The sales process is just starting when the customer first says no.
I'm going to go "no" on this, and add that I think this is misguided thinking:
Now to be fair, I'm hardly an experienced sales-person, so I may be proven wrong. But a lot of the sales material[1] I've been reading and working on applying lately suggests a different approach. Instead of focusing on your product and going into "presentation mode" right away, and finding yourself in the mode of having to "overcome objections" the idea is to "Always be leaving" (not "always be closing") and focus on actually diagnosing the customer's needs and actively seek to disqualify them if they don't actually need what you are selling. If they do, you go through a guided process of diagnosis, something akin to the way a doctor diagnoses a patient: you think your doctor is going to try to sell you some angioplasty because they're running a special on it this week, without even checking to see if maybe you really do just have heartburn?
Further, if you buy this approach (no pun intended), part of the idea is that the diagnosis process keeps the customer involved and you actually get them to take ownership of parts of the process... so that, when you get to the end, IF the need actually arises, you won't usually encounter much (if any) objections, as the answer will be obvious.
Of course it'll never be quite that easy in practice, but I'm planning to start applying this model and see how it works for us.
I'm going to go "no" on this, and add that I think this is misguided thinking:
Now to be fair, I'm hardly an experienced sales-person, so I may be proven wrong. But a lot of the sales material[1] I've been reading and working on applying lately suggests a different approach. Instead of focusing on your product and going into "presentation mode" right away, and finding yourself in the mode of having to "overcome objections" the idea is to "Always be leaving" (not "always be closing") and focus on actually diagnosing the customer's needs and actively seek to disqualify them if they don't actually need what you are selling. If they do, you go through a guided process of diagnosis, something akin to the way a doctor diagnoses a patient: you think your doctor is going to try to sell you some angioplasty because they're running a special on it this week, without even checking to see if maybe you really do just have heartburn?
Further, if you buy this approach (no pun intended), part of the idea is that the diagnosis process keeps the customer involved and you actually get them to take ownership of parts of the process... so that, when you get to the end, IF the need actually arises, you won't usually encounter much (if any) objections, as the answer will be obvious.
Of course it'll never be quite that easy in practice, but I'm planning to start applying this model and see how it works for us.
[1]: http://www.masteringthecomplexsale.com/