Want the Sale? Then You Have to View Objections This Way
When it comes to closing sales, most real estate trainers will simply hand you a list of counters to the most popular objections. Or they may give you a framework that categorizes each objection in order to deal with the endless variations that objections can come in.
For example, they may categorize each objection as “objections on price” or “objections on lack of interest.”
The first approach is problematic in that, as I mentioned, you cannot possibly cover every objection. You will ultimately run into an objection that isn’t on your list, even though they are the most common, and you’ll be stumped.
The second approach seeks to fix that by widening the net. It’s designed to teach you to recognize objections on principle. But you still have to be somewhat fast on your feet to be able to respond if you aren’t familiar with high you are supposed to respond. The framework trainer will probably give you some counter-objection scripts to deal with each category of objection.
While these aren’t the only approaches in the real estate training world, they are the most common when it comes to real estate sales…and they are really incomplete unless you change your entire mindset about objections.
A bad real estate trainer will treat objections from prospects like they are walls that need to be brought down. Agents who practice this approach usually adopt an aggressive, even combative mindset…that’s because baked into this model is a view that real estate is about transactions and not relationships.
A good real estate trainer, on the other hand, will treat them as opportunities. He’ll see them as an interested prospect who wants to do a deal but has some concern he wants to take care of first.
Here’s how Charles Green describes objections:
An objection means the buyer cares enough about you and the sale to want to explore it with you. They’re telling you about a concern they have, in the hopes you’ll help them resolve it. Your enemy is not the customer; your enemy is disengagement. And an objection demonstrates that the customer is very much engaged.
When you get an objection, recognize it as an opportunity. If you and your customer can resolve it, great, you’ll get a sale. And if you can’t resolves it, well it’s almost certainly because it’s just not the right thing for your customer just now.
Amazingly, you get even more credit if you back out gracefully when your offer isn’t right. Your customer will be surprised, and appreciative. And you’ll increase the odds of getting the next sale, and the one after that.
Anyway, people vastly prefer to buy what they need from people they trust. So help them resolve their objections and be secure in knowing you’ve improved the long-term relationship–and your long-term sales.
Did you catch that in the first paragraph? Objections aren’t your enemy. Disengagement is. In other words, objections are signals that you have an interested prospect or client. That means you have an opportunity in front of you.
So next time you find yourself talking to a prospect, you can easily measure the level of engagement by the number–if any at all–of objections they raise. And, in the end, if you don’t have an answer for an objection, take the high road: admit you don’t know but promise to return with an answer. Then be faithful to that promise.
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