The sales objection of resistance to change in business is
one of the most frustrating sales objections of all time...
And it can make the difference between bringing on board
customers soon... or even months or years down the line.
You know what I mean:”We’re interested but we’ve been doing the same thing for years; so we’re not going
to change.”
Most prospects will have a reason why not to buy your product
or service. Some won’t pay you even though they think the offer is the right
price and they say you have the right
product for them... because they have reasons not to change.
So imagine if you could find a method to break down that
resistance to change in the business? Well what I’m proposing is that there are
some ways to help break this wait time and get this process moving quicker.
(Would it be nice if you have deals worth £100 or £10,000 or
£100,000 each that have stalled now being brought forward from two years in the
future to going through in the next six months?)
It’s a bit like someone helping you to make the decision to take
action to do something, say like to melt your ice cream dessert. You’ve been
thinking about it for ages, as it is of interest you say to try ice cream
melted, and then you do it. You help make the decision by taking it out of the
freezer when you are ready to do it. You could even speed the process up by
taking it out of a freezer on a hot day. Or even better still: make the process
quicker by putting it on a hot plate on a hot day.
So in essence, the problem is still: how do you get someone
to make the initial change?
Managing resistance to change
The key is managing the resistance to change sympathetically
with your prospect.
Acknowledge the resistance... take part in learning about
the resistance, get them to tell you about the resistance in detail, feel the
resistance they feel...until they wear out... because there is no more...”Resistance
is futile” as the Borg say in Star Trek (yeah, I’m a Trekkie).
To do this you need to build up a relationship so that on
one magical occasion, whether it’s on your first call or your sixth call, they
pour their heart out: and then they tell you all their objections about
changing.
Aha, so now you get it. Now you know exactly why they won’t
change and buy your product today.
Well let me tell you... you are now in control of your
prospect.
Reasons for resistance to change
Why do you need to know all their reasons for resistance to
change? And secondly, are there are more reasons than lottery combinations?
It’s so that you can work out a way to handle each objection, and possibly yes
to question two.
We are not talking about not willing to change as one single
objection. No, each reason is a different objection, but tied to the main
summary of resistance to change. So now you can work out a way to handle each
objection.
Help them buy, don’t sell to them
Your problem in the past may have been to just run out of
ideas and start selling to them... feature dumping, or benefit spraying
prospects. This won’t help them bring their order forward in anyway.
Some things you propose may spark interest, but some will
reduce their interest too, hey, Taoism exists in sales too!
Remember when you initially were finding latent needs, painsand business problems? This is where you can also find the pains of making a
change. Some prospect might have been interested for over six months and not
done anything about it. Now you are in control (because you know all their
objections as stated above, remember) you can assist in taking away their
business pain and the pain of changing: when you do this, you have helped the
prospect understand it is easy to buy from you.
But that’s not all...
Get them to admit there is a problem
The reason I wrote ‘get them to admit there is a problem’
above is that it may take just one call or six calls to get a prospect to place
the order; which means initiate change, and you can understand why in this
story...
I once knew a friend who liked to have a few drinks, not
just at weekends, but on a couple of weekdays as well. Not a few drinks over
the week, but in a single session, in the bedroom, alone. So family members suggested
he should stop, and in the most mindful way, to visit the AA to have a chat.
But the friend brushed it off as drinking was: “Just good fun”, even though the
friend did mention on a few mornings that it was a bit heavy the night before.
And this went on for over a year. In the end, the friend went to the AA and after a few sessions admitted that he
was in fact an alcoholic. Soon after, the drinking stopped and the change was
made.
So here is the secret...don’t sell to your prospect to get
them to change if they have a big flag hammered into the ground with sales
objection of ‘resistance to change’. What’s the point? It won’t make them
change!
1. Get the prospect to talk through their problems, only by doing so can you know their pains and;
2. Their additional pain of making the change. Once you know this you are in control.
1. Get the prospect to talk through their problems, only by doing so can you know their pains and;
2. Their additional pain of making the change. Once you know this you are in control.
At this point, just like melting ice cream, your job is to
help them firstly, admit that they are looking to change and then secondly,
helping them move to making the change. The second part is the hot plate to
melt the ice cream. The better you get at helping them get to admit to
themselves change has to happen, the quicker you can bring forward the orders
and move prospects through your sales funnel.
On the flip side, if you have someone who will never change
and you cannot make it easy for them to change, then: “Move on” as a sales
director used to say to the sales team from the office corner.
Now make a few calls with this strategy, reignite some
stalled deals pencilled in to come through far into the future like in two
years, and sit back and have some ice cream.
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