MT453 Unit 6 Objection Handling Seminar Reflection Example

Every Supplier Says That: An MT453 Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on Price and Revalidation Objections

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT453: Professional Selling

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The classmates, Pellston Hygiene and Salado Creek Foods are composite; the sources cited are real.

The First Exchange

In this unit's seminar I played the Pellston Hygiene representative calling on Salado Creek Foods, the composite dip maker we have followed since Unit 2. Danielle played the purchasing manager. Her first line was the one I expected: "Your chemistry costs about 30 percent more per gallon than what we use now." I answered with what I had prepared. Our foam clings longer to vertical surfaces, I said, and our dilution rates are lower, so the cost per gallon of mixed solution is closer than it looks. Danielle let me finish and then said, "Every supplier says that." The instructor stopped the exercise there.

She was right, and the reason was obvious once I heard it. I had answered an objection about price with a claim about chemistry that she had no way to check and every reason to doubt. I was defending my product instead of understanding her measure.

The Rerun

We ran the exchange again. This time, when Danielle raised the price per gallon, I said, "That's fair. Our chemistry does cost more per gallon." Then I asked, "When you compare sanitation suppliers, what do you look at besides the invoice?" She said, in character, that she looked at the invoice because that was what she had: the incumbent bills per gallon, so price per gallon is the only number on her report. I asked whether anyone at the plant had ever worked out what a changeover costs, including the line time. She said no.

That was the real objection. Danielle was not wrong about price; she was measuring the only cost she could see. Rackham (1988) argues that objections are often a sign that value has not yet been built, and the rerun showed me that my job was to give her a comparison she did not have, cost per changeover, rather than to argue with the one she did.

The price objection was not a disagreement about chemistry; it was the only number the buyer had ever been shown.

The Second Objection

Then Kofi, playing the quality manager, raised a different problem: "Even if your numbers are right, I'm not revalidating a cleaning procedure three months before our audit." My first instinct was to reassure him that our chemistry was approved and our procedures were standard. I caught myself and asked instead what revalidation would involve for him. He listed it: new swab sampling, new documentation, training records for twelve people and the risk that an auditor would find a procedure still in transition.

His doubt was not about whether our program worked. It was about his own exposure if the change went badly at the worst possible time. Dixon and Adamson (2011) describe how a buyer's personal stake often matters more than the organization's benefit, and this was a clear case. The answer that worked in the rerun was to remove the risk rather than argue it away: nothing changes before the audit; we would observe and measure only; any pilot would start after the audit, with a validation plan written to his schedule and approved by him before the first night.

What Will Change in My Script

Both buyers doubted something I had not addressed. The purchasing manager doubted that the price difference bought anything she could measure. The quality manager doubted that the timing was safe for him. Neither doubted the chemistry, which is what my original answers defended. For the Unit 7 role-play script, I will change three things. I will acknowledge the price gap in my first sentence rather than my last, because the rerun showed that conceding a true point early earned me the right to ask a question. I will bring the changeover cost from the observation, already calculated, so the comparison exists before the objection does. And I will propose the pilot with signed success criteria and a start date after the audit, so that the quality manager approves the plan rather than resists it. I also want to give both buyers a reason to say yes that serves their own measures: a cost-per-changeover figure the purchasing manager can report, and a validation plan the quality manager writes herself. Anderson et al. (2006) argue that a value proposition persuades when it is built on the buyer's own figures, and the rerun convinced me that I have to bring those figures into the room rather than ask buyers to trust mine.

References

Anderson, J. C., Narus, J. A., & van Rossum, W. (2006). Customer value propositions in business markets. Harvard Business Review, 84(3), 90-99.

Dixon, M., & Adamson, B. (2011). The challenger sale: Taking control of the customer conversation. Portfolio/Penguin.

Rackham, N. (1988). SPIN selling. McGraw-Hill.