Stomp The Heck Out Of Your Customer's Main Objection
training.kalzumeus.com
training.kalzumeus.com
Interesting post with a lot of good advice based on the philosophy described above.
I also think that this sales philosophy should have a qualifier around it.
It is important for any salesperson to seriously consider the (potential) customer's objection objectively. Nuking the objection shouldn't be the primary goal and it shouldn't come at the expense of the customer's interests.
In some cases, it is quite likely that the customer's objection isn't something that must be nuked. In fact, I'd even go further and say that (in some cases) a good salesperson should think of potential reasons why a product may be inappropriate (e.g. little value, too risky, too expensive etc.) for a certain customer. IOW in some circumstances, walking away from a sale (based on a customer's objection) might be the right thing to do.
/me sheds a sad lonely tear of sorrow
You address fundamental objections when dealing with a "real" client, and any attempts at deflection or subterfuge will be net-harmful. The only "trick" is knowing about internal champions and the customer's multi-person purchasing process (when the user isn't the buyer and/or doesn't have ultimate purchase authority in a single person).
For random impulse shit, you can trick people. Used car dealers define the upper bound of bullshit for deal size. Generally few substantial purchasing decisions by educated (i.e. business or professional) buyers happen like that, but if you're selling a product on late night tv, you can minimize and bypass objections through trickery, "sell the sizzle", etc.
Neil Rackham's SPIN Selling and Major Account Sales Strategy are the best books I've ever found on sales.
SPIN has an explicit focus on understanding the customer and their problems before selling solutions that's well aligned with the customer development / lean startup stuff that folk here will be more familiar with.
I'd love to apply this... but I don't see how/where. I mean, your main tactic has to be explaining what the product simply is, and what benefits it will bring you.
Overcoming potential objections seems far down on the list, not something you're going to put in your main ad copy or home-page copy.
As another example of addressing an objection in a complicated product, there's 23andMe. They take a different approach and address what might be the main objection, privacy violations, all the way at the bottom of https://www.23andme.com/howitworks/ It'd be interesting to see the change in signups if they'd made a reference to the privacy protections at the top of their homepage.
There are many other options if you do more involved sales with sales letters, email campaigns, or in-person sales, obviously. If your product is very involved, you can sometimes answer the objection right where you can reasonably assume it will first be raised. For example, if you require the clients to install an agent to gather some information from your server, you can reaonably assume many potential customers will immediately go "WHOA! Stop! That's incredibly risky", so that would be an excellent time to pro-actively mention that your agent runs with minimal privileges, is OSSed and hence less likely to have bugs, has run on 20k machines successfully, was tested by a reputable firm, etc.
Then don't think you are qualified to write copy.
You sell people by convincing them they can't live with out something. That they need it. They will do the rationalization for why they will buy it, if they feel they need it. What is the main objection to buying the latest iPhone? Cost. Often the feature differences from the previous model are not worth the price of a new phone, but people buy them by the millions. Why? they "Need" it.
If you are selling to enterprise often the biggest objection is "I'll be needed less" your product is likely going to reduce the need of the person buying it. You can't reduce that objection. What you can do is convince them that they need to reduce their work load. That it is a good thing. You don't "stomp the objection" you instill a need.
I am a CTO. I write copy all of the time. Then I hand it off to a copywriter to fix it. Engineers should write copy, even build sales pitches, but you then reach out to marketing to make sure you are on message, and that you are following the tenants of good marketing. This post doesn't do that.
He basically applied Jim Kukrals' messaging about networking to sales.
Given that this is an objection I frequently encounter from office managers who wonder why their employer needs an office manager if the computer makes 10X the phone calls for 0.1X the cost: "No, actually, this will make you even more valuable to your employer. You'll stop wasting time on the low-value task that is your current job and instead have time to level-up into $HIGHER_VALUE_TASK. And you'll get the credit for the change. Let me tell you about the ROI report: I like to call it the get-you-a-raise screen."
But again, I'm an engineer, not a copywriter. Feel free to improve on that.
Seriously? Do you have experience of this?
In my experience, people these days recognise that progress marches on, and the only viable response is to embrace it.
Can't speak for the poster - but this is something I've seen a lot in the enterprise. I think it's a more common reaction with larger organisations because, due to their size, they tend to silo and specialise work more. So you see this pattern:
* You find $solution to make X better
* You try and sell $solution for X into $company - who refer you to the X department that does nothing else but focus on X
* Since $solution is very disruptive for department X - it tends to get rejected.
This might not just be because department X is thinking "I'll be needed less" - but it's very often a component of it.
In these situations it's often better to approach the head of department X, or the person in charge of the head of department X. They often can see the value more easily since they're more invested in results that the way things are done currently.
As you say, to me that's not an object to overcome. That's a sign you're talking to the wrong people.
The person who "owns" the group you are going to reduce the work of is the person who makes the decision. If you don't get this, you haven't sold to Enterprise. Small Business this doesn't hold true, Medium it only partially holds true. But in Enterprise the best sales are the ones where you are going to sell someone $100k worth of stuff that will put $200k worth of people out of a job.
The only way you overcome this is when a group is in a growth stage and doing more with less means not hiring people.
When you are selling solutions to reduce people you are often selling to the guy you are going to put out of work, or at least his manager.
Most of the time if you are selling to enterprise what is your sales pitch?
Five 9s of Uptime: So you need less staff Reduces the effort needed to <x>: So you need less staff