A Really Good Objection Response

I’ve been around in sales for a long time and probably thought I’d heard just about everything in terms of responding to objections.

But last week I was surprised to get an email from another sales trainer that referenced an objection response delivered during an interview with Mark Zuckerberg?

It wasn’t even a salesperson in was an interviewer, Laurie Segall of CNN.

Take a look at the video below …
fast forward to the 16 minute 58 second mark ...
watch the bombshell question the interviewer drops on Mark Z. 
His immediate response and then the great follow up question she replies with

…you only need to watch for about 12 seconds ...
and then read my comments below the video to get the most benefit.

Did you see the look on Mark’s face when the interviewer responded to Mark's response about remaining CEO of Facebook ?
That is a sure fire sign that the question struck pay dirt.

That momentary pause you saw was Mark running scenarios through his mind.

AND did you notice his head moving from side to side in a “NO” motion. 
A clear non-verbal signal indicating he is NOT about to step down as chairman.

I’d like to venture an opinion as to why this response worked so well.

I’m pretty sure you all know the “just suppose” response where you say “just suppose you purchased our X what are the benefits you’d expect to be seeing”. This works well becasue it gets the prospect to imagine a future reality with your product in it.

However, this response does more than that.

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In another post on this site I have mentioned “Presuppositions”.

Just to reiterate a presupposition is something that you must accept to be true for a sentence to make sense. 

An old, well used, example is …
“Poor John, didn’t realise there was a mountain behind the hill”

Most people tend to focus on the poor John or his lack of realisation and never really question if there is indeed a mountain behind the hill. 

An example closer to sales…
“How many benefits do you see in using our service?”
The presupposition in that sentence is that using your service has MORE THAN ONE BENEFIT.

And what it does is sends your prospect off on a mental search to find benefits.

So, what’s the presupposition in … “What would change that?”

Have you got it?
Yes, the presupposition is that there IS something that would change that.

And the mental search Mark went through was him checking scenarios that could influence him to step down.

Can you think of some variations you could use?

For example if your prospect says…

“We’re just going to stay with what we are doing.”

You could respond with...
“What would change that?”
or
“What would have to happen in order to change that?”

Do yourself a favour and come up with some other similar responses.

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