How Salespeople Create Objections

There is no magic pill that makes dealing with objections easier. When you've got a deal on the line, especially one that you have invested in heavily, that moment when your prospect is hovering between yes and no is excruciating and awful.

Life will be much easier, though, if you avoid creating resistance and objections in the first place. Salespeople create objections and resistance to change because they:

• Lack confidence when asking and don't assume they will get what they want. Since people respond in kind, when you are weak and passive, the probability that your prospect will respond with an objection like “Let me think about it” is high.
• Fail to build a case for change. Rather than doing deep discovery, asking questions, and offering unique and personalized recommendations, they regurgitate generic marketing collateral and hand over a price sheet.
• Assume they know what their stakeholder wants and in doing so miss emotional cues and focus on the wrong issues. People buy for their reasons, not yours.
• Fail to understand the BASIC map and are engaged with a person who is unable to make a buying decision.
• Fail to qualify properly and are working with a low-probability prospect that is not in the buying window and due to timing, budget constraints, or contractual obligations does not have the ability to buy.
• Fail to align the sales process with the buying process and are closing too soon or too late.
• Are guilty of shallow discovery, winging it, and taking shortcuts.

The most effective ways to eliminate resistance and objections is to follow the sales process and avoid skipping steps and asking directly and confidently for what you want. An assumptive, confident ask will break through potential objections where nothing else will.

Status Quo Bias and Why Buyers Object

Stakeholders throw objections at you because they:

• Are afraid of the transition from one vendor to another and the disruption this might cause for the business and the pain for themselves.
• Feel doing business with you is too risky for themselves or their organization.
• Hate conflict and are uncomfortable firing their current vendor in order to do business with you.
• Don't trust you.
• Did not buy into your recommendation(s).
• Have legitimate questions about your proposal.
• Are afraid of or uncomfortable with change—they are wedded to the status quo, no matter how dysfunctional.

Here's a blinding flash of the obvious: humans don't like change. We actively work to avoid change. We stick to our routines and favorites. We live by the heuristic “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.” And God forbid, when someone even suggests that a change might be made, we become anxious, cynical, and rebellious—even if that change is in our favor.

There is always the underlying fear that a choice to change will be the inferior choice or will make things worse.

This status quo bias is the number-one reason stakeholders throw out objections and deals stall in the late stages of the sales process, ending in “no” decisions.

In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the father of heuristic and cognitive bias research, writes:

Organisms that placed more urgency on avoiding threats than they did maximizing opportunities were more likely to pass on their genes. So, over time, the prospect of losses has become a more powerful motivator on your behavior than the promise of gains.¹

This safety bias causes your brain to be more aware of bad things (what could go wrong) than good things (what could go right). In evolutionary terms, you might miss the opportunity for a good thing such as a free lunch. But, if you are not paying attention to danger in your environment, you could end up being lunch—a very bad thing.

As humans, we tend to be attracted to safe choices and safe environments. Salespeople, as a rule, are not perceived as safe. You pose a threat. Now, hitch the safety bias to the status quo bias and you have a formidable emotional wall between you and the stakeholder you are attempting to influence to make a change.

These pernicious cognitive biases, working in concert, cause your stakeholders' subconscious to magnify every flaw, every risk, and every concern about you and your proposition. They feel uncertain, unsure, and afraid. Therefore, they choose staying put, doing nothing (the status quo) over change. Even in untenable situations in which change is necessary for survival, people will cling to the status quo: “Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.”

It's maddening for salespeople who lead thirsty horses to water but come push, shove, and cajoling cannot make them drink. For salespeople, despite all the concern about the competition, the status quo is and will always be their most formidable adversary.

In a world driven by relentless, disruptive change, for the risk-averse the status quo is king. Whether you are trying to persuade others to accept new ideas, influence a prospect to change vendors, coax a customer to purchase a new product, appeal to a company to adopt a new system, challenge a team of stakeholders to accept a new process, or just get to the next step, the greater emotional pull, no matter how illogical, will always bend back toward the status quo.

Average salespeople respond by fighting back. They default to pushing their stakeholders to accept change—attempting to argue them into believing that their fears are unfounded. In doing so, average salespeople confirm the stakeholder's negative stereotype of salespeople and trigger the safety bias. To avoid the discomfort of this confrontation, the stakeholder disappears.

Ultra-high performers (UHPs) help stakeholders move past their status quo bias by helping them acclimate to change though priming and micro-commitments.

An example of the priming process is introducing the stakeholder to the next-step ask during the sales call agenda rather than surprising them at the end of the call. Priming change is also accomplished during discovery through questions that allow the stakeholder to talk about a desired future state.

A series of micro-commitments prepare stakeholders for change. Micro-commitments are just that, small, easy-to-consume steps. As stakeholders get used to small changes, it becomes easier for them to make big changes.

Trust, however, is the one emotion that breaks the gravitational force of the status quo. Although few decisions are completely risk free, trust plays a key role in reducing fear and minimizing risk for stakeholders. The more they trust you, the higher the probability they will comply with your requests, accept your ideas, and buy from you.

But if you have failed to build and nurture trust, you'll run right into the status quo wall. You may have checked every box. You may have answered four of your stakeholder's five most important questions with a resounding yes!

1. Do I like you? Yes!
2. Do you listen to me? Yes!
3. Do you make me feel important? Yes!
4. Do you get me and my problems? Yes!
5. Do I trust you? No! (win probability zero)

But it won't matter unless you have trust. Trust, above all things, trumps the status quo.

You Cannot Argue Stakeholders Out of an Objection

Traditionally, sales trainers have taught salespeople to “overcome objections.” I often hear trainers use the phrase “combatting objections.” Overcome means to defeat or prevail over an opponent.²

Average salespeople attempt to argue stakeholders into changing their minds—to prevail with debate. This is the reason stakeholders often obfuscate, put up smoke screens, and lie. They expect when they say no that they'll face a battle and be disrespected.³

Overcoming doesn't work. It has never worked. Even when salespeople do manage to get prospects to say yes this way, it is in spite of, not because of, debate that they prevailed. You cannot argue your stakeholders into believing that they are wrong. The more you push, the more they'll dig their heels in and resist you.

The act of overcoming (or worse, combatting) creates animosity, exasperation, and frustration for both the stakeholder, who gets bulldozed with a pitch about why they are wrong, and the rep, who creates even more resistance and harsher rejection with this approach.

There is a better way. Ultra-high performers don't view stakeholders as adversaries. Rather than attempting to prevail in an argument, UHPs leverage the way the brain works to paint patterns, disrupt the stakeholder's expectations, turn them around, and pull them in.

Five-Step Objection Turnaround Framework

Everything you've learned in this book is designed to lower the probability that you get objections. When you've aligned the three processes of sales, mapped and managed the stakeholder array, advanced your deal through the sales process one next step at a time, and answered the five most important questions in the affirmative for each stakeholder, closing the sale gets much easier.

When you've done everything right, most objections are either legitimate questions that need to be answered or sincere negotiating that is mistaken for an objection. For example, I love it when a stakeholder says, “Jeb, we really want to do business with you but….” This means I've closed the deal. The stakeholder has made a commitment to me. All we need to do is negotiate the “but.”

It's important to remain alert for objections that are really buying signals so that you don't walk on them.

Ultra-high performers leverage the Five-Step Objection Turnaround Framework (Figure 27.1). When responding to questions, objections, and attempts to negotiate, this framework serves to help them manage disruptive emotions, isolate the real issue, and work through it with their stakeholder without doing harm.