Ask for the order! The prospect expects us to ask and the response we get will tell us how to win it.
Asking for the order can be a hard thing to do! It puts pressure on the prospect, because it asks him to make a decision. A decision, not necessarily whether to award the order but, about how much of his thinking he’ll declare to the seller. Basically whatever his response, the seller will know more about the situation from this point on.
Asking for the order needn’t be such an aggressive tactic. For a start the buyer expects the seller to ask for it. That’s what his job is after all.
Secondly the request can be wrapped up in context which softens the blow. For example we can ask “we need to schedule resources and it would help a lot if you could give us an order now”. We can be slightly more direct with “can you give me the order now?”
Of course if we want to be deliberately challenging we can say “unless you can give me an order now, I will have to withdraw our offer, or if we’re trying to call the bluff of a Serial Prospect we can just send him a contract and ask him to sign it. The degree of discomfort for the buyer is a factor of the way the request for the order is presented.
There are very real benefits to come from asking for the order. We may get it and save ourselves time and cost. The prospect may tell us what’s holding him up and give us a chance to help him get around the road block. Alternatively we may get him to reveal his objections to our proposal, giving us a chance to address them and resolve his concerns.
Our point in this chapter is really related to this last possibility. If we’re going to get this order we will need to find out what the real objection is and handle it. But, there is a problem here. Whatever the prospect tells us about his objections, he most likely isn’t going to tell us what’s really holding him back. First comes the plausible, second the false trail and third we get the real one.
The first will usually be some perceived weakness in our offer. It’s likely this will be highly credible but quite easily disposed of. For example our price is too high. We might handle this with an offer to meet the lowest price available to him. (Elsewhere we suggest this should be avoided, but in this particular and simple context it will work. If he tries to hold us to this after we’ve handled the real objection, then we can go back to our tactics for protecting the price see Negotiation is not the same as concession). Having handled the price question, we will move to the second objection.
The second objection will be designed to throw us off. It won’t be based on fact and will be subjective rather than objective. For example he’s heard bad reports of our customer service. Because the second objection is fabricated it’s usually easy to dispose of. In this case we might respond with “Here is a list of our customers. Which would you like to speak to. We can call them now” Now we should get the third objection, and probably the real one.
The third objection, again in this very simple example, might be “My brother in law wants me to buy it from him, and don’t know how to turn him down”. Now we have the real one we can handle it properly. One answer might be to suggest he has somebody else make the decision, then he can tell his brother in law the matter was taken out of his hands.
Some years ago a consulting company made a fortune from presenting sales techniques seminars, called Close That Sale. The cost of the seminar was quite high but companies didn’t mind if their sales people could be shown how to be more effective. To cut a long story short, the message from the seminar was simple, if formulaic. When faced with a refusal to sign the order, the salesman should ask the buyer to give him a list of ten reasons he wouldn’t buy. Of course the buyer couldn’t think of ten reasons and would probably only get to three or four. The last objection in the list would be the real one.
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