If you recall, depending on the type of product or service that you offer, sometimes a prospect may ask, “Is this a scam? It seems too good to be true.” Fortunately, you now know how to help your prospects overcome that concern by themselves.
In a similar way, then, you’ll likely find that no matter how excellent a company may be, every single company will have at least a few negative reviews. “Such is life,” as they say. And the sooner you accept this premise, the sooner you can learn how to deal with it effectively.
So, suppose a prospect says, “We like what you’re offering, but we did some research over the weekend, and we found a lot of negative reviews about your company online.”
How do you respond to this? Well, here’s how to help your prospects resolve this concern on their own.
First, you want to find out what they’re actually talking about when they make that statement. And the way to clarify this is by simply asking, “Oh. What do you mean by negative reviews?”
Then, the prospect will say something like, “Well, it’s just that some people were saying some bad things about your company.”
And now that you know what the prospect means, then using a curious tone, you slowly ask, “Oh. Now, were these . . . actual clients of ours who were saying these things, or just some random, negative people online who were never clients of ours?”
“Why would I ever want to ask that?” you wonder. Well, you may not have realized this until now, but the reality is that some of the reviews you’ll get won’t actually be from real clients. Instead, they might be from a competitor, or someone who just doesn’t want your company to succeed, as opposed to an actual client of yours.
So, that’s the reason why you want to ask that question. Now, by doing this, it gets the prospect to think that maybe, just maybe, a lot of the reviews that they saw weren’t even from real clients. And therefore, they could possibly be making a mistake by believing the fake review and not going ahead with your offer.
Now, suppose the prospect says something like, “Well, I think some of them were from clients, but I’m not exactly sure if all of them were.”
From there, you ask, “Now, when you say you read some negative reviews, about how many did you actually see?”
Again, you may wonder, “Why would I ever want to ask that?” Well, let’s say you work for a small company that has a few thousand clients, but at the same time you also have about a dozen negative reviews.
What this would mean, then, is that the majority of your clients are actually happy with the results they’ve achieved, aren’t they?
So, the reason why you want to ask that question is because you don’t yet know what they mean. After all, on one hand, they could’ve saw a thousand negative reviews. But on the other hand, they could’ve saw just three.
Now, let’s suppose the prospect says, “Well, I didn’t really count them all, but if I was guessing, I probably saw 10 to 15 of them.”
And now that you know what the prospect means, then using a concerned tone, you say, “Okay, so you saw around 10 or 15 negative reviews, and it sounds like some of these weren’t from clients. And just so you’re aware, we have a bit over 5,000 clients now. So let’s say that out of those 15 reviews, ten were from real clients. This would mean that there were 10 reviews out of 5,000 clients which said that we were bad for whatever reason. So, if I’m doing the math, that would be about 0.2 percent. In other words, one-fifth of one percent were complaining, while the other 99.8 percent of our clients have had a good experience and were actually getting the results that they came to us for.”
And then you continue by asking, “So, help me understand, if we have a 99.8 percent success rate, what would that possibly mean about our ability to get results for our clients?”
Now, when you ask this question, your prospects will most likely not argue with you. Instead, the prospect will likely say, “Well, it sounds like you guys do good work.”
Then, from there, you say, “Well, our clients would probably agree with that. But can I possibly make a suggestion?”
And when the prospect gives you permission, you ask, “Have you ever considered that no matter how good of a job you do for your clients, that there will always be some people who, for whatever reason, don’t do what they’re supposed to do on their end in order to get results? And then, who do they usually end up blaming for that?”
Finally, the prospect will likely say, “Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, they usually blame the company. So thanks for clearing that up.”