Summary of Objections by Jeb Blount
In sales, you’re rejected all the time. Rejection hurts. You have an emotional reaction. This is the thing that holds most people back in sales.
Decision-making is emotional, not logical. Even when logical reasons are given, they’re often an add-on to the emotional base. People whose limbic system (the seat of emotions) is damaged but whose neocortex (the seat of logic) works are unable to make any decisions.
People evolved to spot things that stand out, like a tiger lurking in the grass, while ignoring things that are as expected. So, you need to stand out to be noticed. This is one bias we have. Another is status quo bias, where change is subjected to an unreasonably high level of justification. Another is the sunk cost effect, where of sticking with a strategy or vendor that’s not working out. Another is ambiguity aversion — preferring a simple and unambiguous option to an unambiguous one even if the former is better. Another is ego — people like to believe that they make good decisions, so when faced with evidence their decision hasn’t worked out (e.g., a bad vendor), they’ll deny that the vendor is doing a bad job rather than accept they made a mistake.
Before every meeting you should:
Have done your research.
Be clear what you want to know.
Be clear about your objective: e.g., determine if the lead is a fit for further conversations, or know their budget.
End the meeting with the next step. Never end without agreeing on this.
Prospecting
Prospecting means cold outreach to people. Prospecting is emotionally hard since you get the harshest rejections here. But you still need to do it. The biggest sales failure is an empty sales pipeline, which happens when you don’t prospect.
When prospecting, you’ll encounter three kinds of responses:
Knee-jerk reactions
Brush-offs like “call next month” or “send me some information”. Leads say this because they want to be nice and avoid conflict by saying “no”. Salespeople believe these because want to live in denial that the deal has a chance.
True objections.
There are only 15 responses. For example, I (Kartick) often encounter:
“We’re not looking for a consultant.”
“Your prices are too high.”
“I have only 15 minutes.”
Since there are only 15 of them, list them out and prepare an answer for each. When the objection is thrown at you, respond with your canned answer. Don’t try to answer on the spot. Many of us can’t. All the more so when we’re being rejected and we’re in the fight or flight mode. So, prepare a canned answer. My answer to “Your prices are too high” is “Is $750/month within your budget?”
Don’t argue. They’ll look down on you as someone desperate and not only will they not go ahead, they’ll have a negative opinion of you.
Asking
The most important skill in sales is asking for the sale. Some salespeople discuss the service, the terms, the price and everything except popping the question at the end.
Ask directly — hinting won’t do. Hoping the client will close the sale themselves by doing your job for you won’t do.
Ask repeatedly — the first time you ask, there may be an objection, which you may resolve over that conversation or the next, after which you should ask again. Otherwise, even if the objection is cleared, you won’t close the deal because you didn’t ask.
Ask confidently (about your skills) and enthusiastically (about the project). Prospects can sense if these are missing. This is called emotional contagion — people pick up on others’ emotions without knowing. Horses sense when the rider is not in charge and dump him. Similarly, lack of confidence in yourself causes prospects to lack confidence in you. If the past 10 of your leads didn’t work out, you might approach the next one without enthusiasm that it will work out, but that will perpetuate the vicious cycle. To generate confidence, talk in a relaxed manner with appropriate pauses, rather than fast, high-pitched or nervously. Avoid using too many filler words like umm and ah. Talk directly, such as “This project needs two quarters” rather than indirectly like “We need to think about how much time this project will take”. Make eye contact when speaking. Don’t put your hands in your pocket or cross your arms. Don’t touch your face or hair while you speak. Sit straight with your chin up and shoulders straight rather than slouching or hunching with your head down. Don’t shift weight between your legs. Have a relaxed smile rather than a clenched jaw. A smile is the univeral message “I’m friendly and can be trusted”. Being self-aware this way, and self-regulating, is a muscle that strengthens with use.
Ask assumptively, such as “Shall we talk on Tuesday at 11 to close the deal?”. Not “When would be a good time to talk?” If you’re worried about being pushy, you’re doing it wrong. When you ask, assume you’ll get it, rather than not. Ultra-high performing salespeople believe they’re expected to win, they’re supposed to win.
Ask concisely — if you’re long-winded, the ask is lost in the verbiage.
Salespeople who follow the above have a 50-70% success rate, while those who don’t have a 10-30% success rate. Salespeople who fail to ask fail.
After you’ve asked, shut up. Don’t fill the silence with words. You might end up changing someone’s mind when they were about to say yes.
Objections
Objections are a normal and expected part of the sales process. Don’t fear them, any more than you fear hitting the net when you play tennis.
There are only four types of objections:
Knee-jerk reactions: This is something said to make you go away, and is especially harsh during prospecting, to the extent that some salespeople are afraid of prospecting.
Red herrings: Stakeholders sometimes introduce irrelevant issues into the discussion. Sometimes these may be vaid questions, albeit incidental to the service you’re selling. Sometimes people throw these out just to challenge you. Sometimes because it’s their habitual behavior. And sometimes because they don’t know what else to say. Whatever the cause, you need to detect red herrings so that you don’t go in the wrong direction.
Next step objections: Prospects sometimes object to spending the time it takes for the next meeting (or whatever other step comes next in the sales process). These are rarely harsh and rarely rejections, since this microcommitment doesn’t cost them much.
Buying objections: This is when, at the end of the sales process, prospects object to buying the service sold. Sometimes with vague excuses that make salespeople’s blood boil after all the time they’ve spent. This is sometimes because they have only a vague intuitive sense, and sometimes because giving clear, specific reasons to other salespeople in the past has only resulted in cheesy scripts and manipulative tactics.
Jeb Blount tries to get to an objection in the first 30 seconds of a call. Sales calls typically have objections. The longer you ignore the elephant in the room, the more time you’re wasting. If you’re going to close the deal, you want to close it earlier. If it’s going to fall through, you want to know that as early as possible so that you don’t feel disappointed. Either way, you want to get to the end of the process ASAP. High performing salespeople don’t get into multiple meetings with low-value leads.
When objecting, people often say something different from what they mean. For example, “How do we scale our technology?” might mean “How do we hire more engineers?” Always clarify an objection before answering it.
Don’t reintroduce objections the prospect brought up earlier in the sales process and which you resolved. Don’t try to preempt objections by proactively bringing up objections you’ve heard often from previous clients, and explain. Let them ask. Otherwise, you’re creating doubts where none may exist.
Rejection
Well-intentioned people sometimes say that you shouldn’t react emotionally, but that misses the evolutionary reason: when we used to sleep in caves, if you were reacted by your tribe, it meant having to sleep in the jungle where a lion will make a meal out of you. If you survived the night, without your tribe to protect you, you were at the mercy of rival tribes. If the rival tribe left you alone, you’d find it hard to hunt alone. So rejection lead to death.
That’s why we’ve evolved to have a deep, visceral reaction to rejection before it happens, as a warning to us to change our behavior before we’re rejected. In fact, rejection is unique among human emotions that it’s easy to remember and re-live. More than physical injury, which doesn’t hurt after years. Rejection also triggers other associated negative emotions like loneliness, depression, insecurity, desperation.
In a test where participants were rejected, and later told that the person rejecting was only a researcher and the rejection wasn’t real, the participants still felt rejected. In other tests where the person rejecting was later revealed to me a member of a reviled group, the rejection still stang.
When you hear an objection, it’s not clear whether it’s a rejection. Rejections are good, because you can move on and avoid further disappointment caused by investing more. Asking questions is not a rejection, since it’s natural for buyers to ask. Negotiation is not rejection, since it shows they’re considering it seriously enough that they’ve moved on from the “Is it right for us?” stage to the “How much should it cost?” stage. Rejection is an explicit no, or a refusal to consider the idea you’re presenting. For example, if you’re pitching a service to help a startup scale their tech, and they say they don’t need to scale their tech. But objections that are not rejections can feel that way when they triggers the same emotional response in your mind. Maybe someone rejected you by phrasing it as an objection or question, so the next time you hear a genuine objection, you anticipate a rejection and go on an emotional roller coaster. To handle this better, you should invest in understanding yourself.
The inability to control negative emotions is the single biggest reason salespeople blow it. The following emotions are disruptive:
Fear is the root cause of most failures in sales. Instead of confidently asking for what you want, fear makes you tell yourself, “I’ll do it later.” or “Let me work on other things on my todo list for now.”
Worry has an evolutionary purpose of keeping you safe and alive. It’s rational to worry about a tiger in the grass even if 99% of the time there’s no tiger, because in the 1% of cases, you die. This negativity bias of always searching for what could go wrong makes every day unhappy for you, and leads to overanalysis. When you overanalyze, you lose the clarity you have, and the energy to make a change, so you can no longer make the right decision.
Insecurity causes you to feel that rejection is lurking around every corner, so you approach new opportunites with too much caution. This sends a negative signal. People would rather work with someone who’s excited and positive than someone who’s negative about an engagement. Insecurity also causes you to obsess about looking good in front of everyone and needing everyone to agree with you. This, in turn, causes you to be diffident and not make the right decisions. Further, insecurity causes you to get into a first call telling yourself you need this engagement to work, and people can sense that from a mile away. People would rather work with someone who’s confident and going to succeed whether or not we work with them than with someone who’s dependent, needy or clingy:
You should have be aware of your emotions without getting caught up in them. Awareness is necessary in the moment because, if you react angrily or defensively, they’ll judge you. Sales requires right emotional behavior under pressure. This is hard because the brain is wired to respond more strongly to negative emotion than to positive.
To respond properly, first you need to take care of your physical health: sleep 7-9 hours. Exercise at least 15 minutes every day. Don’t skip meals. Eat healthy. Otherwise, you’ll be degraded both cognitively and emotionally.
“Salespeople should never take no for an answer” is bad advice, since it makes you ram through deals that were’t a fit, causing a failure later.
Stakeholders
In a B2B deal, you’ll find the following stakeholders:
Approvers: These are the people who’ll say yes and sign the contract.
Finance: Though the contract is signed, nothing happens till the finance team approves. In some cases, it might be the CFO, and in other cases, your sale comes out of a budget controlled by (say) a general manager who has to again approve it. Irrespective of the job title, the person who pays for a deal can be different from the one who has agreed to it, and you need to convince both.
Amplifiers: These are the people, junior or senior, who like your service and will say good things to teammates.
Seekers: These are people asked to go find some consultants or companies to work with. They have little authority, but like to feel self-important and can fool salespeople into thinking they’re talking to the approver. Worse, seekers block access to approvers.
Influencers: They can be advocates or naysayers depending on how they evaluate your service. You must develop a relationship with them and get their objections out in the open. Otherwise, the deal will fall through, and you won’t even know the reasons. Even if you find out the reasons, it’s too late to do anything. So know their objections sooner rather than later.
Coaches: These are insiders who advocate for you and teach you how the company works, what you need to do, who the stakeholders are, and how they look at things (e.g., “Bob is always negative but enjoys the respect of the team because he’s been right in the past.”)