How to Get Comfortable Handling the #1 Objection Salespeople Face

Price objection remains the #1 problem sales teams face on a daily basis.  In my workshops, coaching sessions and presentations, price objection is still that one area that every salesperson wants to solve. While it will never go away completely, these two skills will help you deal with them.  whether you are out there in the field, in the farm shop, standing at the counter or sitting in your customer’s board room, these skills will help you remain calm and keep the conversation going.

Keep this thought in mind when dealing with price objections:  In my estimate of personally dealing with them for 30 years, and working directly with dozens of salespeople I managed, and working with thousands of salespeople in training workshops, I would estimate that over 50% of price objections are not comparing equal products or services.  The customer has either knowingly or unknowingly compared your higher value product to your competition’s lower value product.  Yet, many salespeople simply don’t dig deep enough to figure this out.  We assume the customer knows the difference and they are comparing the correct products.  Yet, the truth is that many simply don’t.

First, Relax:  Too often, the first thing a salesperson does when they are hit with a price objection is to give an immediate response.  Sometimes, they respond before the customer even finishes their sentence.  The responses range from conceding a price discount to completely giving up on the situation.  Try to keep yourself from reacting.  Let the customer keep talking.  Let their comments just sit out there.  Sometimes they will fill the silence with how your product is better but theirs is cheaper.  You don’t have to react right away.  If you feel compelled to respond, here’s a few that can buy you some time: “hmm”, “That’s interesting”, “Ok”, or “Sounds too good to be true” (used if it truly sounds too good to be true).

Now, Get Curious:  Over the years, the most important skill you can have when dealing with price objections is curiosity.  The reason is that your job as a salesperson is to show your customer the unique qualities of your product and how they are the best fit for what the customer needs.  Your customer’s job is to evaluate your products against all the other competitors in the market.  To do that, your customer is going to pare down your products to feature comparison.  In a sense, they are trying to commoditize your offering.  This makes it easy for them to compare apples to apples and buy the cheapest apple.  It’s our job to never allow for a fair comparison.  I like to call it “Selling oranges in an apples-to-apples world”

To accomplish this, you have to get curious.  You can certainly tell your customer how your product is more valuable, but that usually meets with much resistance or disregard.  Asking is a much more powerful technique.  Begin with curiosity around your customer’s opinion of the competition’s strengths and weaknesses.  Expand that curiosity to your strengths versus the competition.  When it comes to your weaker areas versus your competition, you can handle them in one of two ways.  First, you can ignore them and only deal with them if the customer brings them up.  Or, you can bring them up and work through them with your customer.  I tend toward the second approach as I like to be in the discussion when talking about either my strengths or weaknesses.

These are the first two skills to work on when dealing with price objections.  The next set of skills to work on are some of the most important to develop as an Ag Sales Profession.  If you’d like to learn more or feel there is a need for your sales team, please reach out.  I would love to hear from you and discuss possible training opportunities.

As always, I’m very focused on agribusiness sales teams.  The part I enjoy the most is customizing the training to your industry and your team.  Different industries I worked with recently include: feed, seed, agronomy, Ag equipment sales and parts departments, crop insurance, ag lenders, grain originators, animal nutrition supplements, and precision ag services.  From the east coast to the west coast, and a lot of Midwest companies, you can see how these industries vary widely in their approach to the market.  Let’s talk if you or your team need a boost in selling skills or territory management skills.

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