Handling Objections

The book Objections, by Jeb Blount, a seasoned sales expert, is a fantastic book on handling objections in sales. It is a must-read for anyone who is in sales or is building a startup. The book is full of practical advice and is a great reference book to keep coming back to. According to Blount, effective sales is essentially about two things

1. Snapping the buyer out of their habitual responses to your questions, and
2. Keeping your (the sellers) emotions under check

These two may sound intuitive but there’s a lot of layers to how we go about executing them, especially in pressure cooker situations when we are too heavily invested in the outcomes. I have tried to summarize the key points below.

Asking is everything

Asking gets you everything in sales. According to the author, ask for what you want and don’t be afraid of hearing a No. Be assumptive and confident and not passive or desperate. Don’t use passive language like ‘i was wondering if you’re free..’ and instead ‘I am visiting a client not far from you and how about I pick you for lunch’. People can smell desperation a mile away and it’s a turn off.

The whole idea of asking is to give your buyer a chance to say yes. This is why after making the ask you need to shut up and don’t feel compelled to fill the silence. The buyer needs time to think and you need to give them that time. Bringing objections to the surface is super important (we discuss the different types of objections in the next section) and for that you must keep the buyer talking.

An interesting aspect of asking questions is letting the buyer indulge in self disclosure. The brain rewards self disclosure so keeping them talking about themselves has a higher chance of them bringing up real objections as you build rapport and trust.

The self disclosure goes something like this.

1. Ask open ended questions
2. Offer full attention and listen actively
3. Don’t interrupt or talk over
4. Pause 3-5 seconds before speaking
5. Center your questions on self disclosures with questions like “i noticed from your linkedin you’ve spent almost 10 years here..what are some of the changes that you have seen in your industry”.

Types of objections

There are 4 main types of objections

1. Prospecting objections - the kind you face when you’re trying to qualify leads. Everyone is busy and has little time so these are often reflexive or brush-offs objections (RBOs).
2. Red Herrings - intentional or unintentional statements buyers spew out. Sometimes are totally irrelevant and are said to divert attention. They can distract you so you need to spot them and avoid chasing these. Pause and acknowledge that you heard them and say ‘let me make a note of that’. don’t bring it up later unless they do it.
3. Microcommittment objections - Asking for tiny committments (like a hard date for the next call or pilot kickoff or specific data) keeps the deal moving forward. These need to be low risk actions that the buyer can take. We discuss these in detail later in the post.
4. Buying committment objections - things like pricing, timing, need to talk to my boss, competitors, conditions, terms, etc.

Handling objections

There are several frameworks mentioned in the book you can employ to handle objections but these are all based on the fundamental idea of being prepared and practicing.

The Ledge-disrupt-ask loop for managing RBOs.

1. A ledge is an auto response that you dont have to think about. It gives you a few seconds to bring your conscious mind in and not let your emotions run afoul. This is where the preparation and practice comes in. It could be things like ‘that makes sense’ or ‘can you please explain how so’ or ‘sounds like you’re really..’, etc.
2. Disrupt the flow of the conversation and give them something new so they can’t pattern match. It could be a statement or a question - “awesome, you should not think about changing but we’ll still like to show you cool stuff”. “can you send me something specific you want to see”, etc.
3. Ask for exactly what you want assertively.

Another important aspect of sales is developing a strategy for getting microcommittments. Getting buyers to make small committments makes them amenable to larger ones (this is based on the principle of consistency and committment bias that we all suffer from).

1. Relate - Step into their shoes and undertand where they are coming from as a person and don’t discount their actions (“its ok to do what you are doing”). This is also a type of ledge and slows the conversation down.
2. Isolate - Get all the objections and then try to gauge which ones are most consequential. Don’t start handling them one by one as they crop up.
3. Minimise - don’t talk down but minimise the objections and reestablish the values of your solution. One way to do this is to bring back all the previous yesses they have given and then start addressing the most consequential objections one by one.
4. Ask - Ask for a committment assertively and confidently. Don’t be afraid of hearing a No. If you get a No, ask why and then go back to step 3 and minimise the objection. If you get a Yes, then ask for the next committment.
5. Fallback to an alternative committment - Use your previous collected yesses to show far they have come and keep them going. If they say No, then fallback to a smaller committment and keep going.

7 Disruptive emotions

Emotions derail sales conversations and you need to be aware of them and keep them in check. Objections feel like rejections which trigger flight or fight responses that leads to us losing our emotional control. This often appears in one of the 7 disruptive emotions

1. Fear - clouds objectivity
2. Desperation - needy and weak, unlikeable
3. Insecurity - drowns assertiveness, makes us feel lonely
4. Need for significance - feel unimportant, egocentricity causes irrational beahavior
5. Attachment - lose perspective due to wanting to be right
6. Eagerness - lose sight of sales objective by trying to please buyers
7. Worry - leads to procrastination caused by negative thinking. focus on what could go right not the other way around.

The book really underscores the importance of keeping our own emotions under control. Recognising what you’re feeling is the step one, being prepared to deal with it is another and finally practicing your ledges and asks, is the last step.

Emotional control

The final takeaway from this book, and for me the most important one, was the idea of emotional control. The author talks about emotional control in the following ways but you’ll notice the core idea is based on “we suffer more in the head”.

1. Develop self awareness - Tune in and become aware. Don’t let your flight or fight response suspend your conscious thought process. Modulate emotions to make them congruent with your objectives. Can be developed with practice.
2. Positive visualisation - Why will I succeed vs why will I fail. Slow down your breating and actualise your success. Materialise you getting what you want.
3. Manage self talk - Take control of your mental chatter and don’t let your emotions be projected outward. People are rude to you but then they forget about you, however you can continue to feel rejected for a whole lot longer.
4. Change your physical posture - How we stand or sit shapes how we feel and think. Physically standing makes us feel more confident and assertive.
5. Stay fit - Regulating disruptive emotions is draining and you need to be fit to tackle them.
6. Managing flight or fight - Give your rational brain a few seconds to catch up. Take a pause. This is where practiced ledges can help you. Using filler words like ‘interesting, can you tell me more’ or “could you tell me why is that important to you”, etc can often prevent you from reacting poorly to a situation or comment.
7. This or that - when you find yourself digging in, you need to ask if what you’re doing is in line with your overall objectives, this helps avoid reactance
8. Immunity for the fear of rejection - don’t be afraid of facing obstacles. practice getting rejections and you’ll find that they are not that bad. you’ll also find that you’ll get better at handling them.
9. High self esteem - developing a high self esteem helps in getting over rejection and also help you become more likeable and less desperate.

To summarise, rejection avoidance is hardwired into our biology. We learn to fear it and thus avoid it making us emotionally vulnerable and opens us upto losing control of our emotions and goofing up our situations. The most effective sales people know that objections are a part of the decision making process and instead of not seeking them or fearing them, theytry to get them out on the table earlier and handle them in a prepared fashion.

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I run a startup called Harmonize. We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, I tweetabout startup life and practical wisdom in books.

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