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Picture this: you’re on a call with a promising lead. The conversation flows smoothly, and you’re confident you’re about to close the deal.
One second later, the prospect objects—one you’ve never heard of before. What was turning out to be a good sales call, soon turns into a mess as you struggle to offer a convincing response while watching that deal slip away.
If this sounds too familiar, you’re not alone. Most sales reps have been in your shoes before—often as a junior rep. But with practice and thorough research, they’ve gotten better at their jobs.
To help you do the same, in this guide, we’ll take you through:
Most sales objections you encounter boil down to two things: the prospect doesn’t know you, or they don’t need you.
Henry Bolland, ex-SDR and now a commercial broker at Mill Wood Finance, says the first objection is easy to overcome—just provide context on who you are and why you’re calling. The second one, however, is challenging.
“The prospect may not need you for these three core reasons: lack of budget, loyalty to competitors, or lack of trust,” _says Bolland. “Understand the core reasons for a prospect’s objection so you can map out the symptoms of these objections, as a doctor would with an ill patient.”
We’ve categorized pricing objections into six buckets:
Sometimes, you have the right solution, but it’s not the right time for the prospect. They might’ve already created their budget without accounting for your solution, and there’s no room for flexibility. Or internal stakeholders might have other priorities in mind, preventing your project from being greenlit.
If a prospect says no because of your pricing, it happens for three reasons:
While it’s hard to overcome the first objection, you should have a clear understanding of what you bring to the table for the other two.
Focus on the unique value your solution provides and highlight the potential ROI of the project with adequate social proof.
Your prospect may have competing initiatives or more pressing concerns that require internal resources. In some cases, it could also be because they can’t see the value of your solution.
So, get a clear idea of your prospect’s challenges and tailor the call accordingly. If you can tie their challenge to the core benefit of your solution, you’ll get better results.
Typically, your prospects are evaluating you against two to five solutions at the same time. If they bring up a specific competitor, focus on how you win against them.
Steve Pogson, the founder of First Pier, recommends conducting a competitive analysis regularly.
“By positioning ourselves as the customer of our client’s competitors, we encounter the objections that might arise due to product offerings, pricing strategies, and user interface,” _explains Pogson. “This exercise surfaces potential objections and highlights areas for our clients to differentiate themselves. It’s a proactive approach that has led to crafting more precise responses and strategies that address these concerns head-on.”
Create a battle card for each competitor so you’re prepared to handle objections for every call.
Another key objection most sales reps encounter is the lack of internal resources to get up and running. In this case, highlight the training, onboarding, or ongoing one-on-one support you’ll provide to address these concerns.
For example, if you’re selling a software solution, highlight the fact that you have a comprehensive knowledge base. If the prospect is ready to pay for a higher tier, they might also get access to a dedicated customer success manager.
Feature or deliverable objections arise when your prospect questions whether your solution has specific capabilities that can meet their unique requirements.
This issue is expected, so use a datasheet listing features, benefits, and outcomes. If you’re selling a service, create a similar datasheet to address any questions about your packages while on the call.
When your prospect struggles to understand your solution’s potential outcomes or ROI, it’s clear they need help connecting the dots on how it helps them. In most cases, they will ask you how your offer directly contributes to the bottom line of their business.
Use internal data, case studies, and testimonials to demonstrate the impact. Make sure you have these sales enablement assets ready before you get on the call.
Here are a few sales scripts based on common objections you might come across:
Script:
Prospect: “I appreciate your call, but I don’t think we need your product/service now.“
You: “I completely understand, [Prospect Name]. Many of our current clients initially felt the same way.
However, they discovered our solution could help them [specific benefit or problem solved]. How are you currently handling [specific pain point or challenge related to your offering]?”
Prospect: [Responds with their current approach or challenges]
You: “That’s a common challenge many clients faced before working with us. Our product/service solves that by [explain how your solution addresses their challenge].
In fact, one of our clients, [provide a brief case study or example], could [describe the positive outcome or result] after using our solution. Would you be open to exploring how we can help you achieve similar results?”
Why it works: You take a more empathetic approach and try to understand why the prospect feels like they do. They feel seen, and then you can counter their objection with a clear data point or benefit from resolving it.
Prospect: “I like what your product/service offers, but the price seems too high for our budget.”
You: “I understand, [Prospect Name]. If you don’t mind me asking, how much do you estimate [specific problem or challenge] is currently costing your business in terms of [relevant metric, e.g., time, resources, lost opportunities]?”
Prospect: [Responds with an estimate or acknowledges the impact]
You: “That’s a significant impact on your business. We’ve designed our solution to offset that cost—so much so that [past client] managed to [significant financial outcome or ROI] within [timeframe] using our solution.
They were in a similar situation and saw significant benefits. Does that address your concern?”
Why it works: You acknowledge that it’s a valid concern and it’s normal to feel that way. But you don’t stop there. You shift the focus of the conversation to the long-term value the prospect gets—instead of how much it costs them.
Prospect: “I appreciate the information, but I’ll have to talk to my boss to get the green light.“
You: “I completely understand, [Prospect Name]. If you don’t mind me asking, who else would typically be involved in evaluating and deciding on a solution like ours?”
Prospect: [Responds with the relevant decision-makers or departments]
You:“Thank you for sharing that! Would you be willing to introduce us to [decision-maker or department]? We can get them up to speed via email or quick video."
Prospect: [Responds with their willingness to make an introduction or next steps]
You: “That’s fantastic, [Prospect Name]. I’ll send that email right away. I’m happy to schedule a joint meeting to discuss this further. Would that work for both of you?”
Why it works: You make the ask and get access to the decision-maker. This lets you fast-track the deal without waiting to find out what’s going on behind the scenes.
Prospect: “Thanks for reaching out. But we’re already working with [competitor] for our [specific solution or service]. We’re pretty satisfied at the moment.“
You: “I’m glad to hear that you have a solution in place, [Prospect Name]. Some of our clients who switched from [competitor] found that they weren’t getting [your key differentiator]. Is that something you’re dealing with as well?”
Prospect: [Responds with their perspective on the current solution]
You: “That’s great to hear, [Prospect Name]. I appreciate you sharing that. If you’d like to learn more about how you can benefit in [focus area you help with], I’d love to send you a comparison sheet. It might let you see if there are opportunities to improve your current setup. Would you like that?”
Why it works: You don’t go for a hard sell and instead take a subtle approach to selling. You highlight a key differentiator where you perform better and use that as an entry point to open the conversation.
Prospect: “I’m on board with your solution, but the timing isn’t quite right for us. We have other priorities that we need to focus on now.”
You: “I completely understand, [Prospect Name]. What key initiatives or challenges are you currently prioritizing?”
Prospect: [Responds with their current focus areas or challenges]
You: “I see. I completely understand. I’d love to schedule a call when you think this solution might be a priority. Would X date work better?”
Why it works: No matter how hard you push, people won’t buy from you unless they need what you’re offering. But if you try too hard, your prospect might become averse to your solution—putting you out of the race. Taking the long view preserves that relationship and keeps you top of mind in the future.
Prospect: “I appreciate the information you’ve provided, but I’m not too sure if your solution solves our problem.”
You: “I understand, [Prospect Name]. Could you share more about what your specific concerns are?”
Prospect: [Responds with their current needs]
You: “I see. Fortunately, we’ve successfully solved similar issues for clients in [industry]. For example, [past client] was able to [outcome of your solution] even though they were struggling with the same issue.
Would you like me to send a case study to gain more clarity on the process? We could schedule a follow-up call after that.”
Why it works: You tackle the objection by showing them that your company has seen it quite often and successfully solved it. In this case, instead of going for a hard sell, you can offer more sales enablement content to nurture and convince the prospect.
Scripts are great if you’re looking for a quick way to get up and running. But some sales reps like creating frameworks to handle sales calls.
For instance, at Ontario Property Buyers, sales reps don’t have specific scripts to follow. Instead, they train using role-playing scenarios before they get on a call.
“All of the objection handling becomes an internal process as our sales reps have found themselves in all possible scenarios multiple times,” _says Sebastian Jania, founder of Ontario Property Buyers. _“As a company, we simply cannot have people learning to handle objections on the phone with prospects that we pay a significant amount of money to have conversations with.”
Here’s how you can build your own objection-handling playbook:
Your sales team has data scattered across multiple tools and resources. So, consolidate all that data first to gather as much context as possible.
Here are a few sources you should review:
Use that data to understand how your reps handle specific situations and identify recurring themes across multiple calls.
After you’ve identified common themes, create a list of them, adding actual objections your team has faced under each one. Prioritize the objections based on their frequency and potential impact on the same outcome. This will help you focus on the ones your reps might deal with—not something you think might be an issue.
Take the time to analyze why prospects raise specific concerns and what motivates their hesitation.
For each objection on your list, consider the following:
For example, if you’re selling an SEO service, it could be that your prospect has hired agencies previously that didn’t work out. They may have received subpar work or didn’t get any results—leading to them marking off agencies as the problem.
Look at it from the prospect’s perspective and identify the root cause of the objection. Unless you determine the underlying reason, it’ll be hard to empathize with your prospect and offer a tailored response.
Now that you know why the objection came up, create a framework or script to address it.
For each objection, create a structured response that includes the following elements:
Bolland recommends using the AAA framework, which means Acknowledge, Address, Align.
Here’s what that would look like:
The goal is to avoid badgering the prospect and take a more consultative approach to the sales call. This way, they’re more likely to open up to you and buy from you.
Here’s a template to build these frameworks for your team:
Can we recreate this with the company’s branding?
Here’s what a few sales experts have to say about improving your objection-handling skills:
The best way to deal with difficult situations is to practice and get direct feedback from your peers or managers.
“Role-playing with team members in different sales scenarios helps,” says Aaron Masterson, president of Link Genius. “When the salesperson can experience different situations, whether the prospect is easy and non-combative as well as aggressive, this helps find weaknesses and possible objections you will need to overcome during a real call.”
It allows you to build confidence, refine your communication skills, and think on your feet when faced with unexpected objections.
Engage in mock sales calls with a peer, manager, or sales coach. Ask your colleagues to present objections based on the playbook you’ve created, and practice your responses. This way, you won’t walk into a sales call without getting your reps in—and you’ll tackle the objection with ease.
Without data, you won’t know what you need to improve. Start recording your sales calls, whether you do them online or offline. Use a call recording tool to capture your sales conversations (with permission)—and transcribe them to identify common objection trends.
You can use tools such as:
You can even process the call transcript through ChatGPT to identify these objections. In most cases, dedicated call recording software has a coaching component you can use. This approach can help you get ahead of newer objections and practice tackling them.
The market is continuously evolving—so your prospect’s objections will, too. For example, when COVID-19 hit, many companies cut down their expenditures. So, it was common for prospects to bring up pricing and value-based objections. They might not have directly alluded to it, but the underlying reason was the same.
Similarly, you must regularly analyze your calls and list new objections within your playbook.
Either treat your playbook like a live document or use a tool like HubSpot to manage your playbook. For instance, ClockOn uses HubSpot’s Sales Playbooks to organize its sales content and connect its objection-handling scripts within the tool.
“HubSpot’s Sales Playbook is especially helpful because it integrates directly with our CRM, allowing sales reps to quickly find and use the most current scripts during their sales calls or email correspondence,” explains Blake Smith, marketing manager at ClockOn.
“To keep our scripts up to date, we conduct quarterly reviews of our sales interactions and performance data to identify new objections or changes in customer sentiment. This iterative process ensures our team is always equipped with effective, current strategies for handling objections.”
A key part of handling objections is to have an excellent presence of mind. You need to give your full attention during the call so that you have the necessary context required to counter an objection.
Pay close attention to a prospect’s tone, inflection, and nonverbal cues to gauge their emotional state. Also, give them the opportunity to complete their thoughts so that you’re not jumping to conclusions.
When you actively listen to your prospect, you learn what your prospect wants from you. This allows you to better address their concerns.
The Socratic questioning method involves asking a series of thoughtful questions to explore a topic or challenge assumptions. You need to ask open-ended questions to clarify the actual cause behind the objection and offer a potential solution.
For example, if a prospect says they’re unsure if they can afford your solution, ask them, “What specific aspects of the pricing concern you the most?”or “How do you currently measure the ROI of your investments?”
It forces them to think about the real issue behind their pricing concern, and you can use that data point in your response.
Objections are inevitable. It’s normal for prospects to have concerns or doubts about your solution—especially if it’s a significant investment. So always prepare for them. It’ll make you better at your job and help you close more deals in the long run.
Work with your team to understand common objections to your solution and build your own playbook to address them. But don’t just stop there. Treat your playbook as a live document that should be reviewed or updated every quarter so that your reps feel they’ve got a pulse on their prospects’ needs.
Store these documents so everyone can access them anytime. The last thing you want is for your rep to need last-minute access and not get it in time.
If you’re looking for a tool to store your objection-handling playbooks, try Content Camel for free today.
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Content Camel is a sales enablement tool used for sales content management. High-growth sales teams use our system to quickly find and share the right content for each specific sales situation and measure content use and effectiveness.