How to avoid circling the drain

If you are in professional sales -- i.e., you sell for a living -- the very first thing they teach you in any kind of sales training is to control the call. The salesperson has to initiate, direct, and control the conversation -- topics, pacing, everything. The first step on the road to nowhere is to let the prospect take the conversation where he wants it to go rather than where you want it to.

 This usually happens with objections. An objection is the term of art for the prospect's stated reasons for not buying. For example, if you're selling an SUV, and the prospect says that he won't buy the thing because it gets miserable gas mileage, that's an objection. Suddenly, you and the prospect are off on a merry discussion of bad gas mileage, and your chances of making a sale begin to circle the drain.

This happens in selling professional services, too. If you're discussing working with a new client, and he announces that your hourly rates are too high, the entire conversation can easily become about that. Not good.

In sales, dealing with objections is its own little discipline, known as objection-handling. There are all kinds of techniques for this, but the key to all of them, as pointed out in a recent post in The Selling Sherpa, is anticipation. After you've been at it for a while, there should be almost no objections you haven't heard before, and you should have an effective, convincing response already thought through and in your memory banks to use whenever you need to.

Most people who are selling professional services don't do this. They just sort of wing it. Bad idea. Take the time to start tracking the objections you hear, and mapping out your responses in advance. This will make your responses much more effective, will prevent the conversation from being hijacked, and will also make the entire sales situation much less stressful. Plus, of course, it will keep you far away from the drain.