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Don't Make Your Prospects "Wrong" When Handling Objections in Medical Sales

by Mace Horoff

Handling objections. When you are giving a sales presentation to one of your healthcare customers and you hear an objection you know you can handle without much thought, what do you do? If you're like most, you handle it, usually immediately and emphatically! While this is a knee-jerk response and an effort to get the objection out of the way quickly, it is often not in your best interest.

You sell to healthcare providers---doctors, nurses, therapists, and technologists--- professionals of one kind or another who are highly educated in their respective fields. Whether or not they are "true experts" is irrelevant. What matters is how they see themselves and that you don't do or say anything that contradicts that perception.

Objections take on many forms. One common form is the "I prefer a design that is different than your product's design" objection. How will most salespeople respond? They will jump right into the design rationale and try to teach the customer why their product is better. While it seems reasonable to the salesperson, the customer may perceive it as "Mr. Customer, obviously you don't have enough knowledge or experience to recognize a better design when you see it!"

Could you instead respond with something like the feel, felt, found technique? "Mr. Prospect, I completely understand the way you feel. Several other therapists that I call on felt the same way that you did about our new design. But what they found is that they adapted easily to the change that we made and felt that it was an improvement after they got the hang of it. Would you like to experience it yourself?"

Another common objection relates to something your customer heard or read about your product, which is not true. An example is your customer saying "Your instrument system is the slowest on the market." Now, you could interrupt and say, "What? Where did you hear that? Our system is faster than anything available!" The customer might hear your response as, "You idiot! Where do you get your information from?" This is not a good way to win friends and influence people and it certainly won't help you to sell your product or services.

A better response might be, "I understand your feelings regarding our previous design. That instrument system was cumbersome and it may have slowed your procedure a bit. It has been redesigned to make it more user-friendly and much faster. Can I show you how it will save you time and provide more predictable outcomes?"

Notice that the second response tells the customer what he really wants to hear---that he is right! We "redesigned the product" and we are offering to show him how it's been changed, which allows him to continue to be "right."

There are many ways to answer objections without making the prospect wrong. Keep this in mind the next time you have the response to an objection on the tip of your tongue. Always help your customers to be right.

© Copyright Mace Horoff 2006, 2011.  All rights reserved