Even if you spend hours researching your prospects, tailoring your sales messaging, and perfecting your pitch, prepare to face objections.
An unexpected objection can stop a salesperson dead in their tracks. Although an accepted, inherent part of the sales process, inexperienced sellers may still struggle to know how to respond and keep a conversation going to potentially overcome an objection.
As a sales rep you need to think about what comes afterwards, knowing how to handle objections to deliver your messaging. Even if a prospect might not be interested at the time, successfully conveying your company’s offering and how you can tackle their particular pain points might put you first in line when they eventually go looking for a solution.
In our latest blog we’re going to tell you how to overcome objections in sales. We’ll explain the essentials you need, from preparing cold calls and researching prospects, to handling those surprise rebuttals and successfully overcoming objections. This is all done with an emphasis on utilising data from feedback and turning this into a valuable asset.
By leveraging these techniques and better understanding your prospects, you can improve the effectiveness of your sales pitches and elevate your performance.
How to Cold Call: Best Practices
Stay one step ahead of objections
Whether a prospect sees little use for your product or service, disagrees with the price, or requests additional features, salespeople need to have prepared responses ready that they can deliver with confidence in conversation.
One of the key skills to being a successful salesperson is active listening. Instead of waiting for a gap in your conversation to plug with sales messaging from a script, take time and make sure you are being attentive, showing a genuine interest in their pain points and business needs.
In order to become a master in handling sales objections you need to be ready, as if you’re expecting the objection to come at any time during your sales outreach. Eliminating that surprise factor allows you to maintain composure and have a response ready for any rebuttals that may come your way. This is learned through experience and researching your prospects, though also requires resilience.
Here are five sales tips on overcoming objections to get us started.
Overcoming Objections: How To Use Data
Let’s talk more about data collection and creating an objection management document
Being able to mentally steel yourself is a valuable skill in overcoming objections but what’s more effective is pre-emptively knowing how to respond and steering the conversation back towards a potential closed sale.
Knowing common objections allows you to change a pitch to focus on setting yourself up a clear and focused rebuttal.
Understanding the number of touches needed per prospect and the number of prospects needed per yes also boosts confidence.
Creating an objection management document demands that you collect data from your sales outreach.
Make sure you are logging the most common objections you’re facing in your market.
Do your research and establish the best way to respond.
Keep responses succinct and focused on how your company can solve your prospect's problems.
Understanding your BuyerDNA can offer an additional layer of insight. This methodology fuses together ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and buyer personas, giving you a better overview of who you are reaching out to, their role within a company, personal traits, and how they can be best communicated to. This, combined with the objection management document, will give you a conversational compass to steer you through your sales outreach.
Still unsure of how to respond to certain objections? Ideally, your inside sales organization should have a process in place, allowing you to exchange data with the members of your team to establish the best approach, leveraging your combined experience to overcome objections. The more data you log as a team, the better you will be able to pinpoint the way to handle rebuttals.
It’s also important to rehearse your responses. Don’t worry, this isn’t broadway – you don’t need to memorise pages of script, word by word in front of a mirror.
The goal here is to deliver your response as clearly as possible.
Make sure they aren’t too long or contain too much jargon for your prospect to process. If you can read these back confidently, in a way that doesn’t feel scripted or as though you are shifting focus away from the conversation, you have a greater chance of overcoming their objections.
Conclusion
For new sales reps, the idea of handling back to back objections can be stressful and daunting. However, as we’ve established throughout this blog, these same objections are an essential resource in helping your sales performance.
By collecting data on your prospect and their reasons for objecting, you are able to craft and hone responses to their rebuttals, improving the effectiveness of your sales pitch.
Not sure why you still aren’t booking quality appointments? Our sales experts at InsideOut want to help. Having tested sales messaging across many markets and industries, we have the experience needed to help you minimize and overcome your objections.
Founder of Invanity Marketing- A digital marketing agency focused on transparency, relationships & making you money
