Last week, a friend of mine sent out a link to Cold Call Me Maybe on Tumblr. If you’re in sales and haven’t seen this clever blog with gif animations yet, I highly recommend it for a good laugh! One of the animations I found particularly funny was specific to the concept of objections and the caption read, “When a prospect has an objection that you don’t really know how to overcome…” which you can see here.
Objections are something we can all relate to in our profession, and I think that unfortunately we sometimes miss out on opportunities because we haven’t completely prepared ourselves or our teams for what to expect. The main thing to focus on is what is in our control; which starts with coming up with a cheat sheet of the typical objections that tend to come up in conversations with a rebuttal for each. If you haven’t already created one for you and your team, below are what I feel are the top 3 most common objections with some pointers that you can use to get started!
We are using xyz competitor. Make sure to not only have one or two general questions to ask the prospect about how it’s working for them, but also have a separate cheat sheet in excel that has all competition broken out by company, with specific questions you and/or your team can use to keep the prospect talking. This will allow you to easily hone in on pulling out some of the pain points that the prospect might be experiencing in using that competitor.
Just send me some information. This prospect either has some kind of interest or they are trying to brush you off. The key is to find out which of the two categories they fall into, and a great way to find out is to say, “I’d be happy to. I want to make sure I am sending the right information though. Can you share with me what would interest you most in the information I send?” This will get the prospect talking more, and who knows, you may even be able to keep them on the phone for several more minutes to uncover more of their pain points. Either way, you will send the information, and end the call with something like, “I’ll send over the information and I’ll plan to follow up in one week at this time. I’ll also send a quick 5 minute calendar invite so we don’t miss each other next week when I reach out again.”
We don’t have the budget. This one is probably the toughest to overcome, but the key is to pull as much information as possible to prepare yourself for the next conversation with you and/or your outside sales rep. Asking follow up questions instead of hanging up and moving to the next call is the way to go. Some questions to ask would be, When will you be reevaluating? Is this something you could potentially allocate funds for at the start of your fiscal year? If so, when does that start?
We all know you can’t always fully prepare for objections that may come up. However, we can try our best to arm ourselves with whatever information we can to ensure we are ready to fire away at prospects when they throw curve balls. What common objections would you add to this list?
