Every day, technology salespeople are struggling to close deals, network contacts are ignoring you, proposals are being postponed, and quotas go unfulfilled.

Is anybody buying any technology or professional services today?

If they are, why?

Even when technology sales are slow, companies still buy when sales reps use the “doctor” method of sales in which they repair the prospect’s pain. You can gain an edge by working as a pain management specialist while your competitors take off for holiday vacation. Prospects are not going to call you back if they do not believe your product or service is going to immediately make them feel better.

Like a surgeon, you need to diagnose your prospect’s issues. At the same time, you need to manage sales objection issues. Below is a list of ten objections prospects use to stall a deal. I have used this list with my own IT account managers when their sales were slowing. Take your 30 to 60-day sales forecast and see if you can apply one (at least one) of these ten closing bottlenecks to each of your prospects in order to better evaluate which deals to spend your sales closing time on and which deals are wasting your time.

• As a vendor, you are not helping me manage my risk.
• Your price (or terms) is wrong.
• I am hurting, but you have not told me how to fix my pain yet.
• We have no budget (no money).
• You have not convinced me it is the right product or service.
• You are the wrong firm and/or I don’t want to work with you.
• I am just a looker. I am not going to buy anything.
• You are cycling me as a prospect. Can’t you tell I am not interested?
• You haven’t asked me the right questions yet.
• I am the wrong person – I have no authority to buy anything.

So, to close more deals, you need to focus on these ten points (or more) to understand what your current sales processes are and what needs to be changed to find prospects who will buy.

Today, let’s just focus on number one – You are not helping me manage my risk. In the technology space, every purchase has risk involved. The prospect risks that the technology will not be compatible with other systems, that your firm’s services will not work, and that you as a vendor may not be in business next year. These are risks all prospects think through when evaluating you, your proposal and your firm. As a technology rep, you need to understand these issues even when they are not verbalized by the prospect.

Helping clients manage their perception of the risk will help you close more deals. In a slower economy, the risk factor increases as funding becomes tighter. Many times senior executives and presidents of small firms will not give you a risk objection. So, a key ingredient is to make sure you have communicated proactively to the prospect that there are minimal risks dealing with your firm or using your technology.

How do you discover what fears the prospect may have? It is the what, who, why, when questioning method you ask prospects that may get you the answers. But even more than just using probing questions, you need to do an internal assessment of the issues of your firm, product, or service to predetermine what the risks are perceived to be. Is your firm too small? Is your product too new? Have you given sufficient client references or testimonials to make the prospect feel comfortable?

Being a small, unknown company or marketing an uninstalled technology does not mean you can’t close IT prospects. Think of all the $30 million deals you read about in the trades from some unknown IT firm selling a Fortune 00 company. To sell a deal like this, these companies have managed their prospect’s perception of buying from an unknown vendor.

They have deployed Prospect Risk Management techniques.

How do you manage your prospects? perception of risk?

Here are some guidelines to prepare for prospect risk management:

• Never wait for a prospect to ask about your firm’s background. Always supply details in advance. If the following variables are positive, your corporate information should include number of employees, years in business, clients’ names and annual revenue. If these variables are negative (i.e., losing money, no installations, customers hate you) then don’t bring it up and just focus on the other methods listed.
• The greater the competition, the more risk management information you must deploy to balance perceived prospect fear. Do not be passive when competing against established players – go after their largeness as a weakness.
• Never have your CEO go on a first sales call. It makes your firm look small. CEO’s are big guns held in reserve to be used when needed, not on the first sales call. Having CEO’s go to your first client meeting only works when your firm is a Fortune 500 and you are meeting a Fortune 500 C-level executive.
• If you are VC-funded and have new technology, name-drop your VC’s relationship.
• If you are a small or startup firm and have Fortune 1000 C-level executives on your board of directors, say “our team includes…” and name-drop their positions and the company names with which they are associated.
• To manage the prospect’s fear of buying something other than what was shown in a demo, it is always a good idea to have a client feature/service sign-off sheet for any software application purchase demonstration. This protects the salesperson from the client’s demo amnesia and protects clients from being oversold.
• When competing against big companies, manage the risk factor by focusing on your strengths. Use the bus analogy when competing against them, “They bus in and out their lead team and usually have no practice manager continuity, while our team stays throughout the relationship”.
• Never communicate that your firm is a generalist. Always be a specialist. Generalist firms are always perceived to be large and slow. Specialist firms are perceived to be more customer centric and small.

Sales objections are just roadblocks which salespeople need to drive around to hit their destination.

Manage risk better and you will manage your sale.