as a client. You can think of it as you qualifying the buyer. Does the prospect meet your criteria?

I’ve been on the receiving end of reverse qualifications like this, and when it’s done well, it can be a very effective way of making you want the solution even more, even to the point of ignoring some of your own objections.

To pull off this approach without looking like an idiot when your prospect pulls the plug on the deal, you need to make sure you know what you’re doing and be good at it. It is, nonetheless, a helpful tool in your new business kit to be used as required.

Asking questions about how the prospect sees your solution fitting into his business and how he sees it helping with specific elements of his original problem area can be an effective means of getting him to overcome some of his own objections. Most people love to talk and to be perceived as an expert, so let your prospect talk himself into a deal, with a little prompting.

You need to own the entire sales process and be the one in the driver’s seat, and this is no different when overcoming objections. Keep the initiative and steer the discussions where you want them to go. Establish the rules for how you’re going to deal with any issues that arise, in advance of them happening, so that you can seamlessly deflect any difficult issues to handle them later.

In Chapter 3, I discuss using a contact report as a sales tool. This report enables you to document the decisions reached so far and can help you revisit those areas of agreement when objections arise that have either already been covered or are in areas similar to ones that you’ve already agreed on. Beware of allowing closed points to be reopened as you risk never closing the sale, and use the contact report to demonstrate that you’ve already discussed and agreed on points.

Earlier in this chapter, I touch on using a trial close as a means of overcoming noise-level objections. This technique can be appropriate as part of turning the table on a discussion, too. For example, saying, “Can we agree that the order is placed if I resolve this issue?” has a way of focusing the prospect’s mind back to the important issues and, while it’s unlikely to give you an immediate close, plays a part in getting discussions back on track and away from objections that may not be core to the solution being successfully implemented.

You’ll have prospects who will appear to like raising objections, real or imagined, seemingly just for the sake of doing so. Take a hard line here. Ask some basic qualifying questions of your own and move on. If a prospect continues to object, then you need to question whether this prospect is serious or a time waster and to consider ending the contact early and not resuming until you’ve reexamined the qualification. Not every prospect you come into contact with is going to be a suitable customer, and many of them will fail your qualification criteria. This is fine and exactly what qualification is about: getting rid of the ones who won’t buy from you and focusing on the real qualified prospects. The key part is doing the qualification before spending time working on a potential deal. I cover this in Chapter 19.

Being prepared to walk away

As a new business salesperson, you have the ultimate sanction — you can walk away and refuse to sell your prospect the solution that he’s looking for. I’ve done this myself on occasions when faced with a prospect who, in my view, was going to be more trouble than it was worth. I now apply the following rule: If a prospect raises an objection to price after I’ve qualified affordability, then that’s the end of the sales cycle for me. Experience has taught me that in my business, if prospects raise objections on price or affordability, then the chances are very high that we’ll end up with a client who’s driven by cost rather than results and will never perceive value for money. This is also why I never do “special deals” when asked by a prospect, because on every single occasion that I’ve previously agreed to do so, the client has been a problem one.

Your new business mindset needs to be one of believing in your solution absolutely and understanding that the prospect needs you more than you need him. You can sell to other prospects, but he may not have other solutions that he can buy.

Another instance when you should walk away is if you discover that you’re involved in a competitive sales situation and that you’re just there to make up the numbers, with no realistic chance of winning the order, even if your solution is clearly the best one. If you discover that a prospect has made a decision or a shortlist in advance, then don’t waste your time.

Qualification, as always, is the key. You should know in advance of getting involved in a sales cycle what the competitive situation is, and if you don’t know or discover something different, then you’re facing inequity. In my mind, that is grounds for walking away. I will do so every time. Thankfully, it doesn’t happen very often, but that’s a result from having solid qualification criteria that are rigorously enforced. (Flip to Chapters 9 and 19 for more about qualification.)

You shouldn’t expect or accept being lied to, and you have a right to expect the same level of professionalism that you bring to the table. It’s important to be true to yourself and live to fight another day and another sale where you’re actually wanted. I discuss walking away from a deal in more detail later in this chapter.

Getting to a level playing field

Animal Farm, the George Orwell novel about equality, will have you believe that we are all equal except that some are more equal than others. And this almost sounds like an extract from a communist manifesto, too!

The point is that to deliver a successful new business campaign, you need to begin with a level playing field with none of your competitors holding an unfair advantage that you don’t know about.

The following are two immediately obvious situations where this may not be the case, and one of your initial qualification jobs is to determine the lay of the land:

• First is the case of an incumbent supplier. It may be naive of me, though I don’t think so, but if you’re bidding to supply a solution to a prospect who is already being served by another supplier who is also involved in the bidding, why would the prospect look to anyone else? He already uses the solution that the other supplier has and must be satisfied with it or the incumbent wouldn’t have an opportunity to pitch again. So unless you (and I) are missing something glaringly obvious, who’s going to win this sale?
• The second immediately obvious situation is where a preferred solution has been found, perhaps after an exhaustive buying cycle, but the purchasing department has decided to invite different bids to be seen to justify their existence. You may gather from that last sentence that purchasing departments aren’t high on my list of regarded functions! To understand this scenario, the prospect has gone through his buying criteria, had his objections overcome, and is ready to place the order. You, at the last minute, are invited to counterbid by a non-core member of the decision-making unit. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see where this sale is heading, and in this type of situation, you really do need to walk away immediately.

Ensuring a level playing field, or even one that is biased toward your solution, is part of the role of qualification. Your initial qualification should have flushed out the type of problems outlined in the preceding list and should have ensured that you’re dealing with a real, live project with a known budget, timescale, and need at an absolute minimum. I discuss the importance of qualification and how to go about it in Chapter 19, and you see in this chapter some examples of why it’s so important in winning new business.

Asking your prospect to help you

There’s something very powerful in a sales situation when you ask your prospect to help you. The dynamic changes, and you’ve temporarily given him control. This can have a profound effect because the prospect won’t expect this behavior. Some sound selling reasons exist for why you may want to do this, as well as some human dynamics. It demonstrates the human touch, a measure of fallibility that you can turn to your advantage. Help is a powerful word and, when used carefully, can both deflect issues and open up opportunities.

For example, if you’re facing a sales situation that is clearly biased against you, ask for help in understanding why that’s the case. At the very least, doing so will stop your prospect in his tracks and cause him to consider the path he’s heading down. There may have been a misunderstanding, for example, and in asking for help, you give your prospect an opportunity to take corrective action.

Unfortunately, some buyers like to play games, and this can especially be the case when dealing with inexperienced people. You need to establish exactly what you’re dealing with and why you’re facing some form of bias. It could be that your prospect had a bad experience with your solution previously, in which case you have to wonder why he’s looking again, so ask him directly, and don’t beat about the bush. A sanction that you have available to you in some cases is to refer back to another member of the decision-making unit (where there’s more than a single decision maker) and get him to act as an honest broker and resolve the prospect’s issues internally.

When you ask for help in a biased environment and that help is neither forthcoming nor effective in changing the situation, then your prospect really has no cause to complain when you take the ultimate sanction and walk away. Keep in mind, too, that you can ask for help in any sales situation, not just one where you face bias or struggle to understand an objection and its impact.

In Chapter 5, I mention an old IBM sales technique of going over the prospect’s head when a sale looks like it’s being lost and telling his senior management that he wasn’t doing his job correctly. This is the one situation where I actually advocate doing just that after you walk away from the sale. Remember, of course, to log everything in the CRM (see Chapter 9) so that other colleagues can learn from your experience in preparation for the next time that prospect appears on the radar.

Using the referral upstairs

After you’ve answered solution-based objections, the only things remaining are usually contractual issues. You’ll have covered budget and affordability early in the sales cycle as qualification criteria so they should be out of the way, leaving only obstacles that should be surmountable. Late in the sales cycle, no new issues should be introduced.

To help you resolve any remaining issues, you have a tool that I call the referral upstairs, where you seek to introduce a manager into the equation who plays the role of an honest broker, of course working for your company. He can side with your prospect on most of the issues and, while siding with you on the stumbling blocks, may have some insight or a solution that gets around any impasse, especially if it’s contractual and beyond the details of the proposed solution’s workings. In this way, should you need to offer some concessions, it’s not you doing so but a manager so you maintain your credibility while easing the sale toward a close.

This is very different from bringing in a “closer,” or high-pressure salesperson, which is an approach I never suggest. It’s simply a way of utilizing a resource available to you with the prospect’s perception of being in a more senior role and therefore overruling you in areas that aren’t fundamental but still necessary to close the deal.

The referral upstairs has another impact, too, and that is to further build relationships between your company and the prospect’s. This opportunity can also, if carefully planned, lead to opening other areas to explore beyond the original deal and bringing things like a future case study onto the table.

Performing second-level qualification

Second-level qualification goes beyond some of the obvious criteria, such as affordability and ensuring that a real project exists (which you cover with your initial qualification early in the sales cycle; see Chapters 9 and 19). It goes into areas such as exactly how the solution is going to fit and ensuring that the prospect’s organization has sufficient resources to deliver its part. You also need to dig to find and work around as necessary deeper and more complex qualifications, such as the following:

• Existing or previous corporate-level relationships between your prospect and any of your competitors
• Resistance somewhere in the decision-making unit
• A relationship with a competitor’s sales team
• A weak relationship between you and the key prospect
• Concern about the viability of your solution
• Concern over the viability of your business

Any and all of these deeper issues can slow down or even derail your sale. You need to work on them as the sales cycle progresses to ensure that you have all the bases covered so no unpleasant surprises arise when it comes to getting the order signed.

You may need some help in getting to the bottom of some of these issues, but your job is to qualify against them and then look for solutions if you uncover problem areas. You can address viability issues, for example, by having a colleague in your finance department address them at a peer-to-peer level in the prospect’s organization. New business sales can be a team game, and you should be free to call on the support of colleagues not directly involved in a sales role to play their part. The bottom line is that the relationship that you build with your prospect should be strong enough to enable these discussions to take place without either party being defensive about them.

Be sure you deal with any previously closed-off issues that arise, for example by using the contact reports that show the discussion and agreed resolution. That’s the key reason for producing contact reports in the first place, even though you’ve more than likely positioned them as “just a record of what we have discussed.” (Check out Chapter 3 for more about these reports.)

If second-level qualification highlights problem areas remaining, then you likely have a major problem — whether with capability, contract, or relationship — and you need to find a solution quickly. Often, going back to the very beginning and reexamining the need for your prospect to have a solution can provide the key. You need to be able to demonstrate that solving his stated business problem and delivering the benefits that have been discussed and agreed upon are more important than any side issues. If you’re unable to do this, even with help, then the chances of your deal progressing to the order stage are practically zero. Second-level qualification is that important.

Help can come from unexpected sources, too. To illustrate this with a real example, I was once at the point of signing a new business deal when the managing director, with whom I had dealt through the entire sales process, decided that he had better get one of his non-executive directors to check it first. Subsequently, I met with the non-executive director, and he and I had a personality clash — we just didn’t like each other. It was obvious to me that if this man was going to have any involvement in the implementation or any form of management role overseeing it, it wasn’t going to work, and I wasn’t prepared to enter into such an agreement. In this case, thankfully the managing director got similar feedback from his non-executive director and decided to keep the two of us apart. The deal concluded, and we worked well with the client for several years, without me ever meeting the non-executive director again. We were able to get into the contract only as a result of the relationship the key prospect and I had built before the third party became involved.

Letting the best solution rise to the surface

If you’re confident that your proposed solution really is the best offer and truly delivers on the prospect’s needs, and if you’re comfortable with the qualification having been passed but you still can’t get the deal over the finishing line, you can try backing off a little and let the prospect determine that you’re offering the best solution without the pressure of trying to engineer a close to the deal.

Coming out on top in every area is not that important. You can let your prospect have his way on some of the less important objections and can even afford to be second to a competitor in some very minor considerations. Let the best solution rise to the top on its own, having sown the seed and left it to germinate a little without you pushing every inch of the way. No one likes to deal with a pushy new business salesperson, so don’t be one. Stay professional and be prepared to be a little aloof after making your pitch, especially if you’re truly confident in your solution and qualification.

If you’re confident that your solution is the best option for your prospect, then you have won the battle, and your aim is to then win the war and get the order. Do this by remaining professional to the end. Accept that if the jacket fits, then you’re almost there and getting the rest of the way just may require a little patience.

Exploring ways to make it work

After you’ve overcome the objections and are well placed to secure the order, you just need to get it over the line. This is the point at which a few hidden obstacles can get in the way, so beware of sudden changes to issues you’ve already agreed on. Use the contact reports that I outline earlier in this chapter and in Chapter 3 to stop this from gaining any traction.

Hidden obstacles that can get in the way of a new business sale can include such things as continued uncertainty about the right solution being chosen or your prospect having difficulty with selling the idea internally.

Keep in mind that your prospect has also been on this journey with you and will understand as well as you do what his alternatives are — at this stage, there shouldn’t be any. The benefit of running a structured sales cycle is that you address qualification upfront and overcome objections as they arise.

Try to get an agreement in principal if the order isn’t quite ready yet, and tie it into when the order will be placed, for example when the paperwork has been drawn up.

This isn’t the end of your sales cycle. It doesn’t end until you have the signed order and arguably not until the solution is implemented and the new customer is happy, but that tends to depend on the size of your business and whether you’ve dedicated account managers or a similar role to take over from you. If that’s the case, then your duty is to ensure that the new customer is completely comfortable with the new arrangements and to be at the handover meeting, whether your colleagues like it or not.

Before this stage, the deal structure has to be finalized, so don’t take your eye off the ball because many deals that are in the bag can fall over at this late stage. Do you need to structure a phased approach, for example, to overcome any of the non-closed objections? Structuring a deal to involve commitment in the form of stage payments while parts of the solution are implemented can be a useful tool. I recommend this approach only with very large deals, because in any other way, it has the potential to water down the commitment to just the first phase, and any solution without total commitment has a much higher propensity to problems and failure.

Any phased approach should solely be to overcome any inertia and push an order over the finish line and not be due to issues of affordability, which you’ll have addressed during the very early qualification.

Managing your reputation

If you do ever have to walk away (and I’m sure that you will), then do it in a professional, civil, and courteous manner, allowing the prospect to save face. The prospect may come back to you on your terms, and he may not, but you’ll have marked yourself as a new business salesperson with integrity, confidence, and courage, and that will only serve to enhance your reputation. You need to establish yourself as a top, ethical, and professional new business salesperson, and word will soon get around that you’re not someone to be messed with. Reputation takes time to build up and can be easily damaged, so guard yours in all that you do.

When the time comes to walk away from a deal, you need to maintain your professionalism and allow your prospect to save face within his company. A good way of doing so is a letter or email thanking him for the time, effort, and commitment that he has put into the project but also saying that after careful consideration of all the points that have been raised, you have sadly concluded that your solution is not the best fit for him and that, accordingly, you won’t be proceeding with the sales contract. Be sure to be courteous and to wish him every success as he seeks to have his original needs met elsewhere.

Reputation works both ways. If you discover that your prospect has pulled out of a sales cycle in the latter stages before, then you need to find out what happened and guard against it happening again to you this time.

You may need to do some explaining internally as to why you walked away from a deal. But after you’ve explained and demonstrated that you acted in the best interests of your company, then you should be backed 100 percent. If not, it may be time to consider walking away again, in a different sense this time. I’ve only ever felt the need to issue a back-me-or-sack-me ultimatum once, and the managing director who I worked for at the time wisely, in my opinion, backed me after doing his own investigation. Unfortunately for him, the damage was done when he expressed any doubt, and I resigned very soon afterward but not before demonstrating that I was right in walking away from the deal.

Revisiting stated needs and dictating terms

If you find yourself in the unenviable position of having to consider walking away from a deal, then you need to understand how you got there. As you’re following, or should be following, a qualification-led approach, then the qualification criteria should have guarded against you being in this situation. What went wrong? You need to revisit the qualification to find out and perhaps make changes to the qualification criteria to safeguard against this happening again in the future. When you can learn from mistakes, they’re often not as difficult to swallow.

When walking away from a deal, you may want to spend a moment to consider how else your prospect is going to get his needs met and a solution delivered. If you really believe that your solution is the right one, you may find that before long he comes back and on your terms. If this happens and the prospect seeks to reopen the sales cycle, you have a one-shot opportunity to adequately address both the initial stumbling block and any other issues that you can see are contentious. Keep in mind that you’re not negotiating here; you’re dictating terms. Play it hard, because it’s your only opportunity to do so.

The prospect now needs you much more than you need him, and he has shown his hand. Use this to your advantage to ensure that you and your prospect have the best possible chance of going on to implement the best possible solution.

Stepping back if successful implementation is in doubt

Right from the outset of a sales cycle, through overcoming objections and onto delivering the solution, the overriding objective of both parties is to ensure a successful implementation. If at any point you feel that this result is in jeopardy, you need to address it quickly. It may be that your instinct is wrong, but trust it enough to give it the benefit of the doubt.

If you feel there’s a chance your prospect won’t be able or willing to commit the necessary time and resources to implement and drive your solution to deliver a successful result, then you need to question whether it’s time to pull the plug and walk away from the deal. You and your company can’t afford to have a failed implementation in your track record, and the importance of that should outweigh the cost of losing a single deal.

The lost revenue from a single sale that you walk away from is nothing compared to the revenue that you’ll lose in the future when news of a failed implementation becomes known, which it will. It won’t matter in the archives of history that you sounded a warning note; you’ll be associated with failure and all the inherent reputational damage that comes with it. If you go ahead and are proved right in your assessment of the likelihood of an unsuccessful implementation, other prospects will notice and it will likely cause you more lost deals.

Being committed to ensuring that your prospect, should he become a client, is successful in implementing your solution will also not go unnoticed, and both your company and principally you, as the new business salesperson responsible, will enhance your professional reputations, which will in turn help you with future sales campaigns.

Successful implementation without trust isn’t going to happen, and for this reason you should walk away from a deal if trust breaks down, as the writing will already be on the wall. Trust, like reputation, is built up and established over time and can be destroyed in an instant.

A deal at any price is not worth it. If you’re being pushed on price, even after qualifying affordability upfront, or if price becomes the driving factor in a deal, then in my opinion something is wrong. You need to discover what the real issues are and either address them or walk away from the sale. In my experience, a deal structured around price after everything else has been painstakingly agreed on is simply a deal waiting to go wrong and is not worth the risk.