Little comes off as poorly as receiving a copy-and-pasted email.
According to Sales Manager Jake Sigrist, the same thinking applies to objection handling. When faced with rejection at Redgate Software, he steers away from cookie-cutter language that might seem dismissive and instead, gets specific with the client.
“Rather than combatting an objection with an immediate, defensive response, ask your customer questions around the root cause of the objection,” Sigrist said.
For example, instead of responding to discount requests with information about how competitive current prices are, Sigrist tries to contextualize such asks. From there, he’s able to have a consultative conversation with the initial objector and often, meet them halfway.
What strategies have you found to be most effective when handling objections from prospective customers?
I think the first thing any salesperson should do before “handling” an objection is to change their mindset about what this actually means. Traditional objection-handling techniques center around a salesperson’s immediate response to an objection. Typically, that response is a set of “if this, then that” reactions.
We need to change our perspective to objection “understanding.” Rather than combatting an objection with an immediate, defensive response, ask your customer questions around the root cause of the objection. We generally receive objections at the surface level. If you better understand the context surrounding an objection, you’ll be more effective at working through it with your customer.
What strategies have you found to be ineffective or counterproductive when dealing with objections?
Salespeople should be wary of most strategies that prescribe specific scripted responses to common objections. Keep your focus on your customer, what they’re trying to achieve and the parameters they’re trying to manage.
Occasionally, I work with salespeople who prefer to skirt around objections by either navigating the conversation away from them or ignoring them completely. That will inevitably cause blowback. Most buyers today can’t be fooled. They’ll bring it up again and you’ll damage rapport.
Make sure to ask follow-up questions after receiving an objection, but don’t use that as an opportunity to avoid having a potentially difficult conversation.
Salespeople should be wary of most strategies that prescribe specific scripted responses.’’
Share an example of a time when you successfully overcame an objection.
While working at a major healthcare organization, a procurement manager threw me every pricing objection you can think of. I was unprepared for that conversation. I didn’t handle it well and was ultimately given two options: add further discounting or walk away.
With some help from my colleagues, I was encouraged to circle back to the business team, who I had initially spoken to, and equip myself with a stronger proposal for completing the purchase as structured. I was able to gather justification for the return on investment and learned more about how this company structured its budgets. I also received sponsorship from a senior stakeholder about why the solution was important to his team.
Equipped with this new ammunition and more context for how this company viewed software purchases, I went back to the procurement manager with a more effective proposal. After taking a few more objections on the chin, they eventually completed the purchase.
