Remember last week when I said that highlighting the benefits of working with you and the results your clients get isn't enough to win potential clients over.

You also have to convince them that they'll actually be able to get those benefits in practice themselves. You have to overcome the concerns they have about whether they'll really get those oh-so-wonderful results you keep talking about.

I'm going to suggest that the best way to overcome concerns isn't to overcome them after they've arisen. It's to pre-empt them. 

Or more specifically, to pre-empt concerns before they're vocalised.

Sales trainers will tell you objections are a good thing. They mean the potential client is interested (no interest = no reason to object, so objections imply interest).

And while that's true to some degree, the problem with concerns and objections is that once a potential client raises them, everything you say about them from then on feels like an excuse. An argument.

No matter what kind of nice words you put around it or “clever” techniques like “I understand why you might feel that way. Many of my clients felt the same way until they found…” – you're essentially saying “you're wrong”.

And what happens when you tell someone they're wrong (even subtly)?

They start trying to prove they're right.

It's much better to have them discover for themselves that their concerns are unfounded before they ever think about them deeply or vocalise them.

How do you do that?

Well, you can't realistically do it for absolutely every possible concern someone might have. But you can do it for the big ones I got you to list last week.

What you do is take each of the major concerns, write down why each one isn't true or isn't something to worry about, then find a story, example or case study to “prove it”.

Next, take those stories and find a useful tip or insight or piece of information in each one that, in and of itself, would be valuable to your potential clients.

For example: let's say you were a social media trainer who works primarily with business to business (b2b) clients. And a concern you expect from many potential clients is “social media marketing doesn't work for b2b”.

Think of an example of a client you worked with who originally thought that, but who ended up getting great results.

Then think of any useful tips or ideas you can glean from that example that would be valuable to potential clients. For example, perhaps they discovered that using Twitter to communicate with potential customers didn't work, but it worked really well to communicate with other influencers in their field who were then able to introduce them to potential customers. 

You can use that tip about connecting with influencers in your marketing in presentations, in webinars, in articles, blog posts, emails, etc.

And if you explain the tip by introducing the example like “I worked with a client recently who initially was worried that social media marketing wouldn't work for business to business. And he was right, the normal ways of using social media don't. But what we did was run a campaign to connect him with influencers in his marketplace. From those initial connections, he built relationships that turned into hugely valuable referrals. So to succeed in b2b social media marketing, you need to focus on influencers, not just customers”.

That's a useful tip (obviously it would be longer in real life with more details and more colour). And anyone hearing it who themselves are worried that social media marketing won't work for them as a b2b organisation will begin to think “oh, it might work for me. These guys kind of know what they're doing”.

You've pre-empted the concern.

Wait for them to vocalise it and tell you “I don't think social media marketing will work for a b2b organisation like us” and no matter how you answer the concern (even if you use the same example), it will always come across as defensive.

They'll always be thinking “well, you would say that wouldn't you? You want me to hire you”.

But address it before they say it, let them “discover it for themselves” and that concern will be put to bed.

Of course, it's a bit of work to come up with genuine stories and examples and weave them into your marketing.

But I promise you, it's well worth doing.