Did you close the deal?

Why should I hire you over someone else?

Do you love me?

Why should you get a bonus?

Questions… they can be simple to answer or they can get our adrenaline pumping and our palms sweating.

To have success in a sales role you need to learn how to answer difficult questions by thinking on your feet.

Because buyers don’t just ask questions to obtain information. Buyers ask questions for other reasons as well.

They might be trying to put you under pressure to see how you deal with stressful situations, they might be trying to understand your attitude on a subject without directly asking about it or they might be trying to test whether you are telling the truth in your sales pitch.

So lets jump into it and learn how to answer difficult questions…

STEP-BY-STEP

When selling there are unlimited questions as a potential buyer could ask you. Therefore it is impossible to plan responses to each question ahead of time. So we need a system to answer tough questions and think on our feet.

Answering tough questions has two steps –

* Creating enough time to process the question* Generating an answer that serves everyone in the conversation

Pretty simple right?

So let’s look at the first step to dealing with difficult questions which is to buy yourself more time.

#1 BUY YOURSELF TIME

Have you ever experienced this? A buyer throws a tough question in your direction and for some reason words start spilling out of your mouth uncontrollably?

One thing leads to another, to another and you’re suddenly wondering what the heck you’re talking about.

I’ve been there too.

This happens because most salespeople fear there being any silence on their side of a conversation.

Salespeople fear this silence because they assume the buyer will think that they lack knowledge on their product or their market and so will then reject them.

This isn’t very effective though. It would be like jumping in front of a train, expecting it to stop.

Unfortunately, when you blurt out a response to a tricky question without thinking it over, often this impulsive response is not going to be the best rebuttal you could have come up with.

So the most important thing you can do to improve your responses to difficult questions is to buy yourself a little bit more time for your brain to think.

How do buy this extra time?

Look at your buyer, pause in silence, making sure not to fill the silence with lots of “umm” and “errrr” and give yourself room to think.

Easy right?

A small pause like this will often indicate to a buyer that you’re not just a sleezy salesperson trying to flog whatever is the deal of the day and that you are truly trying to give them the best possible advice too.

If you need to buy yourself even more time to mentally process the difficult question, you can do what politicians do and repeat back the question to the buyer.

For example, if a buyer asks you –

“Are there are opportunities for discounts if we classify you as a preferred account?”

Well you can pause, then say –

“hmmm, are there opportunities for discounts if you classify us as a p...