In this video, we discuss how to respond to objections in an email.

 

Responding to Objections is More Difficult in Emails

One thing that we will point out fairly quickly is that responding to objections in emails is more difficult than when talking to a prospect on the phone or in person. The reason why is that you have more options when talking than you do when exchanging written messages. With that, we treat this video as an opportunity to revisit the broader subject of responding to objections and then apply those concepts to an objection received in a cold email.

 

Focus on the Sales Process

Whether you are talking about how to respond to objections in an email or how to respond in a live conversation, the first place to start is by talking about the sales process. And we break the sales process down into four key steps:

  1. Initial contact
  2. Conversation
  3. Explanation
  4. Purchase

The initial contact step is the first time that you interact with the prospect, and this is usually either a cold call or a cold email. When you follow your natural instincts, if you get an objection at the initial contact step, your reaction is to try to respond to the objection with something that focuses on the purchase step.

For example, if a prospect says they are not interested, you feel like you should say something that changes them from uninterested to interested. And the problem with this is that trying to do this is focusing on the purchase step, which is not the next step in the sales process. The next step is the conversation and simply talking, and we can improve our approach for how to respond to objections in an email by saying something that focuses more on the conversation than the purchase.

 

Objection Responses

When we apply the concept of focusing on the next sales process step, we can reply to any of these objections with the same type of responses:

I am not interested.
We are not making any changes.
We do not have budget right now.
We already use someone right now.

We can deflect away from the objection by asking some pain questions:

I understand. If I could ask you real quick:

How difficult is it to teach reps everything they need to say?
Do you need to decrease the time it takes to get sales reps ramped up and producing?
How much pressure is there to get reps performing better?

Or we can deflect by asking some of our current state questions:

I understand. If I could ask you real quick:

Are you all using any type of sales scripts or sales playbook?
Do you use and teach any type of sales methodology?
Do you provide sales training to your sales staff?
Do you have a new hire onboarding training program?
How many sales reps do you have?
Are you doing any type of cold outreach?
When was the last time you considered other options in this area?
Are you the right person to discuss this area with?

Both of those objection responses have a good chance of keeping the conversation going when talking to a prospect, but neither of those can be used for how to respond to objections in an email.

We do have a third option for how to respond to these objections, and that is to deflect back to the sales process with a response like:

I understand. And I want you to know that I am not reaching out to you to try to sign you up or sell you anything. More so, we are just looking to open the dialogue between our two companies and have an initial conversation.

We would like to learn a little more about you and possibly share some information about us. That way, when you begin your budget planning or when your are needing to make a change, you can know who we are and how we can help.

Are you open to putting a brief conversation on the calendar? It does not have to be this week or next, we are not going anywhere.

This is a response that we can use in both live conversations and with how to respond to objections in an email.