I need to speak to my wife about this!!

So, how to deal with it when you get hit with the ole, “this all sounds great, I’d like to pass this by my husband / wife first and I’ll call you tomorrow.  It’s a 90% yes from me, but I have to make sure he / she is ok with it” objection.  You can of course replace wife with husband, business partner, accountant, neighbour, best friend – you get the drift…Here’s what I do.

Of course, if you have done your pre – sales work properly this would never come up! In all my pre sales training we have to get to the bottom of who are decision makers are.  Most business owners will tell a “sales person” that of course they are the decision maker.  In small business the purse strings are generally held by someone else so make sure you get ALL decision makers present before you go ahead with a F2F appointment.

Even if the decision maker was to be present and something else came up that they had to dash away, what do you do?  You re-set the appointment.  Its that simple – anything else will see you turning your prospective buyer into your sales person for you.  Thats tough as you have been trained for hours and hours on how to deliver that presentation, they have had 45 mins at best.  Who do you think will do the better job??

So, if you do proceed – and my advice is not to – the the first thing you do is agree with them and then I ask – so what do you think they will say if you went home tonight and told them that you had hired yourself a coach to help you improve sales, sytemise the business to save you time, get your finances in order and hire that extra staff member, do you think they would support that?  Of course I know the answer, it is always a yes.  I then proceed with so why don’t we go ahead and get the paperwork done and what I’ll do is give you a blank agreement to go home with to then pose the question.  What this does is to get them to think of all the reason why they should go ahead rather than going home with nothing but your proposal.

In short, never allow yourself to go ahead with a valuable presentation to half the buying team – reset the appointment as this shows that you are serious.

Happy converting.