Kyle Asay says salespeople waste time "handling" objections when they should understand them instead. Most objections come from doubt in your approach or preference for something else. Ask questions to reopen the conversation rather than defend your method.
One of my least favorite phrases in all of sales training is objection handling. Because the last thing any prospect wants is to have their objections handled by a salesperson. A while ago, I got an email and a response that showed this psychological aspect perfectly. A seller reached out to me with a proposed solution. It wasn't something that I was even thinking that I would need and after I glanced at it, I could tell it wouldn't be that helpful. And so my response was, hey, this isn't the price priority right now. Best of luck with your outreach. So super simple, super quick, just a quick no, this isn't going to be what I, what I need. The seller responded immediately with an objection handle. And they said just to confirm closing more deals faster isn't a priority. And you can see what they're trying to accomplish with this. They're trying to get me into a trap where I can't say no because I'm a sales leader. Why wouldn't I want to close more deal deals faster? So the way they were taught, probably by another sales leader, not their fault, but they were taught to handle the objection by trapping the prospect. The problem here though is I'm not objecting to the proposed outcome. Like I obviously want to close more deals. I always want to close deals faster. Almost everything I do as a sales leader is trying to drive more deals to be closed in a faster way to increase revenue. Right. Closing more deals faster is always a priority for me. But in this situation, I'm already actively working on what myself and my leadership team have determined are our top priorities to help our teams close more deals faster. We've identified tools that support these priorities and we are in execution mode. Because if you think about it, there are so many ways that we can close more deals faster. We can do it by improving our top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel. There are ways that we can, many ways we can go after this priority. So when the seller reached out to me and I said no, I wasn't saying no to the outcome. I wasn't saying no, I don't want to close more deals faster. I was saying no to the approach that their solution takes to drive that outcome. The problems they solve to drive that outcome are not painful for me. And that's why there wasn't a fit. So the way that you can apply this is when you get a no, don't fall back to the high level outcome that you drive. You don't want to go say, oh, you don't want to save money on your HR solutions. Really, you don't want to reduce the risk of getting hacked or huh, you don't want your team to be more happy and productive because of course your buyers want those outcomes. Okay, Everybody claims they can help companies make money, save money, or reduce risk. Okay, Everybody pushes that value. Everybody cares about this value. So when your prospect is objective, there's probably one of a couple things happening. One, they don't believe that you can drive that outcome, so they care about it. You might even solve problems that you need to have solved, but they don't find credibility in your approach. They're not familiar with your company, and your messaging wasn't persuasive enough to convince them that you might be able to drive that outcome. Or two, they believe a different approach to drive that outcome will work better, which was a situation that I was in. I was trying to drive more deals faster. I'm sure the vendor that reached out probably had a pretty good tool to do that, but I had other priorities that I felt would be more impactful towards closing more deals faster. So there's two things. One, they don't believe you, they don't believe you can drive the outcome. And two or two, they believe a different approach might work better. And before you can try to convince the prospect to continue the conversation, you need to find out which of those their objection falls under and then address that for better success. So instead of saying, hey, Kyle, you said it's not a priority. So to confirm closing more deals faster isn't a priority, what they might have said is, hey, it makes perfect sense. You've already got a handle on this. Usually when I hear this, it means you have a similar solution in place and I didn't do a good job sharing how we are different or you are attacking this priority through a completely different approach. Can I ask where you fall? Or a question like that might have continued the conversation and I would have given more detail around the problems I was trying to solve to get to that outcome, giving the seller a better chance at a minimum, to understand my circumstances and come back to me at the right time, or best case scenario, redirect the conversation, help me understand my misconceptions and open up the conversation. And so please, please, please, when you're getting objections from your prospects, don't try to handle them. Try to understand them. Because until you understand them, the only way you're going to overcome them is through blunt force. And no prospects want to have their objections handled in that way. If you found this video helpful, let me know. I'm going the right direction by leaving a like on this video. Then if there are any questions or topics you want to make sure I cover in a future video, leave me a comment. I read all comments and I love recommendations that will help me help you sell more. Finally, don't forget to subscribe. That way you won't miss any of my upcoming content that I'm creating to help you improve the way that you sell.
