Customers raise objections when they interact with vendors throughout all customer touchpoint phases. We cover the fundamental objections relevant to customer success in this blog.
Starting with the first interaction with the customer contacts, the vendor needs to get their ducks in the row before the first call with the vendor. First impressions are essential, and your responses will determine your involvement in the project or even the continued health of the project. Always be alert in front of customers. Savvy customer contacts may start with a few curveballs to test the vendor resources assigned to their project, via virtually interview-style questioning. Customer questions could be very subtle, and vendor resources may not realize that customers are interviewing them.
Vendors should inventory potential objections, and document management approved responses. For instance, regarding a question, “how long will it take to deploy the solution?” most vendors should and typically respond with “we have the staff to complete the project in as less as XX weeks if the customer is ready with all of the information required to complete the project.” Experienced customers already understand that most projects take much longer than this baseline. The time-lapse to collect the information and iterate through the system setup is naturally a time-consuming activity.
There should be a central voice that coordinates all responses from the vendor side. Implementation talk tracks should be discussed and agreed by vendor side executives before the customer calls.
If there are gaps between the expectations set during the sales process and vendor’s true capabilities, this information should be relayed by vendor management to the customer success and implementation managers ahead of time. We do not recommend vendors pursue aggressive business practices by promoting features that don’t exist (also called “vaporware”) since they invariably lead to customer heartburn, vendor resource attritions, and project delays. In such events, customers force their vendors to eat up high implementation costs or build the features at the vendor’s cost or compensate the customer through other means.
CSMs can likely reset expectations with alternate and acceptable solutions. Selling capabilities will enable you to get the appropriate buy-in, attention, and resources for alternate solutions, helping you address these potential objections.
The following are just a few of the numerous objections, questions, and concerns that could come your way during your meetings with the customer.
- “How long will it take to roll out the solution to my end users?”
- “Your sales team led us to believe that our involvement on the project will be very less, but here we are asked to assign many full-time equivalent (FTE) resources on the project!”
- “Asks from you (the vendor) are unreasonable!”
- “Per sales discussions, the requested information, designs, prep work should have been handled by the vendor.”
- “The software interface and capabilities shared today are markedly different from the ones shown during the sales process!”
- “The end-user training involvement is very high, whereas your sales team told us that the user-friendly nature of the system would not need user training!”
- “Quality of vendor resources is questionable.” “They don’t seem to be prepared for meetings and struggle through their talk tracks!”
- “Multiple requests are coming in from varied vendor resources with no streamlined central point!”
- Lastly, “our priorities have changed, or the project is delayed.”
Key Takeaways:
Prepare potential objection lists with documented management approved responses
Be alert and prepared to convey a strong positive first impression during implementation kickoff meetings
