Every sales professional has seen deals fall apart at the last minute because of prospect objections. But if you gave up after every time you heard “it’s too expensive” or “this isn’t a top priority,” your pipeline would be empty in no time. That’s why sales training on overcoming objections should be an essential part of your team’s development.
Sales professionals aren’t born knowing how to negotiate effectively, and overcoming objections can feel hard and uncomfortable without the right skills. Worse, when sellers attempt to overcome objections without expertise, they risk alienating customers and damaging goodwill.
Your sales team needs training and support to ensure their sales negotiations go smoothly and that they get the outcomes you want. Sales negotiation is a critical skill for any high-performing team—and overcoming sales objections is a major aspect of negotiation.
When your salespeople use a consultative selling approach to counter excuses and collaborate on solutions, they see higher win rates, better profit margins, and greater efficiency.
8 Sales Training Tips for Overcoming Objections
Here are eight sales training tips to help your sales team overcome objections.
1. Listen Actively
When a prospect raises an objection, it’s natural to become a bit defensive. After all, you’ve spent days or weeks explaining how your product or service will meet their needs.
Train your sales professionals to focus on listening deeply to the objection before jumping in, and to express empathy with the prospect’s problem. When prospects feel they have been heard, they are more likely to listen and to discuss solutions to their objection.
2. Don’t Leap to Discounts
For many sales professionals, offering a discount is their first impulse when faced with objections. This can be counterproductive. Discounting tells the prospect you didn’t offer your best deal to begin with.
And price may not be the primary reason they’re not ready to purchase. Objections to price are common, but they often mask a deeper concern about trust, value, or resistance to change.
Train your sales professionals to go deeper into problem-solving before they begin introducing discounts. Discounts should always be accompanied by a reason that eases the fear you didn’t offer the prospect your best deal from the start.
3. Ask Probing Questions
Once the prospect has expressed their concerns, it’s time to dig deeper. Under their objection may lie additional fears or pains they haven’t expressed. Common objections include cost, complexity, competitors, lack of features, value, timing, and trust, which may also show up as lack of authority or confidence.
Train your sales professionals to ask probing questions to get to the root of the concern. When asked, prospects will frequently mention cost, complexity, timing, or features. However, they will rarely share that they don’t trust the seller or that they lack confidence in the solution.
Your team must also be skilled in building and maintaining trust through consultative selling. If a lack of trust develops or appears during the negotiation stage, your team must be able to identify the problem and know when to bring in resources to improve the relationship.
4. Recognize When an Objection Is Legitimate
Not every prospect is a good fit for your product or service. For instance, a competitor’s product may be a better value for them, or you might not be able to provide features that are critical to their success.
When this happens, it is better to reclaim the time rather than to engage in aggressive attempts to overcome objections. When a salesperson honestly and correctly identifies a bad fit, they may lose the sale, but they gain the trust of the prospect and open the door for future sales.
On the other hand, a salesperson who insists on aggressively pursuing a bad opportunity will waste time, alienate the buyer, and still lose the sale.
Train your sales professionals how to recognize when a sales objection is a legitimate blocker and how to disqualify prospects at every stage of the sales process so they can focus on those who are most likely to be profitable.
5. Problem Solve
When the sales professional’s probing questions identify objections that can be overcome, it’s time for your sales team to put on their consultative sales hats and get to work solving problems.
For instance, if a prospect raises the issue of complexity, your seller can help them find ways to simplify their approach to the implementation and manage change. This is also a good time to build trust by bringing in subject-matter experts. This helps the prospect feel they will have a good partner in navigating the complexity.
Train your sales professionals to focus on the problems their prospects are experiencing and to collaborate with them to find winning solutions.
6. Identify Value for the Prospect
The value to your sales team of overcoming objections is obvious. But what is the value to the buyer? Why should they bother engaging in a conversation aimed at overcoming their objections?
For instance, if the objection is the difficulty of finding budget for the solution, the prospect may feel frustrated. Your sales professionals must lead the prospect to remember and understand the value of the solution and the cost of not investing in it.
Train your sales professionals to probe for the problems and aspirations that will motivate the buyer to want to overcome their own objections. When the prospect remembers clearly why they wanted the solution in the first place, they’re more likely to want to persevere and problem-solve.
7. Confirm the Solution
Your sales professionals should keep a record of the prospect’s objections and review them with the buyer to ensure they have been addressed. Some sellers resist the idea of reviewing objections on the grounds that this will cause the prospect to think twice and reopen the negotiation process.
It’s important to remember: Prospects don’t forget their objections. Even if they’ve temporarily overlooked one, they will remember it later. If you haven’t fully addressed all the items on their list, you open the door for them to ruminate and kill the deal because of an objection you didn’t address.
Before closing the conversation, train your sales professionals to confirm with the prospect that the solution does address their objections. By reviewing objections and verifying they’ve been overcome, you make it easy for the buyer to say “yes” to the sale—and hard for them to change their mind later.
8. Remember Communication Styles
Train your sales professionals to match the communication style of the prospect at all stages of the sales process, but especially during negotiation. Sales negotiations can be intense and uncomfortable for buyers. Trust is critical. By choosing a communication style that is most comfortable for the buyer, sellers can help maintain trust and improve their ability to move the conversation forward.
Sales negotiations can be difficult for sales professionals. By providing sales training on overcoming objections, you can arm them with the skills they need to close more deals more profitably.
Train Your Sales Team to Overcome Objections
Arm your sales team with the negotiating skills to overcome objections with The Brooks Group Sales Negotiation Training.
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