Handling Sales Objections & Stalls

We have contrarian thoughts on handling sales objections.

In many cases, it’s an exercise in futility. Handling objections in the sales process highlights inefficiencies in earlier stages of the sales process such as:

You have failed to prospect and qualify properly

You have failed to showcase the pain that your solution provides the medicine to and why it’s important to remedy asap

You aren’t talking to a decision making / have the relevant stakeholders invoked

You haven’t articulated the value so now the prospect is looking at solely price & so used your quote to beat down the price on their preferred provider

You gave them too many options

The prospect was on a fact-finding expedition

They don’t have a clear timeline to complete the project

The best way top handle sales objections are to address them before they arise based upon what you or your team find to be the most prevalent. I refer to these as the ‘elephants in the room’, in most cases protects are appreciative of you being upfront about these unknown unknowns and providing clarity to them. I recommended recapping these in the follow-up email you send, I.e if often you lose customers to Company X, in your follow up emails I would include a succinct excerpt outlining your strengths. How you present these is important… these are no directly Company X’s shortcoming but simply your strengths and you should make the prospect aware of this.

Why did your prospect go dark? 🤔

Just ask.

This kind of feedback is invaluable, and once you figure out the questions that give the most useful results, you can easily automate the whole process, so that the emails and the follow-ups are done without your involvement. You’ll get the golden feedback as a result

If a prospect goes dark/cold or is stall you have to get them back and the best way to get them back into the fold is to hold them accountable and challenge them. In most cases, something internally has occurred and it may present them to have less power over the decision-making process than they would like so they rather go cold than let you know. People are looking to save face and protect their ego, which is understandable.

I’d recommend breaking the monotony of boring email subject lines including ‘Following up’ and add some humour, if there was ever a case to hop on a brief call with the prospect this would be it. Many times prospects feel more conformable sharing information over a call than via an email (don’t forget to start the call with ‘Is now a bad time >insert first name<’.