Number 7 on our list of 10 tips for sales reps is to prepare for sales objections.

In my career working as an inside and outside salesperson, I worked for six different companies and many different sales managers, and during that time, there was only one manager that talked to me about the objections I should expect and what I should say when those come up. Now that I look back, I find this fascinating as it is such a critical area to execute well, as it will have a direct impact on your level of success.

 

The Bad News

The reason that this is one of the tips for sales reps that will have a direct impact on your success is that you are guaranteed to face objections when prospecting. Here are some that you can anticipate when cold calling, and if you have spent any time making prospecting calls over the phone, these will sound familiar:

What is this call in regards to?
Is this a sales call?
We are not interested.
I am busy right now.
We already use someone for that.
We don’t have any budget right now.
We are not looking at making any changes.
Just send us your information.

The bad news is that you will have to face these consistently when calling, and there is nothing that you can do to prevent these types of responses and objections from coming up.

 

The Good News

That is the bad news. The good news is that the list of objections that you will consistently face is fairly short, and that makes it very reasonable for you to make a list of the objections you can anticipate and prepare some responses ahead of time for what to say.

Simply spending a little time going through this process and then possibly having some sort of document or sales tool that will outline your objections and responses, will help these tips for sales reps to have an immediate improvement on the conversations that you have with your prospects.

 

Step 1 – Make a List of Anticipated Objections

The first step for you to take here is to make a list of the objections that you can anticipate. We have done some of the work for you on that with the list that is outlined in this blog post. But there are some objections that you will need to add to that list that are unique to your product.

 

Step 2 – Compose Some Objection Rebuttals

The next step in these tips for sales reps might sound a little challenging, and that is coming up with objection responses. While that can be tricky, one piece of advice that we can give you is to focus more on keeping the conversation going instead of resolving the objection with your responses.

An example of what that might look like is instead of responding to “we are not interested” with a response that tries to make the prospect interested, redirect to one of your qualifying questions as an attempt to use these tips for sales reps to keep the call going.