Welcome to the midway point through July! It’s crazy how it wasn’t so long ago that I was ranting about how cold things were and now we’re in the hottest part of the year. Mind you, I have no objections to the time of year, the weather’s great, the days are long, and the world is opening more and more, I have no objections to any of that. 

Speaking of objections though, this week we had on an amazing guest.  Doug C. Brown, Founder and CEO of Business Success Factors and author of the best-selling book, Win-Win Selling: Unlocking Your Power for Profitability by Resolving Objections, came on to talk about the dynamic of sales teams and the importance of objection handling:

Listen to our show with Doug here.

After listening to Doug, there is so much that comes to mind.  Especially for me, a person that is not especially good at objection handling.  This obviously makes my life easy when writing these, so here we go:

 

1- Know your unknowns: This is just good practice for anything in life that you want to get better at.  If there are gaps in your competitive knowledge, or certain objections that you know come up often that you don’t have a good response for, work on getting better at them, and while you won’t be perfect right away, you’ll always get better if you start somewhere.

 

2- Sales Engineers should and can handle objections. It’s uncomfortable, but that’s why we get paid the big bucks.  There may be tension, but if objection handling, in essence, is understanding customers’ fears. If we can alleviate that, we’re on our way to building a beautiful friendship.

 

3- We grow by being uncomfortable.  Whether it be trying new foods or facing our product’s weaknesses in the face and learning to navigate around them, being okay with being uncomfortable is such a great trait for anyone who excels as a Sales Engineer.

 

4-Sales is a team sport, and Sales Engineers are on that team. Chris White mentions this a lot, but Doug talking about how he would leverage SEs really drove home the point of sales being a team sport.  The value we bring is unique and compliments our sales counterparts in several ways.  Knowing the team you’re on and the value you bring is really important, and those on your team recognizing the value in this dynamic is important as well.

 

Demoflow.io

I’m attending a Virtual selling course at work. The conversation went to collaboration and it’s a shame that Demoflow was not on the list. I emailed the enablement person after the call, and I think it bears repeating here, Demoflow is one of the best collaboration tools I’ve used.