Objection! How to use AI to overcome sales concerns and close your deals
What is the hardest thing to hear in sales? If you are like me, and it’s the “No, I am not interested in buying” response — I feel your pain.
It can be frustrating to hear no, especially when you did your homework on the sales prospect: you qualified them as highly interested in your product or service, presented an amazing solution, and solved their key problem…and yet, somehow you didn’t quite get to the sale. What happened?
By far, the most involved of the seven steps for any salesperson is overcoming prospect objections and closing the deal. To understand what the previous steps in this sales process are, you can find other AI in Selling posts here.
During these two stages, clients may have concerns about the product or service. This is the time for the salesperson to overcome any doubts the lead may have as a potential client — including questions about your company, product/service delivery method, the competition, or the price.
A key task is to manage customer objections by understanding and effectively addressing the underlying reasons behind these concerns so that your company can close the deal. How can AI help with that?
Got 99 problems but overcoming objections ain’t one!
Here are two things AI can do for you:
First, AI changes the tasks involved in overcoming objections, enabling sales professionals to respond to concerns faster, via more up-to-date and comprehensive information. This can be done with tools such as AI-enabled battle cards that enable salespeople to have fruitful client conversations.
More specifically, the abilities of AI systems to analyze structured and unstructured data can be used to strengthen a firm’s own value proposition and depose competitors. The information on the battle card can be updated in real-life based on the conversation with the prospect, helping the salesperson to convert potential customers into customers.
Second, AI can influence the negotiation stage with dynamic pricing. Basically, what happens is that algorithms analyze historical data about pricing variables along with other information about leads, to determine the best prices for different potential buyers.
For example, a large wholesale distributor of roofing supplies and building products ABC Supply leveraged an AI-enabled pricing solution by Vendavo to manage price differentiation during their sales process. This enabled ABC Supply to stay competitive and accurate with their pricing on a national scale, which ultimately leads to a better customer experience.
It’s important to remember that while AI can provide help with overcoming objections, the importance of the human touch in the B2B context will always remain. When it comes to understanding the real underlying issues behind the sale, even AI cannot beat you as the best sales lead.
How do you think AI will overcome the “No, I am not interested in buying” response? Write your thoughts in the comments section below!
Originally published at https://medium.com on June 13, 2023.
