A salesperson handles a prospect asking for testimonials before buying. Christian Polk coaches him to spot the real issue: not missing proof, but a hidden money objection. By reframing the prospect's lack of cash as a lack of sales skills, the salesperson shifts the conversation toward solving the actual problem.
Chapters
Give me some testimonials before I give you my credit card.
Can I make a suggestion? And I say this with love. If I show you some testimonials of our clients who have gotten the best results possible, what do you think those testimonials are probably going to say?
Well, it'd be good. That's why I want to see them.
So you want to make a decision based off of biased opinion? You think I'm going to show you a bad testimonial?
No.
So he's showing him that looking at testimonials doesn't actually help him really debunking the logic behind it to get to the real objection.
Solid.
Probably not, because my concern, man, I don't want you to make a biased decision. I want you to make the right decision for you. But if I show you a testimonial of a client who got the best result out of all of our clients, That's probably not a great unbiased opinion to make a decision off. It's like, what's, what's actually behind that?
Payment plan's good. It's just like a 12-month commitment. Plus it's a lot up front right now.
It is.
Flush it to a real objection, understanding that it's a money objection, and then going into handling it. Solid.
Okay, can I make a suggestion now?
Sure.
It being a big investment for you at the moment, is that the problem itself, or is that a symptom of the problem of you not having enough money to where it seems like a big investment?
So what he's doing here is using an NLP technique called changing the cause from why doesn't he have the money is that he doesn't have skills, not his circumstances. So if we get him to accept that the cause of him not having the money is him not having the skills, then he needs to solve the cause to actually get the money. This is really solid.
It is. So then if we really analyze the symptom for a second, why do you feel you don't have a lot of money?
I just physically don't.
I agree with you, man. Why?
The sales skills, probably.
It kind of makes sense, right? So rather than focusing on the fact that we don't have money, we need to focus on the skills we need to get in order to get the money. Because I'll give you an example. If you take a fat person, let's say, and all they ever did all day was just go through life being like, I'm so fat, I'm so fat, I'm fucking huge, is that person probably going to stop being fat.
Using an analogy to really drive the point home. People think in stories, so this helps people conceptualize it better. Good.
Still do nothing for them.
No. But if instead of that, all they focus on every single day is on the fitness, the nutrition that they need to have in order to get fit, are they probably a little bit more likely to get fit? Yeah, probably. Right. So for you, man, rather than focusing on the fact that you don't have a lot of money in it.
So what he did there, he got a smokescreen at the beginning. Hey, I just want to look at testimonials. I just want to talk to some referrals, whatever it is. This is not a real objective. Objection. So what he did is he flushed it out to something real that you can actually handle, which was the money. And then once we got the money, reframing what's actually causing the lack of money to being the skills. So that way, the one thing that we actually have to solve is going to be the skills. If you can do that, then it makes it very, very simple for the prospect on what they actually need to do to change your situation. If you make it simple for the prospect, it's more likely that they're going to tell you yes.
