10 Ways To Prevent Sales Objections – by Gannon Mahaffay

Your price is too high. Whatever! I hate it when I hear this objection and It's the number one objection to buying your pest control services PERIOD. Why do pest inspectors continue to listen to this B.S.?  I just don’t understand… It can and should be prevented.

There are no new objections. You've heard them all before. Can you imagine the prospect saying, Your price is too high, and you responding, Really, I've never heard that before. (Actually, that response may be better than the one you're using.) In the pest control industry, there are around 10 reasons why the client won't buy from you right now. Some objections are just delay tactics or hesitation by the prospect to tell the inspector no. I don’t have to tell you that this is extremely FRUSTRATING!

I have a solution to your problem…  Prevent objections by overcoming them in your presentation before the prospect has a chance to speak up. Prevention is the best medicine to cure objections.

Here’s what you need to do:

1.)  Identify all possible objections. Meet with your inspectors, management, your techs, other industry pro’s and clients. Brainstorm objections. Ask them for the top 10 objections they get. This will be very easy. Everyone will have an opinion that will spew right out.

2.)  Write them down. Make a detailed list of every objection you have discovered. Make sure you realize that the same objection will be explained in different ways.

3.)  Create a scripted response with closing questions for each objection. In order to prevent, you gotta prepare. It’s going to take you a little time to figure all this out. Do it with your team and maybe a few clients in the room. If it’s just you right now, get with family and friends. Also, go to your suppliers with questions, they love to help. Create several scenarios for each objection.

4.)  Develop sales tools that enhance and support every response. Things like testimonial letters, testimonial videos, comparison charts, and other support documentation could enhance the process as well. You must develop whatever is needed to make the person presenting your service feel confident, supported, and able to make the sale easier.

5.)  Rehearse the scripts while doing role-play. After the responses are written, schedule several role-play sessions to get familiar with each scripted situation, and try to make it sound natural. If you sound like your reading from a script your prospect will know.

6.)  Make changes to the scripts. After you role-play, you’re going to discover problems with your scripts. Make revisions to your scripts as the errors are discovered, don’t wait do it immediately.

7.)  Try them out on your clients. Go to a problem client or two (We all have them). Tell them what you're doing, and they’ll be happy to help and usually give you truthful responses. This will also bring your relationship closer.

8.)  Make final adjustments based on real situations. Remember change is ok and being out there in the trenches will change a script and an approach. Be sure to document and implement adjustments every time you make them.

9.)  Develop sales procedures and keep them in a binder and digitize. Give all people selling your services a copy. There is an added bonus to documenting a system - when you hire a new inspector or technician, he or she has a training manual that will provide immediate and ongoing insight on how you would like them to proceed.

10.)  Meet regularly as a group to discuss changes to your scripts. There is always room for improvement, but don’t let your employees go off the reservation. They must stick to the approved scripts but add their own unique flair to the sale.

Don’t make this hard. It’s really easy to implement and it works. The key is to know the objections that are likely to occur, and script the answers or responses into your regular presentation so that when you come to the end of your presentation, there's nothing to object to.

Ninja Kick

The biggest problem most pest control companies have with sales is not allowing enough time for their inspectors to role play and practice sales presentations and overcoming objections.  You need to look at it like this: Imagine that your mind is one big 4 drawer filling cabinet. Each file in there, when opened allows you to say what you want to say with ease.  When you have something memorized like a response to an objection, your mind goes quickly to the right drawer and then to the right file to be opened… When you don’t have your response memorized your mind quickly goes into a frenzy and dumps the file cabinet over, only to discover that everything is out of order and then it just starts randomly trying to find an answer through all the clutter.  This is when inspector starts getting a case of the “and ums” and starts pausing and blurting out gibberish that does not encourage the prospect to buy.

So, if you want good results from your inspectors and technicians they need to be drilled regularly.  Put them in a hot seat and play the start/stop game until they get it right.