Sales professionals can gain valuable insights from sales scenes in movies. While Hollywood might seem like an unlikely source of inspiration, there are many important sales lessons to be found in its cult classics. Whether it’s learning to manage customer objections during sales calls, handling tough clients, or improving your sales strategy, these lessons can enhance your selling skills. For instance, key lessons from Tommy Boy can show sales professionals how to effectively address customers’ concerns. Discover how to succeed in sales by taking notes from these two memorable sales scenes in Tommy Boy.
How NOT to Handle Customer Objections
Tommy Boy offers important sales lessons on how NOT to prepare for meetings. Tommy (played by Chris Farley) gets ready for his sales presentations by nervously pacing, while Richard (played by David Spade) tries to give him some solid sales tips: “We don’t take no for an answer.” What happens next is a funny series of sales meetings where Tommy walks out of each one after getting rejected, without ever figuring out how to deal with customer objections.
The fundamental message here is that with every sales meeting will come objections of all kinds. It’s important to be resilient with how you overcome rejections in sales. Pay attention to your clients’ reasonings and objections. Adjust your responses accordingly and treat every objection as a chance to ask more questions about their specific problems. A good sales tip is to know your product or service like the back of your hand.
Sales professionals must also learn to read their customers personality and adjust their sales presentation accordingly. One way to do this is to ask open-ended questions that reveal their specific pain points and problems. Pay close attention to the nature of their language (and body language), when they answer your open-ended questions. Adjust your approach accordingly to match their personality to improve your chances of closing the sale.
Both Richard and Tommy fail to speak the customers’ language in this specific scene. Richard relies too heavily on the technical aspects of the product or service and inevitably turns the customer off. Tommy, on the other hand, is too informal with his approach and unavoidably ends up ruining the sale.
How to Handle Customer Objections
Now let’s look at how Tommy Boy effectively handles customer objections. In a critical scene of the movie, Tommy closes his first sale with a customer by utilizing open-ended questions and asks, “Why would someone put a guarantee on the box”? This strategy moves the conversation forward and keeps the customer engaged and curious.
A key sales lesson from Tommy Boy is to take advantage of the belly-to-belly you have with customers. Tommy was able to effectively deliver a convincing argument as to why his product was superior. He was able to close this deal by handling the customers’ objections with relevant anecdotes and interesting examples. Tommy’s argument was predicated on the fact that a “guaranteed label” on a box does not always correlate with a quality product. Tommy learns how to handle customer objections and ultimately ends up closing his first sale on the road and goes on t save his father’s company.