If you know anything about selling, you’re probably familiar with objections – reasons your potential customers (“prospects”) could give, for not buying what you have to offer.
Classic objections include things like…
"I can’t afford this."
"I don’t have the time for this."
"This sounds too complicated for me."
In traditional selling, you can try and tackle objections as they arise. The problem is, once someone verbalizes an objection, by tackling it you have to "prove them wrong"... and few people like to be told they're wrong!
A better way would be to pre-empt objections, which means anticipating them and tackling them in advance.
However, there is a simple but profound truth about objections that can help you completely neutralize them, so they don’t even come up in the first place.
By the way, objections might seem less relevant online, because your prospects can’t raise them if they’re just reading or watching a sales pitch… but they can still think them.
This is why objections matter.
They are barriers that could stop people buying what you have to offer – whether your own product or service, or as an affiliate.
By the way, sometimes objections are just excuses. If a person says "I need to think about it," they might actually want to think about it… or it could also be a polite way of saying, "I'm not interested."
Let’s assume an objection is genuine. In other words, a person really means it.
Here’s what objections actually are:
There are two critically important words here. The first is "perceived."
When someone says “I don’t have time for this,” they think they don’t have the time. In truth, they might… if they were willing to cut down on or give up something else that took time.
In other words, what they really lack is a willingness to make time for it, and an overwhelming desire for what you have to offer.
The second important word is “resource.”
Time, money and energy are all resources, of which we only have a limited amount… but I also find it useful to think of less tangible things like confidence and understanding as resources.
The secret to neutralizing objections completely is to help people acquire the resources they lack... before trying to "sell" to them!
In a selling context such as a sales pitch, it’s hard to give prospects everything they need in one go.
For example, if you tried to cram in everything they needed to understand, before they could buy, they could become overwhelmed and think, "this is too complicated."
Fortunately, this is where preselling comes in, the art of moving people gradually toward the point where they’re ready to buy.
Using Presell Content, you can drip-feed prospects the information they need to acquire the resources they lack.
For example, let's say you have a product that involves a seemingly complex process. In your presell material, is there a way you can break the process down, so it becomes easier to grasp?
In the Presell System, I give an example of how to presell a made-up 7-hour course called Conversational Persuasion.
The course would probably contains lots of ideas and techniques, but in the Presell Content I wrote for it, I boil it down to five key ideas, each of which are fairly simple to grasp.
Those five ideas don’t fully explain the techniques. Instead, they’re designed to give prospects enough understanding that they can feel more confident about their ability to grasp the course as a whole.
Critically, this is all done before prospects even know the course exists!
This is the ultimate way of neutralizing objections based on a perceived lack of understanding or ability.
If they can grasp the 5 simple ideas I present to them, once I reveal the actual product… they’re much less likely to say to themselves, “I can’t learn this” or “this sounds too complicated.”
There is so much more I’d love to share with you on the subject of neutralizing objections in advance (I have a whole component devoted to this in the Presell System), but the key thing I hope you can take from this article is:
Objections are really just a perceived lack of some “resource”... so the ultimate way to neutralize objections is, help your prospects acquire (in advance) the resources they might lack.
If “I won’t understand this” could be a potential objection, use your presell material to give them the understanding they’ll need… before you even start pitching your offer to them!
If “I can’t afford this” is a potential objection, you probably can’t give them the money they need… but maybe you can help them see money and affordability from a different perspective.
For example, in the Conversational Persuasion example (see the “Longer Campaigns” folder in the Presell System), I seeded the idea that being able to use conversational persuasion could save someone’s life, or help a loved one avoid a bad choice... which would be priceless.
I also seeded the idea that you never know when you might face a situation where your ability to be persuasive could make all the difference – such as closing a deal or landing the ideal job. It could make or cost you thousands of dollars.
I weaved those ideas into the presell emails, before even revealing the Conversational Persuasion course, which was $199.
Those ideas helped prospects to see the price from a perspective of "what’s $199 compared to helping a loved one, or knowing the right thing to do or say to win a new friend, business partner or soul mate?"
This is the kind of thing you can do in preselling. With preselling, YOU get to set the frames, context and perspective.
If you do it right (and in this article, I’ve just shown you a tiny slither of what you can do), you can neutralize most objections in advance… so they never even arise in the mind of your prospects!