Forestalling Objections

Getting in . . . maybe there is nothing more difficult. Your dream clients have heard from many, most, or all of the salespeople in your space. They have become immune to their pitches, and they have written their own scripts to deflate any great language that you believe will differentiate you and earn you an appointment.

They have finely tuned and battle-tested objections that are proven to shut down salespeople and clear their phone lines. Call you must, and you must get an appointment.

When There Is Nothing Left To Say

I don’t have any idea whether or not you can pull this off. I don’t have any idea whether or not I could pull this off. But I have seen a salesperson that makes booking appointments with the hardest decision-makers look easy. For a long time, I wasn’t observant enough to see her secret. Then, one day I discovered it. By mastering the art of overcoming objections, you can transform challenging conversations into opportunities for building stronger client relationships.

To forestall an objection is to overcome the objection before your prospect (or for our purposes here, dream client) has the opportunity to object.

There are usually three or four common objections that you receive as a salesperson. If I pressed you to write them down, you could effortlessly write the list from memory.

For the salesperson in this example, forestalling in sales sounds like this: “Thanks for picking up; I know you get tons of calls like these, I know that you are happy with your current provider, I know you think we are all the same, and I know you don’t have a lot of time . . . I just need fifteen minutes to show you what makes us different and I promise I’ll make it worth your while.”

That’s a lot of words, but she talks really fast. She says she wants to talk about her company instead of learning about their company. But she differentiates herself with her approach, offers to differentiate her company, and promises to make it worth their time, all of which comes across as confidence.

The Takeaways

She isn’t a mind reader. She knows what her dream client’s objections are going to be and she addresses each of them, removing them from the equation before her dream client can offer them up. Repeating the objections would, at that point, be redundant—the salesperson just overcame those objections.

By forestalling the objections, the salesperson has taken them away. She has eliminated them as objections, and she has gone completely off script, and so the normal objection scripts don’t work as well as they might have. Does she win every battle? No; of course she doesn’t. Does she win far more than her fair share of appointments? Yes.

Forestalling in sales is a powerful technique that can greatly enhance your ability to secure appointments and manage objections effectively.

So what, then, are the takeaways for you? As always, let’s run down this road together in the form of some questions.

Questions

What do you say and what do you sound like when you call to make an appointment? What do you say or do that differentiates from the other calls your dream clients receive?

What are the common objections that you hear when you schedule appointments? What are the language choices that you make to resolve those concerns or to overcome your dream client’s objections?

What language choices could you adopt that would forestall the common objections that you hear again and again?

How do you bring your authentic you to your prospecting and to obtaining the appointments you need?

How do you push hard enough to schedule an appointment with a dream client for whom you could create massive value, while retaining the professionalism, the empathy, the emotional intelligence, and the caring that it will take to win your opportunity?