PRO TIPS - How to Handle Objections for Private Cellular Solutions?

Speaker: Ashish Jain, Co-Founder, Private Wireless PRO & KAIROS Pulse

Ashish Jain: So the question here is how to overcome common objections enterprises have to deploying private cellular network. Well, first of all, my recommendation is to always first understand the genesis of their objection before you try to respond. Try to understand whether the objection is based on a perception or an experience. If their objection is based on what they have read or heard from their peer group or through conferences they're attending or guidance from their trusted circle of experts, then the objection is very likely based on lack of awareness, misinformation, or misguidance. Whereas if they have experienced the technology in someone else's network, in a lab, performed a trial in their network, or even created a business plan and hit some roadblocks, they might have some genuine concern that you should try to uncover. Well, first of all, it is very important that you understand the level of awareness and maturity your customer has with private cellar. Before you start responding to objections, defending yourself, or recommending anything, try steering the conversation towards understanding their real pain points and don't be afraid to ask them questions like, Have you come, how have you come to this conclusion or what have you tried so far to form this opinion? Especially when you hear pushbacks like my Wi Fi work works just fine. Um, nobody in our industry is using private 5G. Private 5G is not ready, or private 5G is very complicated and expensive. Always remember that while automation, AI, or any kind of digitalization might be their top priority, many times wireless infrastructure is not at the top of their mind. It is not their priority, to be honest. It highly, I so I highly encourage you to ask them, Have you performed an audit? And I repeat that. Have you performed an audit to ensure your network infrastructure is ready to support the new devices and applications you can run? This is one of the fundamental gap I've seen in the market. Enterprises are going and jumping into new all new types of applications, but they really haven't. Uh, planned out the underlying infrastructure, whether it's their edge infrastructure, whether it's their cloud applications, whether it is their, you know, uh, the wireless technology that they're using, are they even ready, um. To support the kind of applications and devices they're putting in so when you're getting those kind of objections trying to steer conversation and, and get them to rethink, um, are they really ready? Um, another question I, uh, uh, encourage you to ask is ask them how much downtime do they uh generally experience because of connectivity issues. And have they done any assessment on how much it is costing them? I mean, in many industries that downtime could be in millions. Um, often, uh, enterprises have adjusted to those downtimes and they have made it part of their process, whereas, you know, these kind of connectivity issues become a lot more critical when they are implementing these newer automation applications. So they might have been, uh, OK, um, for the kind of. Productivity applications or just getting employees connected uh to do their day to day job that might have been OK there, but these kind of connectivity issues will be a lot more disruptive to their business operation if they continue to, you know, allow those kind of disruptions. So again bring that awareness to them, have they done that kind of an assessment, um, in terms of downtime cost. So conversations like these will help you uncover their real pain points and business needs versus getting into this trap of handling objections. So once again, don't try to defend yourself. At the end of the day, they want to be convinced that there are use cases for which private cellular makes absolute sense for their business. They want to make sure it will work in their environment, which means it integrates with the existing systems they have, whether it is the network they currently done, the identity and access management systems they have, um, they want to make sure they have complete control of the network and more importantly the data that writes on that network and and it is. And lastly, it's not complicated and costly to deploy and manage. These are genuine concerns, right? At the end of the day, if you try to help them articulate these things, you will uh have a great conversation with them. So try to give them a better picture of what they're trying to defend.