The Thing I struggled with in sales

"Paul, we're not quite sure we're ready to buy. Your pricing is just too high."

I'd start reeling.

‘What is this coming out of left field? I had them closed! I can't believe they're giving me this crap! And this late in the game. Insane. What am I going to do now?!' I could barely hear myself think. My inner chatter had taken over.

As a junior salesperson, I used to struggle with last-minute objections. Part of the deep frustration was knowing I had the prospect on the 1-yard line, ready to punch it in. I could see the ink drying on the contract. Taste the victory champagne. Only to realize I had left my potential customer back at the 25-yard line. It was time to backpedal fast to meet them where they were.

Now, how did I ever get better at this?

Let's start with the fundamentals. Some objections can be pre-empted by performing stringent qualification. If you vet for budget early in your sales process and get a sense that your prospect can more than afford your solution, there's a good chance the pricing objection doesn't come up. Or at least doesn't get credibly put up by the prospect at the very last moment.

You also want to stay in touch with reality throughout the customer conversation. Usually, a last-minute objection meant I wasn't in touch with what was happening or didn't make enough effort to unearth potential objections. We can all get engrossed in our pitch. In what we're communicating. And how we're saying it. But it's also crucial to stay tuned into our prospects. We should be taking their temperature every so often to confirm they're following along. Tracking them intently. After all, our job as salespeople is to lead our potential customers through the entire sales process. If their attention is waning even a little, we need to pick up on that and reel them back into the conversation.

One of the reasons sales is complex?

You need to be totally in sync with your prospect. All while selling.

I might pick up on the fact that my interlocutor is not one hundred percent with me by a tightening in my abdomen. It's a bodily reaction I learned growing up, when a friend looked away when I bid for some connection. As I feel my prospect pull away energetically, I might say, “Does this all make sense, Frank? You see where this feature might be useful to you guys?” He responds in the affirmative. I exhale a tad, knowing he's back on track. Frank most likely was checking his Slack messages but got pulled back into our demo by my questions.

The last and perhaps trickiest part of improving your handling of last-minute objections is managing one's psychology. One moment, you thought you a deal pretty much closed, only to realize the next that you were miles away from crossing the finish line. Reality slaps you hard in the face. What hurts the most is adjusting from what you thought you were perceiving to what is actually happening. That delta between fantasy and actuality causes pain. It's disorienting. Because everything happens in real time, if you take too much time adjusting to the new state of things, your performance suffers in sales. And you can end up squandering the deal.

So for me, the inner game is about never considering a deal remotely close to closed until I obtain a John Hancock on the contract. Staying in a state of ‘I've won nothing until I have fully broken the plane of the goal line’ prevents me from getting carried away with the idea that I've locked in the deal.

If you stay connected to not having closed, it's nearly impossible to get caught up in the intoxicating feeling of victory before it's been truly earned. I now do my best to stay grounded in the present. I can then adapt to almost any circumstance. More importantly, you can't be caught off guard by the difference between what you thought was true versus what is actually occurring in front of you. There's no room for real life to blindside you with an uppercut.

What we're talking about here is ensuring we stay in one of two binary mental states. A “1” state is where the deal is completely secured. And a “0” state, where you haven't secured the sale yet. Most of the time, you're in “0”. And in that state, you focus on whatever you can do to move the deal towards and through to the “1” state. And once you've fully arrived at “1”, you can uncork that bottle of Veuve-Cliquot and celebrate. In my experience, keeping things this basic and distinct will help you stay alert and adjust to whatever a prospect might throw your way. Try it next time you're in a customer conversation, and let me know if it works for you.