How to Avoid Objections in Sales
By Mike Wise
Avoiding objections in sales? I know what you’re thinking, but hang with me here. While there’s no magic bullet for preventing objections, I’ll share a strategy that will surely prevent some and help you be more comfortable with others.
Here’s what I learned from making thousands of cold calls. You can learn and practice how to avoid objections in sales using the same principle.
Let’s face it; most people cringe at picking up the phone and calling complete strangers. On the other end of the phone, people cringe when they answer your call and realize very quickly that you’re trying to sell them something. By the way, this is also known as prospecting.
I was the caller in this scenario and knew they would do everything they could to end the call as soon as possible before dialing a number. I am the first to admit I wasn’t very good at this. Prospects were very successful at getting me off the phone. Every time I had a prospect answering the phone, they could throw an immediate objection and essentially end the call.
Something had to give. I needed to make some adjustments.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” -Albert Einstein.
The first thing I did was evaluated my opening message. This was a game-changer because I focused the message on value creation for the prospect. Even after doing this, I still heard plenty of objections, most translating into “I don’t have time.”
I was confident in my message and how I would create value for my prospects. I found a pen and paper and started writing down the most common objections I was hearing. Again, these were all different ways to say there was a lack of time. Here are some examples:
- I get 100 calls a week from people like you, and I’m not interested.
- I don’t have time right now. Call me back in a month.
- We are happy with our current vendor/partner.
- We are not making any changes right now.
I started playing with my call script and thought, why not address the lack of time objection right away? Since I heard this objection on almost every call, why not handle it upfront before the prospect could say it? I could prevent the objection altogether. I’ve come to refer to this as forestalling objections. It sounds a little bit like this.
“Thank you for picking up the phone today. I know you probably get hundreds of salespeople calling you weekly, and they probably don’t add any value to you or your business. Listen, I realize everyone is busy and usually has their focused priorities in line. Chances are you’re working with a partner already and not looking to make any changes. This is exactly why I’m calling you today. INSERT YOUR MASSAGING to schedule a meeting here.”
You’d be amazed at the results of implementing this practice. Granted, it took a lot of practice and a fair amount of calls to get the language down, but once you sound confident, there’s very little stopping you. You are stating the most common objections you hear upfront and wiping them off the table.
Truth be told, prospects came up with other objections, and many of them raised the time objection even after I talked about it upfront. Still, returning to the beginning and revisiting the objection was very comfortable.
Most salespeople won’t raise objections before their prospect does because it’s uncomfortable. Indeed there are times during the sales process when it doesn’t make sense to forestall objections, but I’m confident you can use this strategy not only for cold calling but as you progress further in your sales conversations. Even if your prospect hasn’t verbalized an objection, chances are, they are thinking about it.
If you hear, “We need to think about it.”, “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”, or any of the like, it’s probably an objection, and you need to do more work to understand why they are saying this.
Objections are simply underlying concerns a prospect has. As salespeople, we must elicit those concerns and work with our prospects to understand and resolve them thoroughly.
