Why is it important to handle objections in sales?

Sales objections are the reasons why your prospects can’t or won’t buy your product or service. This could be for many reasons. Maybe they don’t have room for your product in their budget. Some prospects will tell you they don’t need your product. Others will say they don’t trust your company. These are just a few of the most common objections salespeople come across.

But you can’t afford to give up on a potential sale so quickly.

It’s your job to reframe the perspective of your potential customer and teach your team about properly handling sales objections.

Luckily, if you can identify your lead’s sales objection you can get critical insight into the exact pain point you need to overcome. The best salespeople see objections as a positive opportunity to tailor their pitch and zero in on the factors that will make or break the deal.

There are almost always ways to address your prospect’s concerns if you approach the objection in the right way.

On the flipside, certain objections can act as an effective lead qualification tool for your sales team. They allow you to weed out the low-value leads early and can help to build trust with realistic prospects.

In this guide, you’ll learn exactly how to overcome sales objections, especially the most common, including:

• Price: If price objections are your main issue, you might need to better qualify your leads. However, smart sales professionals know that a budget doesn’t have to be a dealbreaker.
• Time: This type of objection will test your sales skills, especially on the phone. Your relationship management and conversational prowess is vital.
• Competition: If the lead is using a competitor, it means they have a need for your product. Now it’s your job to prove your product/service is a better option.
• Trust: If you’re a new company, make sure you have some testimonials ready. Buyers want to see a solid track record. Your empathy is just as important.
• Change: When the lead is reluctant to switch, you need to use your sales pitch to show them the benefits and highlight what that means for their business.
• Authority: Make sure from the start that you’re dealing with a decision-maker. Don’t allow anyone else to deliver your sales pitch to the final buyer.
• Need: If the prospect thinks they don’t need your product, it’s up to you to reframe the conversation and change their perspective if you still think you can add value for them.

Read on to learn exactly how you can take advantage of all these sales objection solutions. But first, you need to know how to prepare for managing objections.

How to train reps to deal with sale objections

An objection in almost any part of life is an irritating, unwanted roadblock. In sales it’s the opposite.

An objection gives you a precious opportunity to understand your potential buyer's struggles, target their specific needs and build stronger relationships.

A question or objection is a crystal clear insight into the pain point you can solve.

Most salespeople are selling similar products to similar audiences again and again and again. If you want to increase your efficiency and your conversion rate, it’s time to create an action plan for overcoming sales objections and get ahead of the curveballs you might have to face. Here’s how you do it...

Encourage proactive losing

What happens when an objection is valid?

Your solution isn’t for everyone, and not everyone is your ideal customer. Use common sales objections as a way to qualify leads in your pipeline, and understand what your ideal potential client looks like. You need a process to help you find and drop the worst prospects quickly, so you can focus your efforts on those with the best chance of turning into an ideal customer.

As Napoleon Hill (author of Think and Grow Rich) said, “The best way to sell yourself to others is first to sell the others to yourself.”

By following this advice you'll find it far easier to maintain a clean sales pipeline and help your team focus without the fear of missing targets.

According to Lincoln Murphy’s Ideal Customer Profile Framework, your ideal customer is:

• Ready: they have a problem they need to solve
• Willing: they are ready to take action to solve that problem
• Able: they have the budget and authority to solve that problem

If your prospects hold these traits, handling their sales objections will help you identify them and tailor communications to their specific needs, their sales objections shouldn’t be insurmountable if you qualify your leads correctly.

When your lead qualification process is humming, the nature of the objections you’re likely to encounter should be reasonably similar.

If your lead is not ready, willing and able, think about the situation in two ways:

• The customer’s perspective: will they really benefit from your product or service? Will it make a genuine difference to the business and bring better chances of success?
  
• Your company’s perspective: Will you benefit from having them as a customer? Will they happily keep paying for your offering or do you think, as a customer, this prospect would be more trouble than they are worth?

The best sales teams turn reactive losing into proactive losing.

Sales isn’t about tricking people into buying something they don’t need, won’t use or will regret. The sooner you match yourself up with an ideal lead and ditch a poor candidate, the better your conversion rates.

When objections lead your team to believe there isn’t a true fit between a prospect and your company, make sure you reinforce this positive lead qualification decision.

Anticipating and preparing for objections

Merely hoping sales objections won’t happen is the worst plan for managing sales objections. When your lead's objections do come up (and they will), you have no plan in response.

And the best thing you can do?

Have a plan for any likely objection so you know exactly how to approach your response immediately.

There are many factors that influence sales objections. Different markets, product tiers, price ranges and decision-making authorities must be addressed when you are talking to prospects.

One way to do this is to make these specific objections part of your sales training program. You don’t have to overcomplicate things, you just need to be proactive in your preparation. Here’s a simple process you can work through over the next few days to futureproof your objection-handling.

• Write a list of the most common sales objections you hear every day
• Come up with a plan on how to debunk them
• Look at past lost opportunities, call transcripts and emails
• Prep a shortlist—you should end up with at least 10-20 of the most common sales objections your team is receiving
• Figure out why you couldn’t overcome the objection then, and what you should be doing differently in the future
• Develop an outline for a script any team member could use to overcome an objection with an effective and consistent sales pitch

Stay calm when overcoming objections in sales

A study by intelligence conversation platform Gong found sales reps who stay calm when they’re hit with sales objections are more successful in closing a prospect.

What does this mean for your sales team? Stay calm, take a breath and make sure you really listened to your prospect after being thrown an objection. A confident brush-off might influence your prospect’s relationship with you more than you think.

Successful sellers actually pause longer after objections than they do during ‘normal’ parts of the sales conversation. Instead of jumping into defense mode or trying to overwhelm the prospect with how good their product is, top performers slow down and show a sense of calm in the face of adversity.

Gong found average performers basically interrupted their customers and overwhelmed them with information and follow-up questions when they were trying to overcome an objection.

Average performers tend to interrupt their prospect and overwhelm them with an onslaught of words per minute. Top performers don’t necessarily talk slower, they just maintain their pace and show their prospect a sense of calm:

How can you teach your team to stay calm in the face of an objection?

A good place to start is by having your sales reps practice making cold calls to each other in the office. This will teach them to make cold calls with more confidence. Plus, they can practice overcoming objections on a colleague rather than a real-life prospect.

Split your sales team up into pairs and have one rep call with the speaker activated, while the other writes down constructive feedback for their partner.

Increase your sales stamina

How many different ways can you describe the value of your product?

To close a deal, you need sales stamina. This means developing an endless stream of ideas to help you sell your product to a customer. Remember that anger or aggression almost never works. Build up your stamina––you must maintain calm and demonstrate your empathy, especially when the prospect is playing hard to get.

If your sales team is struggling to come up with more than a handful of ways to sell a product, regroup and try pooling everyone’s ideas together. Gather your sales reps into a group and get them to list their descriptions and highlights of a product until they run out of ideas. Analyze what helped you close your most valuable deals and try to pinpoint the factors you can replicate.

Give your team feedback

Everybody needs feedback, and it’s important to continuously provide your team with guidance to improve and maintain their selling standards.

Because you’ve created a list of common objections for your team, you can create a practice of checking in with your team on a monthly basis. Don’t just set up a plan for overcoming common sales objections with your team without following through to ensure correct execution.

Ask them which objections they encountered in the last sales cycle and have them walk you through the outcomes. Give feedback and update your list with any new objections. Tweak the messaging in your templated responses to keep your team focused on improvements. This documentation can act as an invaluable training manual for your induction process in the future.

How to overcome the biggest objections in the sales world

Let’s get into the actual objections you’re hearing from prospects on a daily basis.

Whether it’s about budget or a need for your product, there are always ways to overcome a sales objection and close a deal.

Price: when budget is tight

The easiest way to avoid a price objections is to make sure you are qualifying your leads properly.

If you believe the prospect truly is on a budget restriction and they aren’t close to affording the product, their objection may be genuine. It’s best to flag these prospects as a cold lead and not waste a lot of time trying to find an innovative way for them to afford a purchase.

Let them down easy, show that you still think they might find value in your solution in the future, then file them away in your CRM as a cold lead to contact later by saying:

“Thanks for letting me know. We don’t expect you to buy the product right now, but I would like the opportunity to share what we are doing and see if it’s valuable to your company. I’ll schedule a check-in with you later in the year.”

On the flipside, using price as an objection might mean your prospect does have the budget, but they simply aren’t convinced your product will bring them enough value to purchase.

When price or budget is raised as an objection from an already qualified lead, you have yourself a problem. Either you haven’t qualified your lead correctly (you should know by now whether they have enough funding) or perhaps your lead is trying to find a convenient excuse to cover their uncertainty or get you to lower your price.

If you’ve already determined that your lead does have sufficient budget during your lead qualification process, don’t be fooled when your prospect claims...

• “I don’t have enough budget”
• “It is too expensive”
• “I can find a cheaper alternative”

Be assertive and remind the lead of earlier discussions when they expressed their need and their budget.

You need to reframe the conversation to focus on value instead of cost.

Unless your lead has a drastically reduced budget, price is only a dealbreaker if you can’t convey that the value of your offering exceeds the price.

So how do you reconnect with the lead and reshape their perception of value? Figure out the root of the pricing issue. Tackle this by diving deeper into the objection by asking:

• “Are you currently using a solution in [your industry]? How much are you spending on it?”
• “You let me know earlier that you have a need in this area. ?”
• “I understand. Let me ask you: if price were not an issue on this, is this something you would move forward with today?”

Asking these questions will give you a better understanding of why pricing is an issue with your prospect. Once you get a clear picture of their situation, it will be easier to plan your next step.

Tell them that you understand their situation:

“Your concerns are very reasonable, I get it, it makes sense. I want to make sure you get a return with this offer.”

Let your prospect know that you’re invested with them on their journey. Guide them and tell them how you’re going to get them there with your product:

“I’ve seen huge successes with customers who have implemented [your solution]. These features are the reason [your client] just signed with us last month to achieve [goal one] and [goal two] and has seen substantial progress. Since you mentioned [goal one] and [goal two] as your challenges the last time we spoke, it would be great to talk to you about the added value these features offer your business.”

Talking about price can be touchy, so it’s best to not bring it up as one of the first points when talking to a prospect. This gives them the chance to use price objections as an excuse before you get the chance to outline the value of your product.

If you wait until you’ve already talked your prospect through your product and shown them how it can help their business before you mention price, they’re more likely to already be invested in purchasing it.

Once they see the benefits of your product, price is less likely to impact their buying decision.