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Tip #1: Assess who you're selling to right now.
This might sound obvious, but if you’re hearing the “I can’t afford it” objection a lot, you might simply be selling to the wrong people. I once had a mentor who always used to say, “The person who needs your solution the most is likely the person who can't afford it.” If you're dealing with prospects who have no money, you’re going to hear “I can’t afford it” all the time. You only want to be selling to those who are likely to at least be able to afford your solution in the first place.
Tip #2: Discuss their critical challenges.
When someone who has money says "I can't afford it,” what they’re really saying is, “I don't see enough value in what you're offering for me to reach into my wallet and give you money." That’s why your first step should always be to focus on the severity of their key challenges. Get them talking about the challenges that you can ultimately help them solve. The more you get them to discuss their critical challenges, the more they’re going to see value in your offering.
Tip #3: Understand the value of solving those challenges.
Getting the prospect to understand the value of solving their critical challenges is the key piece that gets them from point A to point B. It’s up to you to build the bridge to get them there. It’s your job to help the prospect determine and articulate, “What’s the actual value of moving from point A (where I am right now) to point B (a place where my challenge is finally solved)?”
Tip #4: Get commitment to solve the challenges.
This is really key because not all challenges are equal. If you run a business yourself, you probably have a lot of challenges in your business. And so, you know that not every challenge is created equally. You need to constantly do triage. And so your prospects are doing triage themselves, whether they're consumers, or whether they're business owners, or whether they work in a large company, they're constantly doing triage and they're deciding which problems are most important.
Tip #5: Discuss budget before presenting.
This is one of the key distinctions in my selling system from a lot of other folks out there. You want to have a money conversation upfront before you share your solution. So you want to have that budget conversation before you actually get into what the solution looks like, what's the price, all of that. You want to just get a sense of what budget would they be willing to put towards solving these challenges. Ensuring that you have that money conversation upfront is almost always going to avoid at the end, the situation where they say, "I simply can't afford it." Because you will have dealt with that upfront.
Tip #6: Only present to their challenges.
There's a very common mistake that I see among sales people, where we get really excited to present our solution. We're excited and we're passionate about what we're selling. And so when we get into the presentation mode, we tend to share all of the features and benefits of what we have to offer. And a lot of times there are benefits and features that you offer that your prospects simply isn't looking for.
That is a landmine. If you start presenting benefits or features that the prospect wasn't actually looking for, they didn't mention it in their challenges. Now you are likely creating a situation where they're going to actually see less value in what you offer, because it's distracting from what their core challenge is. So you want to make sure that you're only presenting the components of your offering that are relevant to the challenges that they mentioned.
Tip #7: Hold their feet to the fire.
So at the beginning of this training, I shared with you that I would give you some ideas on how to actually deal with someone that actually says, "I can't afford it." Remember, once you're in this situation of, I can't afford it, you are in trouble, right? I mean, that's pretty obvious, but it's really important that you do everything to avoid it. But let's just say, you've done all of those components before and they still say, "I can't afford it."
If they're saying I can't afford it so often, that is a proxy for, "You know what? I'm just not seeing enough value." So you want to hold their feet to the fire and don't back down here. Don't get really salesy and try to sell them more and try to talk about how great your offering is and how it's such a good offering for them. That's crap. Just be willing to recognize that they've already discussed their challenges. They've discussed the cost of those challenges and we've discussed some budgets. So now help me understand what I might've missed here. So there is how to deal with prospects that say, "I can't afford it."