Eating that Frog works in Sales too!

Legendary self-development Guru, Brian Tracey, wrote a best-selling book on time management and productivity called ‘Eat That Frog’ – it was based on the metaphor that if you had to eat a live frog on a daily basis, the best time to do that would be first thing in the morning.

Why? – Because once you have eaten your Frog, then anything else you have to do in the day would be easy and pleasant by comparison.

When selling the same rule applies to objections!

First let’s just define an objection versus a condition. A condition is a commercial or tangible reason for not going ahead. For example, the desired product is out of production or in short supply, or a genuine lack of finance (not a just budgetary issue), it is something over which you or the prospect have no, or very little, control.

An objection is usually just a misunderstanding or a lack of trust or an absence of real value. In essence, it can be satisfied with more information, or the same information but presented in a different way.

So back to the Frog analogy…

In my experience, high performing salespeople have a well-crafted sales pitch/presentation. It has; a sensible structure, the words and linguistics are technically well constructed, and they know what objections they are likely to get and when.

Taking their performance to the next level is learning to anticipate those objections and controlling when they are appropriate. In other words, create a log of every objection you get. Then sort them into the order you would like to deal with them and then re-arrange your sales presentation around them.

So, eating the Frog means – lead with your biggest objection and deal with it early!

For example, many years ago I was challenged with developing a sales strategy for an Italian carmaker with a reputation for rust. We trained people to handle this early by saying something like…

“Many people still think that (our products) are still susceptible to rust and corrosion. But, let me ask you, if you had a product with such a reputation what would you do about it?”

Typically, here the prospect would say something like – “I’d get it sorted!” – so then the salesperson can say…

“That’s exactly what we have done. In fact, we now have a ten-year anti-corrosion guarantee to make sure no-one ever has to have any concerns about the quality of the product ever again – so that’s nothing you need to worry about is it?”

This then lays the number one objection on the table and also deals with it to make the prospect feel more comfortable moving forwards.

One word of warning, only lead with your most common and biggest objections – otherwise use my unique 5 Step Formula for objection handling, which you can find in my Amazon five start rated book ‘The Ultimate Knockout Closing System’.

Monitor your objections, lead with your biggest and most common, it will serve you well!

Good Luck and Good Selling!!

Rob