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In the first two parts of this series we focused on the preparation necessary to anticipate and prepare for possible questions and objections from your audience. In this part we focus on how you answer the questions.

The key point of this article is that if you’re a salesperson, the skills that you have learned for handling objections during a sales call are not the same skills that you use when dealing with Q&A. In fact, what works during a one on one sales call can actually hurt you during a presentation.

Most sales professionals have learned a technique for handling objections that goes something like this:

• Listen carefully to the objection or question
• Probe further to understand the objection if necessary
• Soften, or “cushion” it by saying something like “good question”
• Set up your answer by using an analogy, asking a question to redirect, etc.
• Answer the objection
• Check for agreement

It can be a rather long process, but it’s very effective because it avoids turning things into a debate.

So what’s wrong with using the same process for a presentation? The principal difference between a sales call and a presentation is the number of people in the room, and that changes the dynamic entirely.

When you’re in a call with one or two people, you need to answer questions to their satisfaction in order to move forward in the conversation. That’s why you give them every opportunity to talk and get their objections into the open.

But in a room full of people, your focus is usually not the individual, but the group as a whole. We all have faced audience members who love to ask questions just to get noticed or show how smart they are, and the worst thing you can do is to let them take over.

The standard objection process lets them do just that. Let’s modify the process:

• Listen. This does not change; it is tied for the most important part of the process in either case. Don’t start trying to think of your answer while they’re still talking.
• Probe. In a presentation, you want to limit this. Assume you’ve heard the question correctly and answer what you’ve heard. A little bit is OK, but probing too much may give them the floor for too long.
• Soften. Drop this entirely. If you say good question to someone, you have to say it to everyone so they don’t feel slighted, and then what do you sound like?
• Set up. Drop this entirely or at least keep it as short as possible. Not everyone in the room cares as much about your answer as the person who asked, so you want to keep it brief.
• Answer. This is as important as listening. The first thing the entire audience is looking for is to see if you’ve answered the question. You may decide to bridge off your answer to reemphasize a point from your presentation, but you first have to earn the right by answering the question—otherwise you come across like an oily politician.
• Check for agreement. Drop this, or you run the risk of opening a full can of worms that no one else cares about. Confidently assume that your answer was the right one and move on to the next question.

There is an exception to these principles. When the person asking the questions is the decision maker, for all practical purposes, he or she is the only person in the room at that time.

Related articles:

How to Make your Presentation Bulletproof: Part 1

How to Make your Presentation Bulletproof: Part 2

Sure wish I had brought a map

Your plan will go off-track. It was a German general, von Moltke, who first said that no plan ever survives contact with the enemy. I doubt von Moltke ever carried a bag, but the same idea applies to sales call plans. You can establish a clear purpose, have excellent questions prepared to guide the conversation, anticipate the worst possible objections you could encounter, and the customer will still find a way to say or do something unexpected.

So why even plan? Why not go in and wing it? You’re a pro, after all. You’ve been in sales long enough to have heard everything. You have a quick mind, deep reserves of experience, and the ability to bluff your way out of the odd inconvenient moment.

Sure.

I’ve noticed an interesting dynamic in my sales training through the years. The attitude towards sales call planning roughly corresponds to the salesperson’s experience level, but the relationship is not linear. Newbies tend to embrace the idea of planning for sales calls. Those with a medium level of experience tend to think they don’t need to plan because they have had some success in sales up to that point, and as a result have enormous self-confidence. But interestingly enough, it’s the ones with the most experience who most embrace the idea of planning, and in fact most of them have devised their own ad-hoc systems for it.

There are two main reasons salespeople give to explain their aversion to planning. The first is that it takes time, and the second is that it limits their flexibility.

Before tackling these two objections, let me first stress that when I refer to sales call planning I don’t mean force-fitting every call into some predetermined sales process that requires you to move systematically through stages in the buying process, or mechanically filling out a sales call plan template. The template helps, of course, but the key is to use it to really think about the upcoming meeting with the customer.

Of course plans take time. So do unsuccessful sales calls, except now you’re not only taking up more of your own time, you’re also taking up the customer’s. How many times have you had to schedule another meeting to answer questions you were unprepared to answer in the first, or have left a meeting only to suddenly remember that you forgot to talk about something very important?

Besides, as you get in the habit of writing sales call plans, you’ll find that it gets easier and faster, since most calls tend to fall into one of several regular patterns.

Plans don’t limit you, they liberate you. Alfred North Whitehead said that “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them”, and the same could be said for sales call planning. Your goal, when you enter into a serious sales conversation, is to devote your full attention to the buyer. That’s hard to do when a portion of your working memory is taken up trying to keep track of where you are in the conversation and what you want to ask next. If you’ve planned it, you can ask your first question, and then focus your full attention on the answer. If the customer says something that goes off the intended track, you can follow the new thread without worrying about whether you will forget your other questions. You always know they are there if you want to come back to them.

Plans can also boost your situational awareness, which is the best defense against the unexpected. The big picture that the plan gives you helps you spot quicker when things are going off track and to make sense of them. The map may not be the territory, but when the territory is different than what you expected, it definitely helps to orient you.

Finally, the process of planning forces you to think deeper about the customer, the situation, and the value you bring. Depth of thought results in better analysis and greater creativity, but that’s an idea I will develop in another article.

You wish

It seems like everyone has joined the customer satisfaction bandwagon these days. Everyone wants to measure your satisfaction, no matter how trivial the transaction. Last week, I had a brief conversation with the young man cleaning my hotel room in India. He could barely speak English, but one thing he did know was how to ask me to fill out the comment card. I didn’t mind doing it for him, because I thought I could help him look good and maybe get some benefit out of it. Of course, in order to do so, I may have embellished a little bit; by the time I was done he was a modern-day Gunga Din.

That points out part of the problem for companies trying to measure customer satisfaction—the measurement process itself can distort the actual satisfaction felt.

In that example, I made things seem better than they were, but sometimes it works  in reverse. When I work in San Diego, I sometimes order room service at the end of a long day, and then go to bed early because my body is still on East Coast time. But inevitably, just after I have fallen asleep, the phone rings, and it’s the hotel staff asking me if my meal was satisfactory. It took me a couple of times and a few choice words before I was able to train them not to do that.

So, companies clearly have a measurement problem. Since they are ostensibly making important decisions based on the data they collect, surely they are making some wrong decisions? (Of course, we might be more eager to provide feedback if we thought it would lead to actual changes…)

They also have a motivation problem. Lexus says “we value your opinion”. That’s the problem: you may value it, but I don’t. There is no tangible or immediate link between my time invested in letting you know about my customer experience and any measurable return to me.

In closing, I’m reminded of what a friend of mine told his wife when she complained that he didn’t tell her he loved her. He responded: “I told you I love you when I married you. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”