When it comes to sales, their is a process for everything. There is no situation that a book or guest speaker cannot provide for you the traditionally accepted responses. It is just a fact that if you work in sales, you will give pitches, and if you give a pitch, someone will have an objection. How will you deal with it? If they say, “hey I heard you product breaks after a month,” or “but we aren’t interested in an implementation schedule that long,” what will you do?
So here it is, the acronym that will allow you to answer without sounding defensive or too conciliatory. It’s called LCASAC:
L- Listen
- Resist the urge to jump in as they complain, listen everything, and find the pain point.
C- Confirm
- Show that you understand, then ask a confirmation question, “so, your having trouble seeing the value in….correct?”
A- Acknowledge
- Tell them that you get their point of view and say you appreciate it, “I see what you are saying, that would be frustrating.”
S- Select
- Pick an appropriate method for handling the objection, this is the important part. How you deal with this makes or breaks the sale. These techniques are shown below*
A- Address/Answer
- Explain why they should not be too concerned about that.
C- Close
- Attempt to move on from the objection “does this answer your question?” if so move on
There are several techniques one could select that would answer the objection. These include:
- Technique 1
- Feel, felt, found- I understand how you Feel, I talked to people who Felt the same way, but after use they Found it wasn’t an issue
- Technique 2
- Counter balance- Admit they have a good point but outweigh that with your answer “you are right we are more expensive, however, it lasts 2 years longer and you’ll actually save money”
- Technique 3
- Use a direct or specific question- “what is it that you perceive as the quality deficiencies of the product?”
- Technique 4
- Deny the objection- be careful, if their information is just wrong and you tell them that “respectfully those statistics are not accurate, I can give the accurate information you need.”
- Technique 5
- The boomerang method- turn the objection into a reason to buy, such as a trial offer “you’re right, these need to prove themselves, here, try it for two weeks and I’ll get back to you”
If you learn the process and the responses, you will have a fool proof way to answer any objection. No guarantee you will still make the sale but you can at least have a grade A game plan.
BoweryJE22
This is a very helpful technique and a well summarized article. I believe listening is the most important step in the process. If you don’t hear out your client not only are you going to miss the problem but your going to annoy them because you will be replying without understanding.
It is too bad there could not have been a catchier acronym but these are very important ideas. This stresses that you need more than just an initial pitch. Selling requires good rebuttals and preparedness. People are much more likely to buy if they feel that the seller knows what the heck he is talking about.
This is a great technique to use when confronting objections. There are always going to be people who are not sold right away on your first pitch. It is important to be able to counteract their objection in a polite and efficient manner. It also helps your client to better understand, and maybe will help you better understand where you can improve your pitch!
Stu this is a very good technique. I remember learning this myself in Dr. Kocur’s Sales class. I believe this acronym really helps and that it is very important to chose two or three techniques during the select phase. I find that the one technique that I use the most is the “feel, felt found” technique. I am a very empathetic person so this technique just feels natural for me.