Episode #185: Sales Objections, Welcome

Getting an objection from a buyer is a joy. Getting nothing is a pain. At least when they object, they are displaying some level of interest to know more. Many salespeople fear objections, but when you know what you are doing, trust me, you welcome them.

This is what caught my attention lately: Legal action against Line is being considered. Line is a popular messaging app in Japan and I am a user too. It has eight-six million users in Japan and over seven hundred million worldwide. The Personal Information Protection Commission will consider legal action against Line Corp after user’s data was left accessible at a Chinese affiliate. It is alleged that Chinese engineers in Shanghai accessed Japanese users’ data without consent. The personal information protection law obliges companies to gain users consent when they transfer their info to entities in a foreign country.

Line is used in various administrative services. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and communications announced it would stop using the Line service and request local governments to investigate their usage status.

Buyers should buy and not quibble, hesitate or question. That at least is what salespeople hope for. That may happen, but the frequency is not high and you certainly wouldn’t want to be banking your career arc on the odds of that occurring. The reality is we want buyers to object. If we don’t get an commitment to buy right then and there, the next best case is they give us an objection. No objection then no sale.

If we are giving our presentation and at the end the buyer doesn’t have any objections but are also not ready to purchase then we are in trouble. In the sales call we have to get the buyer excited. We also need to have them mentally commit to implementing or consuming whatever it is we are selling. That triggers a future state where they have to anticipate that certain things need to happen. This future state throws up questions. If they are a non-buyer then there is no trigger to go into anticipation of potential problems.

We are all raised to be risk averse. Watch carefully when you cross the road. Don’t dive into the river before you check what is under the surface. Don’t sign contracts without reading the fine print. Our parents do their best to ensure our survival and a big part of that effort is to make sure we avoid doing risky things. This carries over into our role as the buyer. We have to anticipate issues which may arise in the future and make sure they are covered off at the point of purchase. This is the due diligence of business.

Now if we have no intention to make a purchase there is no point wasting any energy on the due diligence component. The buyer will just sit there, listen inertly and then end the meeting. Everyone is time poor today, so we will not invest that valuable resource in things which are going nowhere. Such as talking with a salesperson who has nothing of interest for us.

When we get an objection, it indicates interest. Getting very poor questions is also another warning signal. If the sale is expensive or complex then we want a lot of questions. We know that those questions are the buyer running through a mental checklist to make sure they can buy. If the issues are dealt with then, it is a deal. No mental checklist and no questions means no sale.

Sometimes the person we are presenting to may not be the final decision maker. This is usually the case in Japan. There will be various stakeholders scattered around the company who have to agree. We will never get to meet them or will not even be aware of many of them, but they are there and they have to say yes. The famous ringi system of affixing their hanko or stamp to the recommendation to purchase is typical of big companies. They need to coordinate across divisions and sections. They value having a common understanding of what is going to happen. Your stamp on the document and it is usually a physical document, indicates you are aware of this and you agree that this project can move forward from the point of view of your area of responsibility.

The person sitting across from us is a catcher of data and information to relay to others within the system. They will not have many objections, because they are probably not going to be the end user. They may not have enough information to know what risks should be taken care of in this sales presentation stage. We had a meeting with a financial institution recently and the size of the deal was 10x. that means the scope of the solution was probably ten times what they were expecting. The investment amount was in line with that scope and also 10 x what they probably expected.

At the end of the meeting, I noted to my colleague that they didn’t have enough objections. If the scope was that much bigger than they were initially thinking there should have been more issues raised. Our interlocutor was a catcher of information not a decision maker. We need to get together with the decision makers and go through this idea for them again. We need to get some solid objections if we are going to make this sale.

No objections is a bad sign. We haven't shown enough value or time urgency to inspire then to take our offer seriously. So contrary to what we salespeople all want, which is a sale with no objections, in fact we need them to make the sale. Remember our objective is not to make the sale, it is to get the reorders and to do that the buyer has to be 100% convinced this is the best thing to help them build their business. We need to partner with the buyer because we bring so much value to them. To establish that fact we have to show that we are providing more value than we are asking for in terms of their investment in our product or service. The way to do that is run through their mental checklist of potential problems and cross them all off so that there are no longer any barriers to making a buy and continue to by decision.