The most common and challenging sales objection is when the prospect says “I am not interested”. If you find this one challenging and frustrating, here is an easy way that you can handle that.

 

Don’t follow your natural instinct

The first thing that you need to do when you hear this sales objection is to resist your natural instinct and reflexes, which will make you try to overcome the sales objection. In other words, you hear this and you want to try to change the prospect from not interested to being interested.

You want to ignore this urge for a couple of reasons. The primary reason is that changing someone’s mind is a challenging thing to do. And when you face this objection, it is usually not the right time and place to try to take on such a big task.

The other reason to ignore this is that it will make you frustrated. You will find yourself thinking about how can they not be interested in what you have because your products are great. And how can they know that they are not interested, you haven’t even had the chance to tell them much. These thoughts will get you nowhere, so ignore them.

 

Focus on keeping the conversation going

Instead of trying to resolve or overcome the sales objection, try to focus on just keeping the conversation going. When they say, ‘I am not interested”, they are trying to end the conversation.

Don’t try to make them interested, just try to keep the conversation from ending.

 

Redirect to a related area

When you get this objection, simply respond with one of your pre-qualifying questions. If you don’t know what your pre-qualifying questions are, you should create a list of 3 to 5 of those as they can always be your fallback position when you run into objections.

 

An example to demonstrate

Here is an example. Let’s say that we sell magazine subscriptions. And some good pre-qualifying questions for us are:

Are you currently subscribing to any magazines?
When was the last time you subscribed to a magazine?
What hobbies do you have that you would like to receive magazines for?
How often do you buy magazines at a store?
What magazines do you usually buy?

I don’t know if those are the perfect pre-qualifying questions for assessing how well someone fits with buying a magazine subscription, but they do a good job of finding out how the person stands in this particular area.

Now that we have our pre-qualifying questions, let’s look at a scenario where we are talking to a prospect, and once they know that we sell magazine subscriptions, they say “I am not interested.”

Our natural instinct wants to tell them how great life is with magazine subscriptions, or all of the great magazines that we offer, or promotions that we currently have. These would all be attempts to take them from “not interested” and change them to “interested.” And these would all likely end with both the prospect and salesperson being frustrated after the prospect tries to make a more abrupt attempt to end the sales process.

Once we fight this urge, all we have to do is simply respond with one of our pre-qualifying questions like this:

I understand. But if I could ask you real quick, are you currently subscribing to any magazines?

75% of the time, the prospect will respond to with an answer to your question. It is less likely that they reinforce their objection with anything like “I told you, I am not interested”.

What your question does is keep the conversation going. It does not make them interested, but it gets you past that initial objection.

From here, what you can do is follow up their response with another pre-qualifying question:

Oh I see. Do you ever buy magazines when you are at a store?

Not only does this process keep the conversation going, but you are also collecting very valuable information from the prospect. You might gather new information that tells you that they are not qualified and their response of “I am not interested” is probably correct and a good place to leave it.

Or you might find out reasons why the prospect should be a little more interested in magazines, and you can use this as you build your case for why they might want to be interested in what you have to offer.

We hope this tip for the “I am not interested” sales objection helps you to improve your prospecting efforts.