Here’s one reason why you get vague objections from your prospects and can’t figure out why they aren’t saying an enthusiastic “yes”:
They’re totally confused by your description of how you’ll help them.
Let’s unpack this and explain how to fix it!
One of the things that used to frustrate me most was when I’d present my offer on a sales call and the person would give me a really vague response, like:
“I’m not sure this is what I need,” or
“I’m not a ‘hell yes’ quite yet,” or
“I just have to think about it some more.”
Sales coaches trained me not to let these vague objections go – to get to the root of them, to see what they really meant.
So I’d dutifully follow up, with “May I ask exactly what you need to think about?” Or “What would you need to know/see/hear from me in order to be a ‘hell yes’?”
Not only was I taught to ask those questions, but I’m a very curious person and I really did want to know exactly why folks weren’t saying “yes.”
But those questions usually didn’t help much or elicit any new information.
I’d get responses like, “I’m not sure what else I need to know, sorry! I’m not sure how to answer that,” or “I don’t know why I’m not a ‘yes’ yet, it just doesn’t feel quite right.”
It was frustrating as hell – I just wanted people to tell me the reason already so I could figure out what I was doing wrong!
Looking back, though, I can see why people weren’t able to get more specific with me about why they weren’t saying “yes.”
It’s kinda like when you were in high school or middle school and the teacher would stand up front and say, “All right, who has questions about quadratic equations?”
[Blank stares and silence all around]“No one? Okay then! I’m expecting that everyone is going to get 100% on the test tomorrow!”
And of course you’d panic when you heard that – knowing full well that you didn’t grasp the material well enough to get an A+ – because not being able to formulate a question doesn’t necessarily mean that you perfectly understand something.
On the contrary. You actually need to have a decent understanding of a topic in the first place in order to formulate an intelligent question about said topic.
If you feel totally confused about the topic, all you’ll be able to muster up is, “Uhh… I don’t get it.” or “I think I need to reread the chapter.” Or “I need all of this explained better.”
All of which are coming from the same place as “need to think about it” and “not sure if this is for me” often do in a sales conversation.
So my point here is that vague objections from your prospects are often rooted in just feeling totally confused by what you shared about how you’ll help them. They don’t even know what to ask you; they don’t even know where to start.
Even people who are generally good communicators are prone to poorly explaining what they do. It’s a very hard thing to do well, especially when you know your expertise inside and out and have been doing it forever and you forget certain things about what non-experts in your subject matter really know and don’t know.
Sometimes the problem is even a few steps further back, in that you don’t actually HAVE a clearly-defined process for helping your ideal clients – you’re either too new to what you do, or you’ve helped such a wide variety of clients that you haven’t narrowed in on the key elements of what you do that only apply to the most-ideal client so that your offer is more tailored.
That was the case for me. I had helped people with so many things (email list building, lead magnet creation, positioning statements, sales pages, market research) and one day I decided it was time to mush them all together into a high-ticket program and start doing sales calls for it.
And of course prospects were confused by it.
In every sales call I would actually have to read off my own explanation of the program from a script in order to remember all the parts. (!!!)
Now I see what a red flag that was – even **I** didn’t really understand what my offer was about or how the parts fit together.
In contrast, I could explain my current super-successful offer in my sleep – and in fact I rewrite it from scratch every couple of weeks without any notes or other memory aids because I know exactly what concepts and deliverables are included and why.
The deeper issue with my offer back then was that it was just a “grab bag” of topics I knew about, and wasn’t aimed at getting a particular outcome for people – such as scaling from __ amount to ___ amount per month, selling more high-ticket offers, generating a certain number of leads for a certain type of business, etc.
(For more on “grab-bag offers” and why they’re so hard to sell, see this post.)
I think that what my prospects wanted to know – but couldn’t articulate – was “What kind of outcome can I expect? And how will all of these things get me there – why are we doing them?”
But it’s very intellectually demanding for a prospect to even formulate that question to try to extract that info from a coach or expert, who in theory should know their expertise inside and out and be able to explain it in an easy way that doesn’t make the prospect’s brain work too hard.
Now, even if you actually do have a proven process (unlike me back then) and clear reasons why every piece of your offer is included, you could still be prone to the same errors above of “not explaining the outcome” or “not explaining how the different pieces will get them there.”
I’ve now reviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs’ explanations of their offers, and I see these gaps all the time.
I use a particular method (known as the Strong Method™) that I created for articulating an offer.
And, when I help clients to articulate their offers, I ask them to put the outcome first (in Point A to Point B fashion, e.g. not just saying that the outcome is $10K month but also where the ideal person would be starting from in order to get there – $5K/month? Already having a validated offer? Something else?).
And then I ask them to list out the chunks of stuff they’re going to do to get someone there.
And more often than not, at first glance I struggle to understand what the different chunks mean and why the heck you’d be doing those things if you wanted to get the stated outcome.
As an example, I’ve looked at weight-loss offers where the first thing they’re going to do with you is “get you eating more.”
And I’m like, “Huh? Isn’t this a weight LOSS offer? Why are you having them eat MORE?”
And then client will explain to me, “Well, actually, eating too little can stress the body and make it hang onto fat.”
And I’m like, “Ohhhhh. Please include that bit in the first bullet point so prospects understand precisely why you are having them do that.”
And I’ve looked at stop-binge-eating offers and stop-emotional-eating offers where one of the things they’ll do in the program is “learn to be present.” And nothing more is said.
And again I scratch my head – why? What does that have to do with ceasing these unhelpful eating behaviors?
They explain, “When you learn to be in the present moment, you actually have a chance to disconnect from all of your thoughts around ‘I need to eat that now’ and ‘I shouldn’t’ and simply FEEL whether or not your body actually wants that food. More often than not, the answer will be ‘no.'”
And of course the lightbulb then turns on for me and I have them include that explanation in their bullet point.
And I’ve looked at scaling/hiring offers where one of the “what we’ll do” chunks is “have you and your team members take my personality assessment letting each of you know what your Acme Personality Typing Profile is.”
Huh? What does that have to do with —
“Oh, I have them do that because when they see how each of them naturally operates in the world they’ll be less likely to misinterpret and misunderstand each other’s actions, resulting in fewer team disagreements/fights and better morale.”
Oh! Okay. Please include that explanation in the bullet point…
And so on. 😉
Most coaches and experts don’t realize how unclear they’re being in their explanations. When you clear these up (along with clearing up what exact outcome the right person can expect with you), you should have dramatically fewer of those frustrating vague objections that the prospect can’t clarify for you.
You might even find, in my case, that you no longer need to do sales calls at all, because when you can put your explanation in writing in an easily digestible format, prospects suddenly feel like they “get” what you do and don’t need to even get on a call with you to have it explained.
And you save tons of time and energy… it’s so much easier to write something one time than it is to try to explain it out loud over and over to different people.
(And let’s not even get into how tough it is to train a sales rep to properly present what you do when you struggle to do it yourself.)
For me, it was frustrating that I never got an answer from all of those prospects about why they didn’t say “yes,” but I’ve come to realize that they simply did not have it in them to give one because they couldn’t pinpoint what was missing from my explanation.
And, to be completely fair, even I couldn’t pinpoint what was missing back then, so it wasn’t very realistic to expect a third party to do it.
Now I see that when we put a clear explanation out, we very often get a clear decision back. 😉 Funny how that works.
In my case, I went from doing tons of calls and only enrolling every 10th or 15th person or so (0-2 clients per month) to now doing no calls and getting 1-3 enthusiastic enrollments every week from people I’ve never heard of before who pop into my inbox telling me that they know what I offer is just what they need.
I know which way I prefer.
If you want those results too, DM me on Facebook to see if you qualify for my 30-day 1:1 Intensive where we refine your offer and the way you’re talking about it, as well as the content you write to pre-sell people on the offer.
Also DM me if you’re interested in taking my certification program so you can teach my methods to your own clients.