Nine out of 10 salespeople can’t cope effectively with stalls and objections. Since every salesperson confronts stalls and objections pretty often, you could call that a major fail.
Companies spend billions of dollars on sales training, and practically every sales-training program ever invented addresses stalls and objections at some point. So how is it possible that the situation never seems to improve?
I’ll tell you how: Most sales training gets this subject dead wrong. The training fails for three major reasons. First, most sales training treats stalls and objections as if they were the same problem, calling for the same solution. Wrong.
Second, as I explained in the last edition, the objection-handling techniques taught by most sales training companies do not fit neatly and organically into the sales methodologies those companies teach. To handle an objection, you are required to leave the path that supposedly leads toward a sale and wander off on some detour.
Here is the third reason why most sales training fails to help much: Most training companies do not even define an objection correctly. They’ll tell you that customers object because they get too much information from the internet. Or they’ll tell you that an objection is actually an opportunity-sometimes even a buying signal! When did advice like that ever help anybody…?