When selling a high ticket offer to B2B buyers, it’s natural to expect them to have objections. Luckily, stats show that if you satisfy their questions, close rates go up to 64% (source: Webstrategies.com). This begs the question: are there tactics and strategies that can be deployed during the sales conversation to minimize or even to eliminate buyer objections and get higher close rates? After being sold to in the corporate world for 18 years and now teaching how to sell to corporations for the past 11 years, here are 3 ways I’ve seen to do that.
Cost Of Problem
If during the sales conversation you can uncover the buyer’s problem, that’s great. Because people or corporations don’t buy without feeling pain. However, the way any pain manifests in corporations is in the loss of money. After all, businesses are in the business of making money. So if you’re able to systematically and co-operatively come to an agreement with the buyers in the meeting about the cost of the problem you’ll be solving, you are much more likely to wow them into avoiding any objections. By simply unveiling the fact that your solution costs a mere pittance compared to the behemoth problem costs, you will have the buyers really listening.
Who’s In The Room
Everyone knows how important Decision Makers of a purchase are to the sales conversation itself. However, you probably didn’t know that stats show that not having decision makers in the room when deals are being done causes them to be 80% less likely to close for SMBs and 233% less likely for enterprises. This is the astounding power of having these high level folks at your sales meetings. How do you get them there? First by refusing to pitch unless they’re in the room. Next, you can start a partial pitch to the lower level execs and refuse to co-create your SOW or share the budget until all decision makers are involved in the next meeting. My clients and I use these tactics daily to create winning sales meetings with minimal objections.
One Is The Loneliest Number
Did you know that if you sell alone to a corporation that you’re setting yourself up to fail? You are 258% less likely to close by selling alone versus selling with a team or at least one other person in the room. Matching buyer committee numbers might be a challenge with your small business but try to bring in members of your team or 3rd party contractors who will work with you on the project to the sales meeting. You will meet less objections and close faster.
If you want to reduce the ‘let us think about it’-itis in corporate sales meeting, go ahead and try some of these suggestions. I promise you’ll close faster and have less objections.
Want to reposition your messaging to grow your leads? Follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, watch my Podcast on YouTube or connect with me on LinkedIn –and let’s talk.
Great advice trying immediately