Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

Using “soft skepticism” to uncover the potential sales objection in price negotiation

  

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Last week, I took my inside sales training course to Bangkok, Thailand, where I trained a very bright group of sales people that sold media advertising. In one exercise, I asked the group to discuss a current sales situation that presented a significant sales challenge. One of the reps stated that she’d been working for months on a deal, but she was in danger of losing it to her prospect’s present vendor, even though my rep had a better (or so the prospect maintained) solution.

The prospect told her that there were four reasons her solution was better:

1) My current vendor’s design is “cramped”
2) The content of my current vendor’s writing is “stilted”
3) The constant design changes are driving me crazy
4) The sales staff of my current vendor keeps changing

And yet, even with these problems, my rep is losing the deal, based on price. So I told the rep that perhaps a little skepticism was in order, and it might be time for her to ask her prospect if any of those four problems were big enough to cost the prospect money. Because if so, we could make a great argument that our solution might actually cost less than the competition’s over the course of a year, based on an “apples-to-apples” cost comparison. To help determine if the above factors were really important, I suggested asking several more questions. I call this concept “soft skepticism,” because you’re going to be asking the prospect to “prove” to you that his or her complaints regarding the current vendor are important enough to change vendors. Maybe you’ll find they aren’t. If that’s the case, you don’t have a strong enough value proposition.  If  the issues are important, then work with the prospect to quantify them. At that point, you’ll be better positioned to make the sale.  So here are several questions that will help you to derive better data, based on the four issues listed above:

1) Would you explain to me how the “cramped” design is negatively impacting your business? [then] Can you help me to understand if it’s actually costing you money to continue doing it this way?
2) I’m not quite sure how the stilted content is having a negative impact on your business. Would you explain that for me?
3) You mentioned that the constant design changes were driving you crazy. So I can better understand how those changes impact you, would you tell me more about how they’re affecting you and your company?
4) Would you explain what happens to your workflow situation when your current vendor’s sales staff changes?

Those are just several questions, but there could be others just as important. Each is designed to get your prospect to tell you about the real impact these problems have on the company. And when you understand these, you can work with the prospect to determine how many work hours are wasted in dealing with them, for example, just one of the many ways to help the prospect understand the real financial impact of staying with the less expensive, but less productive vendor.

It’s always good news when your prospect has problems with his or her current vendor, and thinks you could be a solution. But if you don’t work to uncover the real costs of the problem, you may never get the business. Be skeptical of everything, but soften your verbiage a bit when you ask the prospect to elaborate on pain points. So please consider adding “soft skepticism” to your Best Practices Playbook as a way to proactively counter price objections before the come up.