Value-Based Fees, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 8How to Prevent and Rebut Fee Objections: Since You've Heard Them All Before, How Can You Not Know All the Answers?

I'm constantly aghast at salespeople who wring their hands, rend their garments, and give up the fight when a prospect reacts with the quite normal reaction of “I don't think I need that.” If you've been in the sales arena for longer than a month and haven't heard every imaginable objection, you've been embedded under a rock.

We, as consultants, know what our prospects' objections are going to be before they utter a word. There is no excuse not to be prepared for them. That doesn't mean that we'll be able to convert every single contact into a sale, but it does mean that we should be able to engage the buyer in a more prolonged dialogue and provide ourselves with more opportunities with the decision maker to influence his or her ultimate choice.¹

There is a succession of “filters” (see Figure 8.1) that we must negotiate to achieve a positive buying decision. Some require “footwork” and maneuvering, such as getting through or circumventing feasibility buyers and committees to reach the economic buyer. Some require careful questioning and discerning listening in order to reach conceptual agreement.

But one of the most critical and most often bungled steps is dealing with early buyer resistance in the form of quite natural objections and rejections of the consultant's value or potential impact. The reasons include the following:

• We tend to take rejection ...