How to master objections

We explore how to handle objections with confidence by borrowing from improv: embrace uncertainty, listen deeply, and reframe concerns into opportunities. Practical scripts show how to pivot price, timing, scepticism, past failures, and missing features toward value and proof.

• embracing uncertainty rather than steering to safety
• using curiosity and active listening to diagnose hidden concerns
• validating emotion to reduce resistance and build trust
• reframing price to ROI and doubt to evidence
• turning bad timing into prioritisation and momentum
• converting past negative experiences into safeguards and process
• positioning missing features as intentional design or customisation
• practising a repeatable pattern: empathy, validation, pivot, proof
• focusing on outcomes, case studies and next steps
• building a personal objection playbook

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And you can download the 5 Objection Reframes here.

Welcome to the podcast!

Chapters

• 0:13 Setting The Goal: Objection Mastery
• 0:32 Borrowing From Improv Comedy
• 0:57 Embracing Uncertainty In Sales
• 2:30 Curiosity And Active Listening
• 4:59 Unpacking Hidden Meanings In Objections
• 6:21 The Reframing Model Overview
• 7:17 Price: Cost To ROI Shift
• 9:11 Skepticism To Credibility
• 10:11 Timing To Priority
• 11:21 Bad Past To Renewed Trust
• 12:09 Missing Feature To Smart Design
• 12:50 Core Pattern And Takeaways
• 14:31 Close And Call To Action

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Hello and welcome to another podcast. This is Graeme Elliott. So in this podcast, we're going to talk a bit more about objections, which is a pretty much favorite subject, I think, of most salespeople. So, what are techniques you can use to make objection handling really easy? And where we're going to go today is to actually look at comedy, and that is the area of basically reframing handling things on the fly, much in the same way that someone doing improvisation or stand-up comedy would handle somebody from the crowd. So it might be an unusual way of looking at it, but hopefully there's some value there for you. So, how would you feel if you could walk into any sales meeting, conversation, and feel really confident that you could handle any objection that came up? Now, you might already be feeling that way, chances are you're not, because otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this. So, what I want you to think about is how does someone who's doing improvisation operate? What are the kind of things they practice? So the first thing that they will do is to embrace uncertainty. And this I think is a big problem for a lot of salespeople, and I think this is where a lot of the problem begins because we're afraid of uncertainty. We want to go in. I think one of the issues is we're we're aware that there are certain questions that if we're asked, we're going to really struggle to answer, or the answer may well not be what the client wants to hear. And when you've got those kind of things in the back of your mind, you you're really trying to steer, whether you're doing it consciously or subconsciously, but you'll try and steer the conversation back to where you feel comfortable, to where you've got certainty, basically. So the first thing to do is to let go of that and to just let it be okay for whatever comes up to come up and not stress about it. So that's point number one. So what are the secrets to doing that? Well, one of the key things, and this is something I've spoken about before, is curiosity, it's asking more. So if someone comes up with an objection or a question that you hadn't thought about or you weren't expecting, ask more, find out more. And the way that you do that is to actively listen. So, again, this is something I've said many times. Listening to clients is really important. If you do nothing else well, I would say listening is probably the one thing you really need to get down. Because what it does, it will allow you to first of all have good communication with them, good conversations. You they will feel that you have heard them, that you're interested in what they're doing, that you're hopefully interested in providing a solution for them. And the kind of questions that you're asking during the conversation are relevant. And again, with all of these things, just put yourself in the shoes of the client. If you were a client having a conversation with you about whatever it is you offer, how would you want that conversation to go? Would you want the salesperson you're speaking with to be clearly listening to what you're saying, asking additional questions to get a bit deeper, get a better understanding? Or would you be up against one of those salespeople who just keeps going back to the brochure and it's like you're they're not even hearing anything you're saying? So clearly the two experiences are very different, and this is really important in how you connect with your clients. And the the truth of this is as well that if you are with a salesperson who is clearly listening, is clearly interested in providing a solution for you, you're going to be a little bit more forgiving if they get things wrong. I think that's just human nature. In most cases, if it's somebody we like or we're leaning towards liking, we'll we'll give them a little bit more lee room to make mistakes or get something slightly wrong. And that comes back to what a lot of the worry is for salespeople about uncertainty and hitting that question that you know you don't know the answer to. So the other thing that you're the other thing that you're doing when you are curious, when you're asking questions, is to start diving down into the hidden meanings of objections. So I'm going to pull this to objections because that's primarily what I want to deal with. And with objections, you generally get the same ones. So I've said before on other podcasts, if you write down the top three to five objections that you get, the chances are you've got price, you've got timing, you may have something related to the need that the client has, but they'll tend to be the same sort of objections that come up every time. So it is really helpful to have some insights into how to handle those objections. Obviously, for each individual client, they you'll need to answer them in a particular way so that they've they like to feel unique. We like to feel that we're special, we're being listened to. On the other hand, it's also nice to feel that we're not the only person having that concern. So there's that social proof aspect. So with each of those objections, generally underneath is a hidden hidden meaning. And often that will relate to value, which I spoke about in the last podcast. Often it will mean that something's been miscommunicated. They haven't quite understood some aspect of the offer of what you're offering, and that's created this uncertainty in them. So these are the kind of things to bear in mind before we uh move forward. So I'm going to give you a model, and there is actually a little handout you can download, a PDF. And um this is what I call reframing. So a reframe is simply taking a statement and turning it around, making it mean something different. And going back to the improv, if you look at comedians on stage or the good ones still, if they having someone heckle them, they'll quite often just flip it around, flip the meaning around, so that rather being something that's attacking them as the person on stage, they'll tend to flip it back onto the person who's creating the heckle in the first place, or at least in in some circumstances. So I'm not suggesting that you um uh try and upset your clients, generally not a good idea. But I'm just going to run through five, and these are all in the handouts, don't worry if you don't get them. So the first one is price objection. So, what's that about? Generally, price is related to value. So the the client might be saying your pri your product is too expensive. And the way you can respond with that is to say something like, I understand, I hear what you're saying, it is an investment. And most of our clients felt the same way at first. But what they found was it actually saved them money within the first quarter or whatever it is. And maybe you can show an example of how they did that. It's useful to have a case study if that is relevant and valid for what you're doing. So what happens here? Well, we're doing two things. The first thing is empathy, and this is going to be really important throughout. We validate the concern that the client has. So this is really important. Because what we're doing here, we're essentially putting ourselves with the client, side by side with the client, to find a solution, not opposing the client and somehow trying to have a struggle of wills or whatever it might be to uh win and get this deal across the line despite all of the objections from the client. So it's about working with your client. So empathy is really important and validating their concern is absolutely fundamental. What you've also done is shift the focus from the cost, so the initial upfront investment or the initial upfront cost to the return on investment, what that investment will give them in the coming months. So, in this example, in the first quarter. So that again is just reframing, it's switching the focus of the concern and it's getting them thinking about what this solution will deliver for them. So that's the first example. Second one is skepticism and turning that around to credibility. So the comment might be something like, I'm not sure this will work for our type of business. And the response is again to validate, that makes sense. Every business has its own quirks, and then add more information to help you turn it around. So that could be something like a few of our best success stories came from companies that thought the same thing at first. Would you like to hear how they approached it? Again, use whatever words, whatever's relevant for you. But again, first thing we're doing is empathy, we're acknowledging their uncertainty. And then the pivot is to turn doubt into curiosity and then proof. So hopefully, if you're acknowledging that another client had the same concerns, but they that was actually able to be turned around so that it became a positive, that should provoke curiosity in the client, at least, so you can continue that conversation. And proof is obviously to reassure them that um what you're offering will deliver. Now, another one is timing. So this is about switching timing as an objection to making it a priority. So the comment from the client could be something like, Now's not a good time for us to make a change. So again, respond with, I totally understand. Change can feel risky when things are busy. A lot of our clients said the same thing, but they found that implementing now actually freed up their team's time sooner. Would it help if I shared how they managed that transition? So again, we're expressing empathy, we're acknowledging, we're aligning their hesitation, and we're flipping bad timing to be opportunity. So acting now allows you to access savings, whether it's time, money, whatever, um, sooner rather than later. Now, number four in the examples that um I have for you, so again, this is all downloadable, um, is to just deal with past experiences that have been negative and switch that into trust. So the kind of remark uh might be we tried something like this before and it didn't work. So again, you can respond with something like that's completely fair, or I understand no one wants to repeat a bad experience. But if you're open to it, I can show you what's different about our approach, and that addresses exactly that issue. So again, what you're doing is empathy, honoring their past experiences, their past disappointments, and then the pivot is to turn frustration back into curiosity about how these improvements can be implemented. And then the final example I have for you is um a criticism about a feature, turning that back into maybe a customization opportunity, customization reframe. So the comment could be something like it looks like your product doesn't have whatever that feature might be. And again, we're responding with your right. We built it differently on purpose. Most clients found that the first feature, the one that you're they're objecting to, slowed them down. Instead, we focused on a different feature or benefit. And can I show you why? So, what you're doing there is to again express empathy, confirm their observation, agree with them that it's valid, validating them, and then the pivot is to turn something that's missing into a strategic design choice that actually leads to an improved performance overall. So these are just some examples to work with. Now, with what you're doing, they may you may well be um some of those might be relevant, some might not be. But again, there's a the common themes there are to validate the client, acknowledge their concern, and then get them curious, switch what they've raised as a concern into an opportunity. So your takeaway from this podcast, I hope, will be to just sit down and think about common objections that you get and look at ways that you can reframe them if there is a complete answer you can provide, or just find a way or get clear or maybe practice how you just acknowledge their concern and then ask questions to dive a little bit deeper to get to understand what is underlying that objection. Is it a miscommunication? What's the fear? What is the fear that's stopping them? And this is how we work with um objections. So again, coming back to what we started with, the purpose of doing this is that you don't need to have stock answers for every objection that comes up. But what is really useful is having a technique that you can apply that will allow you to manage that objection as it comes up. And once you've got the technique, it doesn't really matter what the objection is because essentially you're doing the same thing. You're listening, you're agreeing with the client, you're expressing empathy, you're validating them, and then you turn around what they've expressed as an objection to make it into an opportunity of some sort. So that's it for this podcast and what I wanted to cover. I hope that makes some sense. I hope that's something you can apply. Uh, if that's been useful, hopefully I've earned a like and subscribe from you. And um I'll speak to you in the next podcast. So bye for now.