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Many salespeople spend countless hours trying to improve the way they handle objections by those moving and those that are national accounts that move sometimes hundreds of employees. Schools of thought that range from high pressure tactics all the way to being able to demonstrate empathy to the client have tried to tackle this common selling issue. But, what top performers know is that objections are typically masking some other underlying issue that somehow feels like it is creating risk to the Buying Influence. Someone may feel his job is now less secure because of the expertise your company brings to the table; someone may perceive that your moving solution impacts the way he/she needs to structure their department; and a Buying Influence may just not trust that you understand his real issues of the relocation process. These issues may manifest themselves in the form of objections related to pricing or service quality concerns. But the real basic issues may still be in hiding.

For example, I recently had lunch with a CEO friend of mine who was talking to me about a large professional services firm that he was in discussions with. They did an analysis of his technology and concluded that his current Customer Relationship Management software system was only being utilized by about 30 percent of the sales force and therefore they were not able to effectively mine customer data and turn it into business intelligence. This firm guaranteed the CEO that they would double the utilization in the first year and that he would get a return on his investment in less than three years. The CEO was pressuring the firm to drop their price and now they were trying to figure out exactly where they needed to be in order to win the deal. On the surface the objection looked like it was a price one. In reality, the Basic Issue was that the CEO spent several million dollars about five years ago for the current CRM system and he sold it to the board by committing to them that they would get an ROI in three years. This clearly had not happened so imagine his trepidation of taking this idea to the board again, given his failure in the past. The basic issue the CEO has is really about his own credibility with the board rather than the price objection. If the sales rep is strong enough to surface this then they may be able to help the CEO work through their problem. Well, as I thought about this situation I thought about how the same objection can happen in the moving – relocation industry when a company or an individual is trying make a choice on which moving company to use. The bottom line  that I have learned sometimes to slowly is that skilled sales professionals need to be experts at understanding and eliminating resistance.