What to Say When a Prospect Says They're Already Taken Care Of (Ask Jeb)

0:00This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi, I'm Jeb Blount, best-selling author, fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and inked, and I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check. All right, next up on the show is Rob Bowman from Old Hickory, Tennessee. I love me some Tennessee. How are you doing, Rob? I'm doing great. Thanks for asking. Old Hickory is a little suburb outside of Nashville. I can't even imagine there's suburbs in Nashville anywhere. It's growing so fast. It is growing extremely fast. So tell me what's going on in your world. I work at a local fire sprinkler firm here in Tennessee, and we provide every aspect of fire sprinkler services.

0:37My role is to set up annual inspections with new buyers. And the biggest objection that I get when I walk in the door of a building is we already have somebody that does that. And of course they do. It's a mandated inspection work. My offering is we have local technicians, highly qualified individuals, 30 plus years of experience on our team, direct communication, great workmanship. So how do I get past that objection? Prospecting is extremely difficult in this world and we're battling gatekeepers and procurement officers and private equity backed companies with limitless funds for marketing. So you're doing all of this in-person prospecting.

1:13So you're just going door to door to door. Yes. Are there particular types of businesses that you target? But industrial, manufacturing, warehousing, storage, as well as multifamily hotels and motels. So walk me through real quickly. When you show up in the parking lot and you walk into the front door, are you walking in the front door or are you going around the back? How are you entering the building? I have to enter through the front door. There's not a lot of back entrances that are available. Nashville, like you said, is growing quickly and there's a lot of us out there. So they've locked a lot of entries to a lot of these places.

1:46So you got to go to the front desk. So you go to the front desk. and tell me what you say. Usually it's, hi, my name's Rob. How are you today? I get a little banter going with whoever's the gatekeeper there. I say, we offer fire protection services, specifically fire sprinkler services. Love to offer you a free, no obligation quote to help be competitive in the market. Maybe keep your current vendor honest. If I have enough banter and enough connection to that person, they will reach out to whoever's the procurement person in the office. I have been able to get through past that to them. Sometimes they'll take my information.

2:17A lot of times they say we already have that taken care of. We're not going to change that this year. You don't want to be talking to procurement. Procurement is where your sales dreams go to die. So who's the person that you actually want to talk with? I'd love to talk to whoever the maintenance manager is, if that's a facility manager, maintenance manager. The biggest issue is that when you meet the gatekeeper, the gatekeeper sends you to procurement. Or like if you're in multifamily housing, they may send you to some corporate office that's in Minnesota because they're not owned by a company that's actually in Nashville.

2:46bill, the gatekeeper doesn't know where to send you. You end up in this morass of the wrong people. The second thing I think that creates the objection is the way that you're approaching the gatekeeper. I want to offer you a free inspection. As soon as you do that, all of the walls, the fence of walls come up. It could be like you're in Old Hickory and I come bopping down the street and you don't know me from Adam. And I go, hey, I've got a free hundred dollar bill. your initial reaction would be, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, okay, what's the catch? And that's exactly what happens in the gatekeeper.

3:18You walk in, I'd love to offer you a free fire inspection. It's a whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What's the catch? And the other problem is nobody cares. You know, that's not on my radar. Because of all that, it creates the either I'll send you to procurement because the gatekeeper goes, oh, if someone's buying something, it has to be procurement. Or those decisions are made out of our corporate office. And I know you get that objection. And or we already have someone who does that for us. Or you get, I'm not interested, right? So you get all those things. Yeah. Okay. So a couple of different strategies here.

3:51One of the strategies that I want you to start thinking about is scheduling a morning call block where you call these locations and whoever answers the phone, you say, I'm looking for the person who is responsible for sprinkler system compliance. because that's going to get you to the maintenance manager, the facility manager, not the procurement. You say to the facility manager when they pick up the phone, I'm Rob, I'm with, I'm going to be over in your area. May I come by and spend just a minute with you to learn a little bit more about how you are running your sprinkler systems and fire suppression and all the things you do for your organization?

4:30And the reason I want you to do that is you can spend an hour a day. Maybe you make 20 outbound calls, but you're going to be able to probably get one or two appointments where when you go out in your territory, at least you've got one or two appointments and you're not just going door to door, to door, to door, to door. I would start that. That's an easy thing for you to do. And because of the buildings that you're going into, you could run that call block at seven o 'clock in the morning and from seven to eight, just$20 and just ask for an appointment. The next thing I want you to do when you walk into these buildings is I want you to remove, I would love to offer you a free fire inspection from your vocabulary and do the same thing.

5:04You walk into the gatekeeper and say, I need to speak to the person here who is responsible for making sure that your fire suppression systems, however you would say it in industry vernacular, are compliant. That tells the gatekeeper who you need to speak to. So if you say I'm selling something, the gatekeeper wants to send you to procurement. If you say I'm looking for the person who is responsible for compliance, they're going to say, oh, that must be the facility manager. Now you can try A-B test, You can say, look, I want to speak to the facility manager or who is your facility manager. You can try that.

5:35I would do that by phone and then try to do it by foot. Going into a follow-up call, I want every important note right at my fingertips, not buried somewhere in a scribbled stack of notes. And with Plod Notepin S, I always have them because it's a wearable, portable note taker that lets me stay present and focused on customers during every single meeting. Plod captures the conversation and turns it into organized summaries and action items so I can follow up faster. And if I need a specific detail, Plod's Recall has that ready for me. And that's why Jeb Senior and I and all of Sales Gravy trusts our Plod Note Pen S.

6:09Try Plod and stay focused on the conversation while it handles all of your notes. Go to plod.ai forward slash Jeb. That's plod.ai forward slash Jeb and use code JEB to get 10 % off your purchase. Now, that doesn't answer your bigger question of what do I say when they say we've already got somebody. But that first part of this is how do I get you fewer of those objections and more real conversations with people about what you do? Your value proposition is solid. Like we're local. We're not owned by some company outside of the state. We're right here and we offer comprehensive solutions. Fire suppression isn't something that you think about a lot until you have a fire.

6:48And we make sure that if that happens, you don't have to wait, you know, two days for someone to show up and fix this problem for you. Right. So you've got a really good pitch. The problem is, is it's hard to get people to listen to it. And they're having a hard time listening to it because your sales process is scheduled a fire inspection. During the free inspection, you're convincing them to do business with you. And everybody knows exactly what's happening here. They recognize there's nothing free in life. That doesn't mean that that's not a great approach. It just means that you need to have a different conversation.

7:15You actually said this in a really nice way. You said, I might not find anything, but at least I can help you keep the other guys honest, right? I want to have a conversation about some of the things that you're not thinking about, some of the issues that may be out there. So I'd like to bring my team in. I want to give you a free quote for the inspection. Why would they need you to do a fire inspection? For compliance purposes. It has to be done annually. So who do you want to talk to? Whoever their compliance officer is. Exactly. Now, your main objection. We already have someone who does that, okay?

7:43If you're talking to procurement, you're dead in the water. You know that, right? Because you die there every single day. If you're talking to the person who handles compliance, you have a chance. You're not going to get past procurement with any objection. Procurement says we got somebody. Unless you're in the system or you got a better mousetrap, you're not getting through. So stay out of procurement. With the compliance officer or the facilities person, why would they want your quote? We're very localized here in Middle Tennessee. You don't have to call an 800 number. You can call our 615 number right here in the office.

8:14We pick it up every time. And I've received 2 a.m. calls for an alarm. And I respond. We've run into questions that other companies can't answer. and we've been able to give them solid answers. And to be honest, a lot of the fire marshals come to our engineers and ask questions. There's your pitch. That's what I'm getting at. Like, what do you know that the big companies don't know? You've got relationships with the local fire marshals who often come to you to get questions. So when we're doing an inspection of your fire suppression system, we're doing it through the eyes of the local fire marshals who ultimately have the authority to fine you or shut you down.

8:52Now, when someone throws an objection at you and says, hey, well, Rob, we already got someone who does that. What are you going to say? Good question. We'll work on it together. But for the audience, I'm going to try to overcome this objection. This is how we iterate this thing. So hit me with it. OK, we really already have somebody for this. I really appreciate you stopping by, but we've got somebody we're sticking with. Yeah, I figured you were going to say that because everybody has someone who handles their fire inspections. The reason that you may want to rethink working with me is because we're local and we have deep relationships with the local fire marshals.

9:25The local fire marshals are the people that have the ability to fine you or to shut you down or to make you re-engineer your system, which can be really expensive. So the reason why so many local companies work with us is because when we're doing that inspection, we're doing it through the eyes of the local fire marshal. and we can help you solve problems that could get you shut down before you get shut down. I'm going to buy from you. And all I'm going to say after that is I'm going to say, wouldn't it at least make sense before you say no for us to sit down for a second and let me walk you through our process so you can make an informed decision about whether or not we might be the right inspector for you?

10:07So A, starting off, when you walk into a company, rather than saying we would love to give you, say, I'm looking for the person who is responsible for your fire suppression system compliance. And by the way, if you can get the name of that person, you can call them up on the phone and set an appointment with them. And then second is remember what makes you unique. You know, when you say I'm local, that relationship with the fire marshal, I mean, it's just gold. If I want a company working for me, I want the company that's going to keep me out of jail. I want the company that's going to keep me in compliance.

10:39I want the company that if something's going wrong, You've got a relationship with a fire marshal and you can help keep them out while we're fixing something. That's what I want. And that's your selling point. That's great. To put a cap on this, I was hiring a builder for a cabin up in North Georgia. And it's a pretty tight county. Regulations there are managed by a handful of people. And I ended up hiring the contractor that I knew had a deep relationship with the building inspector because I knew that that person would be able to explain. because we were able to get variances on particular things that we were doing without having to go through a lot of rigmarole because of the relationship that the two people had.

11:17And in your space, especially in middle Tennessee, the same thing applies. And you just want to use that and lean into it. I appreciate that. It's a killer question. I love this conversation. Just in case, I'm just going to throw this out. Maybe you and some of the people on your team, if you really want to understand how to break through buyer resistance, we'll show up at the Outbound Conference in Las Vegas in November. The entire theme of the conference is breaking through buyer resistance. So dealing with objections like this, go to outboundconference.com. It is the biggest, baddest conference in sales.

11:49It's a great opportunity to network with some of the best salespeople from around the globe. Perfect. I love it. All right, Rob, thank you for joining us. I appreciate it very much. And stay in touch with me. Let me know how you're doing. Hey, everybody. Thanks for listening to the episode. I'm Jeff Blunt, Jr. And the objection that comes across most often is that we already have somebody, which is a perfect opportunity for you as a sales rep to have a conversation, to learn about their business, see how they're doing things. Why do they like their current vendor? And if you got something from this episode, drop us a five-star review on Apple Music, iHeartMedia, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

12:25It helps us help more people sell more. You can also watch all of these episodes on youtube.com forward slash sales gravy. We'll catch you next time on the Sales Gravy Podcast.

13:01turbs apply