Wednesday 27 June 2012

The £1,000,000 answer to the sales objection of resistance to change in business

The £1,000,000 answer to the sales objection of resistance to change in business: by Jason Li 2012 ©

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.

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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