Course Outcomes

This negotiation course for salespeople will:

  • Outline over 50 reasons why people object during the purchasing process and suggest strategies and tactics for answering those reservations.
  • Provide a process for outlining a customer or client’s decision-making process.
  • Suggest a method for identifying a competitive advantage when in a multi-seller environment.
  • Explore buyer needs and the importance of identifying what matters to customers.

Course Overview

Objections are reservations about your products, services, organizations, or are based on what your prospects currently understand about what you offer and how you offer it. When buyers aren’t completely sold on a purchase, they usually push back with an objection. This course is about recognizing the reasons objections most often surface and creating solutions to overcome buyer reservations. During the workshop, we will explore a range of practical models and frameworks, identify the source of most objections and responses for addressing those concerns, examine buyer needs and the importance of mapping products and services to them, and practice language for responding to “no.”

Program Objectives

At this program’s conclusion, participants should be able to:

  • Describe the source of their buyers’ objections.
  • Outline their buyers’ decision-making processes.
  • Research their competition and develop strategies for minimizing others’ strengths and positioning against their weaknesses.
  • Explain Bain & Company’s Elements of Value study and its relevance to understanding customer needs.
  • Prevent, preempt, and respond to a range of objections throughout the sales process.

The following outline highlights some of the course’s key learning points. As part of your training program, we will modify content as needed to meet your business objectives. Upon request, we will provide you with a copy of participant materials prior to the session(s).

Workshop Outline

Step In: Understanding From Where Objections Come

One way to overcome objections is to avoid them in the first place. This course opens with a discussion about the typical conditions that cause people to object or hesitate when asked to sign on the bottom line. During this conversation, we will also discuss three strategies for addressing a buyer’s reservations. Next, participants will review a list of objections and identify those reasons buyers most often rebuke their advances. We will use those responses to confirm the program’s objectives and shape the agenda for the remainder of the session.
 

Put One Foot In Front of the Other: Dissecting the Decision Process

Sometimes salespeople encounter objections because they don’t understand a customer’s purchasing process and how the organization would use a product or service. In this part of the program, participants will create a purchasing model specific to their customers. Next, we will identify the information they should gather at each stage and discuss language for eliciting that data.
 

When You’re Not the Sole Soul: Researching Your Competition

Why talk about the competition? Because sooner or later every person in sales is in competition with another organization offering similar products and services. In this part of the workshop, participants will conduct a competitor analysis. Next, we will discuss methods for highlighting advantages against a competitor’s weaknesses and tactics for neutralizing or reducing a competitor’s strongholds.
 

Threading the Laces: Meeting Needs

This portion of the program focuses on needs and the importance of meeting a range of them. During this part of the course, we will spend time exploring Bain & Company’s Elements of Value study, research that traces its conceptual roots to Abraham Maslow’s work on needs hierarchy. For the purpose of identifying the top five needs their products or services answer, participants will consider 30 attributes as they work through a ranking exercise. Once they’ve isolated the top needs their products or services address, we will discuss ways of positioning that information when speaking with prospects.
 

Untying the Knots: Overcoming Objections

In this final course component, we will revisit the list of objections compiled at the beginning of the session and develop a strategy for preventing them, preempting them, and answering them if the first two steps don’t silence them altogether. This part of the program includes a range of activities: strategy mapping, roleplays, and identifying language that keeps the conversation going.
 
By the end of this sales training workshop, participants should fully understand the source of objections, how to determine their buyers’ decision-making processes, tactics for mapping the competition and identifying the needs their product and services meet, and specific steps for preventing, preempting, and answering buyer reservations.