Overcoming 4 basic objections:  No Help

(third of a 5-part series)

No Help

All customer objections to your sales offer can be classified under four broad areas: No Trust; No Need; No Help; No Satisfaction. If you know how to respond to these four concerns, you can answer virtually any objection.

No Help

Let’s unpack “No Help.” No Help is similar to No Trust in that the customer concern is about “you.” While No Trust is more of an ethical concern, No Help is tactical and practical: the customer is not confident that you, the product/service provider, are delivering at a satisfactory level of service. Therefore, the customer is not inclined to do business with you, even if there is a clear need for your product/service and that product/service is perceived as desirable.

Help is relative

The key concept here is “satisfactory level of service.” The customer may not always be right but must always be satisfied. So the first step in overcoming a No Help concern is to determine what a satisfactory level of service is in that customer’s eyes. The easiest way to do that is to ask.

• If you were to buy this product/service, what are your service expectations?”  Or,
• Just so I’m clear, what do you consider excellent service?” Or,
• After making this purchase, how can I best support your use of it?” Or,
• What does good service mean to you?

These are acid test type questions, but you must ask them for your own protection. You have to know what the customer thinks he/she is buying. Some will expect a high level of service through the entire process—pre- and post-sale. Others might have lower expectations. In fact just asking them, differentiates you and represents a certain service orientation on your part.

The anatomy of Help

The best way to overcome the No Help objection is to pre-empt it. The best way to pre-empt it is to integrate “helping” into your entire sales process. That begins as early as your positioning statement. By defining what you do in a sentence that begins, “I help . . . ,” you set the tone (and the expectation) that your goal is to make that customer’s situation better. For example, it is more impactful to say, ”I help business owners communicate their message as effectively as possible using the internet,” than  it is to say, “I’m a web developer.”

Other demonstrators of help include taking the time to really understand the customer’s current and desired situations, communicating the way the customer is most comfortable, always presenting a brief written agenda for each meeting, always stating what you hope to accomplish at the end of a particular contact. You get the idea. To paraphrase Forest Gump, “Helpful is as helpful does.” You should “check in” with the customer several times during a longer contact by asking, ”Is this helpful?” If you get less than a positive response, use the “meta-talk” method covered in Part 1 of this series.

The idea is to “help” from the outset, help through the decision process, make it easy to do business with you, and support the customer after the sale and throughout the relationship. As Zig Zigler says, “You can have anything you want if you help others get what they want.