School Tour Objections!

Selling to teachers brings up a lot of objections, and I'm a bit stumped on how to overcome the following:

* We don't have enough students interested

* The students see that price as being too expensive

* The recession is hitting a lot of our parent finances hard



Comment from Stephen Craine

Thanks for your questions, I'll do my best to give you some ideas and tips to help increase sales.

The overall problem that causes your objections

From your questions there appears to be one problem that could make a masssive difference to your results if you can find a way around it.

From the information you have given it sounds like you're suffering from a case of secondary selling.

Secondary selling is when other people are selling your products on your behalf. In this case it sounds like the teachers or school staff are re-selling the products you offer to the students.

The students and parents are not seeing the full benefits of what you have to offer. This is because the teachers and school staff are not professional sales people.

I bet you sell with passion

From the few details I have about your product I bet you can present your tours with great passion.

I can imagine you describing benefits in a way that grabs the emotions and makes prospects feel they are already on the tour.

There are probably benefits for the students that you would present to their parents with great communication skills.

Teachers are not sales people

But if it's the teachers and school staff that are doing most of the selling to the students and parents, that emotional selling isn't happening.

I would recommend getting as much contact as possible with the end users, the students, and the financial decision makers, the parents.

To help with how you do this I would need more information on the sales process.

But if you can get to present to the students and parents, you will sell the benefits and prevent the objections you have talked about in your question.



Overcoming your objections

The objections you have listed above are coming from the schools not the parents.

Let's go through them:

We don't have enough students interested

To overcome this objection you have to communicate directly with the students.

You have to use your sales skills to grab the students interest by showing them the benefits of the tours you offer.

Perhaps a fun night where you get to present the tours. Maybe you could present more than one tour and have the students vote on which one the school should buy.



The students see that price as being too expensive

Expense is what buyer's see when they don't see the benefits.

Using your sales skills, and some original ideas on how to communicate your message, push benefits of your tours at the students and parents.

Consider the benfits in two ways:

1. The positive benefits.

These are what the students will gain from buying. Not just fun and good times, but also educational benefits and experience. Remember they have to sell the idea to their parents.

2. The negative leverages.

Use selling techniques such as social pressure. How will the students that don't go feel. Children put pressure on parents all the time to buy them what everyone else has.



The recession is hitting a lot of our parent finances hard.

Have you ever bought something you couldn't afford?

When recession hits it means you have to make sure your products are high up the buyer's priority list.

Use the positive and leverage pressure to make what you have to offer become a priority in the eyes of the parents and students.

People still spend, but the only spend on the important things. Make your tours important.



One last sales tip

The recession is also making it hard for the sales people competing for your customer's money.

You are obviously looking for new ideas and realise you have to do something different if you are going to get ahead of the competition.

That's a first step and one that your competitors will not all be taking. Once you find an idea that sounds good, do it!

Take action, put your ideas into play, monitor the results, and make changes until you're successful.

Many of the objections in your qustion can be overcome with good benefit presentation. You can see some really effective free sales training on presenting features and benefis at Sales presentation tips.