Effective Practical Strategies to Overcome Customers' Objections: in the New Era of Auto Sales

By Okonko Basil Nwachukwu Ph.D

The three effective sales ability qualities are: First, the ability to be effective in communicating with customers. The Second, is the ability to listen- to allow customers acknowledge feelings of care, essential for encouraging trust and loyalty to doing business. The structuring of a sales process that benefits a salesperson, his organization, and the customers can be achieved by effective listening. The third effective sales quality is the ability to understand customers. Effective salespeople use their communication and listening skills to understand their customers. It is a very important strategy that helps control customers. The strategies I used to sell volumes of products were not magical; they were, instead, my utmost desire to maximize my income as the primary benefit for being a professional salesperson. Understanding customers makes the difference. I believe that what I did to achieve sales benefits can be done by anyone who makes good efforts to try to become the best they can be in sales business. How the author wants the reader to understand the three sales abilities: Communication. Every communications must concentrate on matters involving product sales and purchases. Listening. Listening should involve giving attention to customers' verbal and non-verbal cues as relates to their purchasing needs. Understanding. Understanding is the key to knowing how to successfully respond to customers' needs. These are the essential sales principles the author followed to achieve sales business success and growth. The author acknowledges sales career as a profession with a desire to achieve financial success. The same desire was his motivation towards his hard works for success. This is why he believes that anyone with such a burning desire for success as he had, can also achieve sales success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644923689

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Effective Practical Strategies to Overcome Customers' Objections

in the New Era of Auto Sales

Okonko Basil Nwachukwu Ph.D

Copyright © 2019 by Okonko Basil Nwachukwu Ph.D

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Dedication

To a late wonderful and special someone who made a difference in my life: My oldest sister, Madam Chinyere Salomy Mbawe. With heartfelt thanks for your strength and courage, heedless of your gender, in standing up to our father’s older sons (our half-brothers) to challenge and quell their intimidating verbal and physical behavior toward me. You are part of the reasons I have become who I am today, and you will always be loved. Until we meet again, rest in peace, sister!

Acknowledgments

Nothing is accomplished without the Almighty God as its foundation. Although I produced this book based on my sales experience, the reasoning and thought processes that gave it meaning would not have been possible without God’s guidance. The life and good health provided to me by God, starting from the time I proposed writing this book to the time it was completed, were the major strengths behind an accomplishment such as this. For these reasons, I say, to His name be the glory.

I also give thanks to the men and women from Christian Faith Publishing who contributed greatly to ensure that my plans for this book were carried out. I am thankful for what each one of you did to make the book a valuable tool for those wishing to improve their sales productivity. By the same token, my warm and sincere thanks go to Dr. Diane Johns for her witty and unparalleled editing contributions that convinced me to move forward with this project.

My great gratitude goes to the two most important and wonderful people in my life—my wife, Charing B. Nwachukwu, and my son, Jayvyn E. Nwachukwu—for their patience and endurance during those moments that required my being away from them for hours at a time to work on the book. I extend my special thanks to Jayvyn for understanding, at the age of nine and ten years, the importance of Papa’s documents as something that needed to be protected to avoid erasure. The mental maturity you showed at such young age to assure the protection of the book manuscript was the impetus behind its completion, that made it a reality. You are an inspirational little boy indeed, and I am so proud of you!

Foreword

This book is for you if you are a salesperson who has to deal face to face with your customers. It is written to give you effective answers for the objections you have already heard customers voice when they came to buy one product or another but decided instantly not to move forward with the sales process. Salespeople—those in auto sales in particular—experience this problem every day. The book is designed to help you prepare for the objections that are inevitable from customers, to persuade them to reconsider whatever is causing their resistance and complete the sale. This way, you can be satisfied with the financial rewards that sales bring. A sales-book like this has not yet been provided by those who write just to sell books because they are better at writing than selling products, although they may claim to be the best salespeople who have ever lived on the planet. I wrote this book because I think it is necessary for me to help men and women in the sales business such as auto sales, where customers’ objections sometimes overwhelm salespeople and create a stumbling block, keeping both buyers and sellers from moving forward with the sales process.

The unique nature of this book stems from the fact that I, as a well-known, successful salesperson in the California auto sales industry, have compiled all the major objections that I heard from customers over the years, along with the effective and practical strategies I used to convince them to move forward with the sales process that often led to product purchases. The fact remains that it is difficult to sell to customers who are not convinced they have the right salesperson to work with. Many salespeople have lost business from customers whose concerns or objections were not properly addressed. In some cases, many sales personnel in auto sales split their commissions by turning their customers over to salespeople they think are better at overcoming those objections, even when those objections are not as hard to overcome as the salesperson thinks. This book is a useful and powerful tool to assist you in becoming better at overcoming objections with effective, carefully designed and reasonable strategies that put to rest those objections and make room for sales accomplishments.

Although I cannot say for sure what other sales-book authors promise their readers, one thing I can say about this book is that it is written based on my twenty-year experience as a successful sales professional in auto dealerships as both a salesperson and as a sales trainer. Those who received training from me during those years, who also took my customer objection lessons and became successful themselves, encouraged me to write this book for others who truly want to succeed at overcoming sales objections. The most doubtful aspect about many sales-books on the market is that they mention sales as a general concept, and unfortunately suggest the reader will become a good salesperson simply by reading these books, without adequately taking the steps that a person must take to improve their sales errors. This is the reason most sales-books are boring to read: the authors are more concerned about writing to promote themselves and their self-images using glamorous words that get their readers’ attention, when their books are not all that good at helping their readers improve their selling skills.

Anyone struggling with sales performance due to a lack of convincing tools to address customers’ objections will find this book most valuable, as the author has attempted to include all the objections ever heard from customers within his twenty-year career. He has meticulously composed these and the effective strategies used to overcome the objections. It is difficult for sales-book authors to describe actual customers’ behaviors that can make sales challenging for salespeople, or to recommend specific sales strategies to help readers become effective and successful, as they claim. In contrast, this book is designed to allow readers to understand customers’ behaviors specifically relating to objections that could hinder or completely shut down an ongoing sales process. The book does not just give scenarios as experienced by the author, but also includes communication tactics the author used to address each objection and complete successful sales. I believe any reader who follows the author’s strategies based on these scenarios and other important information included to help combat objections, will see a significant difference in their sales performance. If I was able to use these strategies as displayed in the book to overcome objections that made me successful and become known by many as one of the best salespersons in my organization, you too can do the same by following what I did.

For the many salespeople who asked me to write this book, I know why you requested that I write a book like this. You know that I am fully aware of what salespeople go through emotionally when they think they have a deal, and suddenly the customer doesn’t want to buy the vehicle any more— even when a customer who has committed to buy decides to leave without giving any good reason for doing so. You know I understand the emotion that is sometimes intensified when a salesperson is convinced that he or she has a buyer and, out of excitement, communicates this to the managers, but later is castigated by those managers, who waited for the salesperson to bring the deal to their desk to no avail, as the customer had left the dealership. I know how it feels when this happens, because I went through it during my first year in the business, until I figured out what was happening. After figuring it out within my first year, I took over the sales department as the employee of the month for years, and could not let it go because of the joy and happiness it brought, by knowing that I had gone from a zero salesperson to a hero salesperson.

The ability of salespeople to take control of the sales process and proceed to make successful sales depends on their understanding of customers’ needs and wants. Most of what customers are looking for manifests itself in what they object to or resist during the sales process. Sometimes these objections don’t go any deeper than the surface level on which one usually sees most objections. It may be that customers are just looking for more explanations and clarity about what they are attempting to buy. If they get clear information from salespeople on what they are asking about, and are satisfied with the responses to their questions, my experience also tells me they will respectfully and happily complete their obligations in the sales process and purchase their products. This premise to which I just alluded is based on my experience with similar situations, and I believe that readers of this book looking for better ways to pass through customers’ objections to complete the sales process will be happy that they have this book in their hands. If you behave the way I did when I faced these objections, and apply the communication skills as I did, and as displayed in this book, I am certain you will notice a difference in your overall sales performance. I said certain because this is what I did to become a great sales performer, and you can become one as well by following and applying the strategies as demonstrated in this book.

Another reason for writing this book is to give salespersons the opportunity to own it and use it to have a selling advantage that other salespeople without this book do not have. The competitive nature of the sales business, especially with automobile products, where each major dealership has between ten to thirty sales personnel at a time, and where many auto sales organizations are located in every corner of a city selling almost identical products, makes it important for salespeople to compete with unique qualities that set them apart from other salespeople. Qualities of self-presentation, effective communication skills, and a positive attitude toward the customer and the sales process are the attributes that create sales. This book is written under these merits, as it scrupulously emphasizes these factors as essential components of sales productivity.

One may ask, why didn’t I include product knowledge as one of the factors that creates sales? As important as product knowledge is and as significant as its role in the sales process, ultimately salespeople and not products set the tone for generating sales. As mentioned in this book, the majority of people who buy vehicles buy them based on feelings rather than needs. After all, they have other vehicles at home to drive, or they can leave a salesperson they don’t like in favor of other