As sales reps or entrepreneurs we deal with sales objections every single day. If you want to get better at closing deals and convincing the prospects to believe in your vision and product, then you will need to learn how to conquer these sales objections.

Objections are generally around price, product fit, competitors, and a billion other “excuses” that the prospect can come up with to avoid doing business with you.

“I don’t have enough money for this”

“I love what you’re doing, but this is not the best timing”

“I’m too busy for this right now”

Yep, we hear those every day. If you’re new to sales, you might be confused as to how to approach handling these sales objections.

The 4 steps for objection handling in sales

When the prospect isn’t ready to buy, use these 4 steps to help you work around the objection.

Listen Understand Respond Confirm

Step 1: Listen

One of the biggest mistakes sales reps make is that they don’t tend to listen. Once they hear an objection, they argue back. That’s not a good way to handle objections.

Start off by listening to the buyer’s concern first. What problems are they experiencing?

It’s all about information gathering at this stage and understanding the needs. Then you can react based on their response.

Step 2: Understand

The next step would be to understand or acknowledge their concerns.

Start off by saying, “I understand your pain/concern” This tells the prospect that you can relate to their problem.

Next restate the issue or concern that the prospect mentioned earlier. Sometimes when you restate the buyer’s concern, it allows them to understand their own problem from a bigger picture. This will allow you to get closer to the full source of the objection.

At this stage, you also want to ask more questions to understand their situation more. If you’re already this deep in the conversation and the buyer is still willing to chat, that means that the buyer is less annoyed and more willing to give you more information.

Some good questions to ask at this stage would be:

“What else is bothering you?”

“How are you currently solving this problem now?”

“When’s the last time you purchased something similar to our solution?”

“What’s your typical budget for something like this?”

Step 3: Respond

Now that you’ve understood the reasons behind their objection and now that you’ve gathered more information, it’s time to respond to the prospect accordingly.

At this point, you should try to map out a solution that solves the problem that the prospect mentioned previously in the conversation.

A good trick to use would be to show previous case studies with similar companies that experienced a similar problem to what they’re going through.

Another thing you could do at this stage would be to offer the prospect some relevant content that can help them reach their buying decision.

This can include white papers, ebooks, blog post, webinars, podcast interviews and many more.

Always try to be helpful and get to the bottom of the sales objection.

Step 4: Confirm

Just because you provided a solid solution to conquer the sales objection, doesn’t mean that the buyer fully agrees with you.

They might just be “listening” to you as well, so this is the time where you want to confirm that your solution can solve their problem.

Simply approach this by asking the buyer, “Is it fair to say that this feature can help you overcome problem X?”

You don’t want to assume anything, instead you want the buyer to confirm and agree with you.

If the buyer seems hesistant at this point, you might want to explain or repeat their problem and how you can solve it.

With these simple four steps, you should be able to work around any sales objection.

Example of a sales objection conversation

Let’s dive into some real sales objections and how we can deal with it.

Buyer: “There’s too much on my plate now to deal with all these problems.”

You: “I understand, your time is valuable to me as well, but would you mind if I ask you a couple of questions? I promise it won’t take too long.”

Buyer: “Sure go ahead”

You: “We provide marketing services for e-commerce companies. Usually, the companies we work with are focused on growth. Is that not a priority for you guys right now?”

Buyer: “No not at all! It’s my main focus as well, but I’ve got a lot of other things to do right now.”

You: “I understand. That is what I’m here for. Our solution will save you a ton of time so that you can focus on the other aspects of business while we do the heavy lifting for you. Isn’t that what you want?”

The main reasons for objections

Usually most objections happen for a few reasons.

Lack of urgency/need Lack of Trust Your solution is a good to have and not a must have Lack of budget

Lack of urgency/need – This is when the buyer feels like they don’t need to have your product at this stage of their business. This is where you have to ask the correct questions to understand their main problems and see if you can identify a solution for them within your product.

A good way to approach this would be to use open-ended questions to narrow down the pain point.

Another good way to approach this would be to do your research on the buyer before getting in a call with them. You want to look into their competitors and their current company status to see if you can mention something in the call where their competitor is excelling at.

Tip: Focus on the outcome and results that you can provide to overcome the sales objection.

Lack of Trust – Cold outreach works well in outbound sales, but it’s extremely difficult if your company doesn’t have any case studies, references, or branding.

Buyers are usually more willing to purchase your product if they already trust and believe in the results. So how can we solve this problem?

Be prepared with case studies, white papers, ebooks, blog post and additional resources that will help buyers make their decision. This might require a lot of nurturing and video is a great way to do this. Content is king.

Show that you understand their business. This goes back to doing research before getting in a call with the prospect.

Build a friendly relationship and offer help instead of always trying to “sell”.

Lack of money – Most common sales objection ever…”I don’t have a budget”

Yeah it sucks, but we have to learn how to conquer this common sales objection.

“It’s not in the budget.”

Here are some ways we can address this on a call:

“That’s all right. No one budgets for ideas they don’t have yet. That’s why I called today.”

“I hear that a lot… and once my customers get around the budget issue and see what positive things come from these seats, the budget is never an issue again.”

“Probably not. A lot of companies haven’t figured out the value of seats like these, so they don’t budget ahead for them. It’s a good thing we’re talking today!”

“That’s OK. I’m sure you’ve had good ideas that have come up that weren’t in the budget that were able to get done somehow. Right?”

You can always adjust the price of offer a discount but MAKE SURE you adjust the deliverables as well to make it match.

Conclusion

Sales objections are going to occur and as a sales rep, you should always be learning and overcoming them. The key is to keep practicing and get on as many calls or respond to as many sales email as possible because practice makes perfect.

Try to engage in role-playing with other reps on your team to overcome the most common sales objections.

If you’re looking for highly qualified and targeted sales leads with hard to find data or you need help with data enrichment, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at GrowthOK