We held a webinar on “10 Sales Tips for When You Feel Like You Suck at Sales,” and sales tip 6 is to prepare for objections.
Number 6 on this list of 10 sales tips is to become more prepared for sales objections. If you were only going to do one thing in your effort to be a better salesperson, this is the one thing I would recommend because sales objections come up all the time, and they are what the prospect uses to end conversations.
If you simply shift from improvising when objections come up to having a response to say, you can improve your odds of keeping calls and conversations going. That should improve your ability to generate more leads. More leads should help you to increase your sales results.
It is the same objections that come up.
One reason why this is one of the sales tips that makes such a difference is that it is the same objections that come up again and again. If it were a list of 50 objections that you had to face, and I suggested that you prepare responses for those, it could be debated if that would be helpful and would probably just be more of a pain in the butt.
But the reality is that there are only about ten objections that you will consistently face, and that is an incredibly short list when thinking about creating and remembering responses. Here are the ones that we all need to be prepared for
I am busy right now.
What is this in regards to?
Is this a sales call?
I am not interested.
Just send me some information.
We already use somebody for that.
We are not looking to make any changes right now.
We do not have budget/money to spend.
Call me back in X months.
How to respond to those?
You may say that the suggestion makes sense but also that those objections are difficult to respond to. That is fair, and we do have sales tips for how to respond.
First off, I want you to resist your desire to “overcome” the objection. This refers to hearing “I am not interested” and wanting to respond with something that makes them interested.
We advise against that for a few reasons, but a couple are that it is difficult to change someone’s mind, and you don’t have much time to do it when you hear that sales objection on a cold call. We want you to craft your objection-handling responses so that they are designed to keep the call going more so than necessarily resolving the objection.
You may read that and think it sounds like a good approach, but then you still need to think about how to respond to these difficult objections so that you can keep the call going. We have a full webinar specifically on sales objection handling, but the quick answer is that you can deflect back to the other stuff that we suggest in this list, like sharing your value, asking questions, or sharing the pain points that you fix.