January 18, 2025 | Read online
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This week was packed with training and travel for me.
I did a Sales Kick Off in Miami in front of about 1000 reps who were fired up to Make it Happen in 2025.
Seriously though, I forgot what their SKO theme was so when I showed up and realized it was ‘Make it Happen’ I knew it was going to be a good day since I was already wearing the shirt 🙂
The rest of the week was packed with training sessions and sales calls. One of the sessions was about objection handling and closing, which reminded me of some tactical tips and one of the biggest learning lessons of my career, which is what this week’s newsletter is all about.
Let’s Make it Happen!
TACTICAL TIPS: Know Your Walk Away Line
SALES RESOURCES: Objection Handling Techniques and GPTs
SALES FROM THE STREETS: The Biggest Learning Lesson of My Career
TACTICAL TIPS:
Know Your Walk Away Line
When it comes to negotiations, we all have a mental line that gets crossed where it doesn’t seem “fair” any more.
Chris Voss, author of one of my favorite negotiation books called Never Split the Difference and someone I’ve had on my podcast, calls “fair” the most dangerous F word in negotiations.
Here’s a good blog post he did on the topic with a few great tactical tips.
In his post he talks about when someone comes out and says the word “fair” during your negotiations.
I want to talk about the internal feeling of “fair” we all feel.
It’s when the client has pushed us too far. They’ve asked for yet ANOTHER demo, extended the trial AGAIN, asked for MORE discounts and so on.
There’s a certain point where they push so far or ask for so much that it crosses the “fair” barrier in our minds.
When this happens, we tend to start reacting poorly and the situation starts to unravel quickly.
We’re shorter with our responses, take longer to respond, and are less friendly in our tone when we talk to them.
The problem with this “fair” line in each of our heads is that it’s somewhat subjective and can be different based on how we’re feeling at that moment.
This is why I think we should all have an actual, objective “walk away line” in mind when we go into a negotiation with a client.
What’s the absolute lowest you (and your boss) are willing to go?
This way, it’s not emotional. Once you get to that line you can objectively walk away.
This is also called the ‘walk away’ close or the ‘negative’ close technique.
It switches the power from the client to you.
A few things need to be in place to do this right.
You need to:
- Know the problem the client is facing and the impact it’s having on their business
- Know that you’re solution is the best one to address their needs
- Know that you’re the preferred vendor
- Have a big fat pipeline so you are in a position to WANT their business, not NEED it
If you have those things in place and reach your walk way line then you should have a ton of confidence saying something like:
“At this point it doesn’t make a ton of sense for us to continue since it doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to address your needs with the concessions you’re asking for.”
When you say something like this and have those items in place, many times the client backs down and agrees to your line.
It doesn’t work all the time and you have to be willing to walk away but this has saved me from a lot of mental anguish through the years.
This is also why it’s important to know the different closing and objection handling techniques. Once you learn the different techniques you can be more thoughtful and strategic about how you use them.
(If you want to learn more about the different techniques you can sign up to my membership and gain access to every piece of content I have, including the new membership with new content that I’ll be releasing in about a month)
SALES RESOURCES:
Objection Handling Techniques and GPTs
We all face the same objections all the time. Let me know if these sound familiar:
- We’re not interested
- I don’t have time for this
- You’re too expensive
- We don’t have budget for this
- We’re happy with our current solution
- Send me information
What seems a little crazy to me is that most of us act like it’s the first time we’ve ever gotten the objection when we get it.
The biggest key to objection handling and closing in my opinion is being proactive versus reactive.
Before making the call or having the meeting, we should
- Know what we’re trying to “close” for
- Have multiple things to close for in case we can’t get our main one
- Know who we are meeting with and what objections they might have
- Have responses for the objections or at least a flow we can follow to help address them
With that, I wanted to share with you some resources to help with objection handling.
One of them is a blog post that I did a while ago that outlines a step-by-step process you can use to handle almost any objection you get later in the sales process.
The data shows what the best reps do versus what average reps do and this is the process they came up with and is what I train in my training.
Also, I found a bunch of Objection Handling GPTs that you can check out here:
Start playing around with some of these today and practice your objection handling techniques so next time you can handle them far more effectively.
SALES FROM THE STREETS:
The Biggest Learning Lesson of My Career
Staying on the topic of closing and objection handling techniques, I used one that led to the biggest learning lesson of my career.
It’s called the “Door Knob” or “Columbo” close. For those of you (probably most of you) who are too young to know who Columbo was, look him up.
This “close” is used after the client tells you you’ve lost the deal. It’s about accepting the loss and then asking one more question that sounds something like:
“For my own personal and professional development, could you help me understand the REAL reason you decided not to go with us?”
The sleazy sales approach to this is to then take whatever they tell you and try to use it to resell them on your solution by highlighting something you might have missed about how your solution can help them.
The business professional approach to this is to use it to learn so that you can get better next time.
That’s what I did when I got fired from Staples after they acquired my first company.
You can read more about the details in a blog I wrote a while ago about it but I'll share the highlights here.
The head of the $12B Contract/Corporate side of Staples was the one who led the acquisition of my company and did the initial interviews with our executive team before they decided to buy us.
To make a long story short, we didn’t hit it off very well from the start and the year I was there trying to lead the integration of our sales orgs didn’t exactly go well for various reasons.
Some of these reasons were within my control but many weren’t.
There was a point in my tenure there where I didn't think I was being treated “fairly” and started to react poorly.
This led to them eventually firing me, which was devastating to me at the time. I had never been fired before, and I was one of the main drivers of our culture up until that point.
After I digested the fact that I had been hired, I reached out to the executive who fired me and asked if he would be open to meeting with me to help me learn from the experience (the “door knob” or “Columbo” close).
He agreed and gave me an hour of his time in his office.
That hour was my MBA. I learned more in that hour about myself, business and how I was perceived in the previous 10 years of selling and running a business.
The conversation went so well that he ended up being the person I used as a reference when I had the chance to work for Jack Welch (another one that most of you are too young to know but he was Forbes Magazine CEO of the Century).
The point is, when you lose a deal, try to learn from it. Remember, failure isn’t failure as long as you learn from it.
Make it Happen!
The Best Meeting Prep System I've EVER Used
Check out this post.
I talk about how I prepped for a meeting and got all the right questions and research done in less than 10 minutes.
This system would NOT be possible with out OtterPilot. Reply "Make it Happen" to this email and I'll send you a link where you can download their Sales companion version for free.
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ADDITIONAL WAYS YOU CAN LEVEL UP YOUR SALES GAME
- The JB Sales Membership is where you’ll get access to my live training, workshops, AMAs and OnDemand catalog so you can level up your sales skills every day! 3000+ Sales pros have already joined. Are you next?
- The industry-leading Make it Happen Monday Podcast where you’ll get insights and inspiration from some of the most interesting and influential people in the world of Sales and business. (this is where you’ll hear the Guy Kawasaki episode on May XYZ)
- The JB Sales YouTube channel with practical tips that you can apply immediately to drive results along with interviews and content that is guaranteed to get you to think differently.
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