editione1.0.1
Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
In the grand majority of your sales interactions, it’s not going to be an immediate yes, nor will it be a cut-and-dried no. Instead, it will most commonly be, “No, because of this” or, “Well, what about this?” And all those equivocal responses come under the heading of objections that you need to handle before returning to the close.
Often first-time sales staff are afraid of objection handling, because it feels like you’re starting conflict with the prospect. Why am I arguing with the person I want to sign this proposal?!
importantThe reality is that handling objections is where some of the most valuable work in sales is done. If sales is about commercial persuasion, this is where the rubber hits the road. This is where you examine, one by one, the things that are blocking your prospect from proceeding and surmount them using business-based arguments and proof.
That’s not to say that this has to be contentious, but you will be best served by being direct. When a prospect surfaces an objection that runs counter to their business reality, it is your duty to address it head on. This general concept of respectful contentiousness has been popularized by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson in their book The Challenger Sale. It’s all the more important in innovative technology sales, where you must change minds to popularize a new approach to a business problem—which typically requires challenging existing mindsets.
We touched on this briefly when talking about objection handling in Prospect Outreach and Demo Appointment Setting. Now, instead of surmounting objections to taking a meeting, you’re surmounting objections to proceeding with the purchase. Further, you have far more information about the prospect’s internal situation, thanks to all the discovery you executed, so you can handle these objections with very concrete examples that are rooted in his business realities. Moreover, you are on the far side of your presentation and demo, in which you made the case for why your solution is a solid fit for the organization, building agreement with the prospect as you went. So objections should be nothing to fear, given your position of strength.
As with the objections you were handling when setting appointments, objections to a sale are a good thing! You know the prospect is actively engaging with you and considering the sale, rather than going silent or just saying something abstract and content-free like, “No, I don’t think it’s a fit.” A great way to elicit specific objections when a prospect is being vague is with a line like, “What specifically is blocking us from progressing right now?” That puts it to her to surface one, or many, concrete objections.
The objections that you run into will be both generic and specific to your solution. The generic ones will be similar to those we covered in Prospect Outreach and Demo Appointment Setting around timing, budget, authority, need, and price. Then there will be those that are specific to your solution, which may be versions of those generic ones or specifically address feature and functionality concerns or competition. We’ll talk about the generic ones first, then move on to the solution-specific ones.
Generic objections can generally be divided into the following categories—lack of decision-making authority, lack of need, fear of change, timing, price, budgeting challenges, and reluctance. We’ll discuss how to resolve each of these issues below.
If the objection is around authority, this is an easy one to resolve. During discovery (see how it all comes back to discovery!?), you were supposed to figure out what the organization’s process is for making judgments about tooling and who makes final decisions. Well, now you just come back to that.
importantUnderstand whether this is the true blocker. Is the prospect sold on the solution and honestly telling you that he doesn’t have the authority to commit to purchasing? Handling this objection is going to involve assisting the prospect in navigating his organization with your help—you will essentially be partnering with the prospect to sell the next decision-maker in the org. And because this can be a squirrelly exercise, you want to make sure that he is fully bought-in as a champion of your solution.
You can validate that with something like, “Is the authority to make this decision the only thing that is blocking us from getting you started?” This helps you understand if there is anything else lurking or if you can point your efforts toward this issue. If questioning elicits other objections—like price or budget or feature deficit—great, handle those first. But you don’t want to get into a situation where you and your champion are sitting on a call with his boss or the CFO and something else bubbles up. Yuck.
Assuming that yes, your prospect is indeed bought-in, it’s now just a question of project-managing the next step of the sale to engage, with the help of your prospect, the ultimate decision-maker or set of decision-makers. Ideally you would have been engaged with them from the get-go, but often the budget-holder and decision-maker are removed from the person who would understand and appreciate your solution. Sometimes organizations will run purchasing decisions through a finance staffer, like a controller or CFO, to make sure that there are strong ROI arguments and efficiencies deriving from the purchase. Or other times, it may be the manager of the prospect that you’re engaged with, who is removed from the pain point that your solution addresses. Whoever it is, you need to elicit that information from your prospect and then offer to run point on engaging the decision-maker to get the ball across the line.
Typically I prefer to not give the prospect the ball to run with here and, instead, like to put the onus on myself to manage that process, under the guise of being helpful. Of course, the goal is to ensure that I have control over moving the conversation forward and am not gated by the prospect dropping the ball. Because while your contact may be excited about your solution, advocating for it is not his day job. It’s yours. Also, he likely will not be as good at it as you. So you need to be the one running point on setting up incremental meetings with other decision-makers. Just treat it as another demo that will likely be foreshortened.
How to do this? Well, first, eliciting the names of the decision-makers can be dicey this late in the conversation, because the prospect may be concerned that you’ll just run ahead and engage them, leaving him out of the loop—or making it look like he just dropped a rabid sales rep in their laps! Again, that’s why getting this information via discovery at the beginning of the conversation is so much better, or even before that in pre-call planning, when you figured out who the potential decision-maker could be (boss, boss’s boss, and so on). The closing conversation is so far from prospects’ minds at that point, they’re less guarded with this information. But regardless, you can use the same gambit as before, using LinkedIn to sniff out who your contact’s likely boss or likely decision-maker is and surfacing that.
An easy approach here is something like:
example“Fantastic, I am very excited to work with you to help understand how helpful this will be for ____. I know you’re busy, so I would love to take point on setting an appointment so we can both present this to her. Is her calendar available to you? If so, we can get fifteen minutes scheduled right now, and keep this ball rolling!”
If the relevant person’s calendar isn’t available, you can volunteer to start an email thread including your champion and the target decision-maker wherein that scheduling takes place. (Ideally you should just assumptively propose some times, the way you would in an appointment-setting context.)
Once a meeting is calendared, you would just approach it as a second demo, with all the associated pre-calling planning, a stated goal, and customization for the type of person that you’re selling. In this case, you’re selling the decision-maker on the fact that her deputy is bought-in to this solution; you just need to make it clear that this is a good expenditure of budget. Often you’ll find that the decision-maker in question is just back-checking the judgment of the deputy and that it’s a rubber stamp situation. However, this goes back to the importance of having good ROI documentation in your slides and proposal. These higher-level managers are not going to care as much about individual bells and whistles as business outcome proof.
importantOf all the generic objections you’ll get, “We don’t have the need” is the most concerning. As touched on above, if the prospect doesn’t think your solution is a fit, there’s something problematic going on. It goes back to the persuasion formula we talked about at the beginning of the chapter. Does the prospect really not have the need, and you just did a poor job on prospecting and discovery? Then you probably shouldn’t be selling to him. Or does he actually have the need but is not grasping the potential value? Or does he not believe that his organization would capture it? You need to figure out the issue.
On the first point—validating actual need—this is why understanding objective external signifiers of demand, and making sure to do good discovery, is key. Because if those signifiers of need are absent, you wouldn’t want to be pitching that prospect anyway. But if they’re present, it puts you in a much better position to get to the bottom of things.
Despite all your best intentions and efforts, sometimes through crossed wires you can get to the far side of a pitch and discover something that contradicts those previous signals of need. So your first job is to re-verify that need.
exampleFor Immediately, this might be something like, “I’m confused. Based on our discussion at the beginning of this call and my research on LinkedIn, your company has fifty outside sales reps. And from what we talked about earlier, your sales management struggles with getting those reps to log meetings, emails, and contact information in the CRM because they’re mobile all day long. Is this not the case?”
Note that the sentence includes all of the need signifiers, so you are sure that they have an opportunity to address where the shortfall is. Is it with the number of reps? Are they not actually outside sales reps? Or are they actually quite good about logging activity in the CRM? What are you missing? Again, this is not about calling someone out as a fibber, but instead about getting clarity of information, so do not be squeamish. If in response to this inquiry, your prospect surfaces a piece of information that makes it clear that, after all, they don’t have the need for your product, then next time you need to be better at discovery! This would have to be something specific that contradicts the prior indicators of need, though, like, “Oh, well, we do have fifty reps, but only five are actually outside sales reps.” That would be a specific data point, and you should take it seriously. However, if the response is squishy, like, “Well, I just don’t think we need it,” that’s code for something else, and you need to get to the bottom of it.
It can be harder to contend with a prospect who continues to claim that he doesn’t have the need after all, even though you know that he does (either from external information, things that he or his colleagues have already said, or just a general squishiness in his response to your inquiries). In that event, it’s likely that he’s using this generic objection as a cover for the real objection (whether budget, authority, priority, or something else). You want to get clarity on that by helping him understand that he can be straight with you. This can be delicate, because you don’t want him to feel that you’re calling him out, so frame it in a way that makes it seem like perhaps he was just sparing your feelings before. You can do that by adding something to the above question, like, “Well, from everything I can see, it appears to me that your organization definitely has the need for this, but perhaps there is something else blocking us from progressing that we haven’t discussed yet? You can be straight with me, I can take it!”
The goal here is to get down to the actual reason, so you can handle that objection on its merits. You’re trying to get the prospect to surface a more specific issue, like, “I’m concerned that I won’t have time to use the product” or, “I don’t think it will be as useful as ____” or something like that—something that is specific and can be addressed on its own.
Often when prospects articulate that they “don’t see the need” or “don’t think it’s a fit,” they’re actually making this objection, in disguise. The prospect validates that she does indeed have the need in question but articulates to you that she is unwilling to make a change to her way of doing things. This is actually a much better place to be than her saying, “We don’t have the need,” because you have gained agreement that she does indeed have the need. Now you’re just having a discussion about why she should grasp the opportunity to adopt a new way of attacking this need.
The best way to approach these objections is to take the hidden cost of continuing to do things business as usual, whether true cost or opportunity cost, and make it visible. You may recognize some of this language from the proof of a better solution section. That’s no coincidence—this is the point at which you should bring out your quantitative and qualitative proof of a better solution. Do the actual math for the prospect on what she’d be missing out on.
exampleIf we were Textio, the makers of job-posting text-optimization software, and we were selling to someone who wasn’t sure if she wanted to Textio-optimize her job postings, we would compare the projected outcomes for the following 12 months using her status quo with what it would look like with our approach. In this case, we would go back to those key metrics that we know our prospect cares about: click-through rates for candidates that see postings on job boards and our career site, applicant-to-screen ratios, and such. If we knew that the prospect spent ~$100K a year on job postings on Monster and sponsored clicks on Indeed, and we have shown that we can reduce posting spend by 15–40%, we could say, “By continuing your current approach, you’re wasting fifteen to forty thousand dollars a year. That’s half a Recruiting Coordinator salary. Saving that from your budget would make you a hero to your CEO and your VP of Engineering.” Note that you’re not just making it clear to the decision-maker that this decision is something that impacts her, you’re bringing in her internal stakeholders too—who would likely be evaluating this decision with a more dollars-and-cents mindset. That hint of a stick, to go along with lots of carrots, can sometimes help focus minds.
This is a great time to flip back to the materials (like your slides you put together to crystallize your proof points. Objection handling is another reason it’s important to have sales materials other than just a demo.
exampleWe had some slides from TalentBin’s sales deck that demonstrated the time savings associated with adopting a talent search and automation solution. In this case, we made it simple and said, “TalentBin will save you one thousand dollars of recruiter time per week,” with the model to back it up. If we ran into fear-of-change objections, we could use the discovery information we’d gathered (how many recruiters the prospect had in house) to crystallize that opportunity cost. If the company had ten recruiters, we’d make it clear that they’d be wasting ~$10K of recruiter time every week.
Source: TalentBin
Source: TalentBin
Beyond the pure quantitative arguments, you will use qualitative approaches as well. You can use all those arguments about how your solution is the emerging industry standard, along with other types of fear of missing out arguments—including which of the prospect’s competitors are likely using the solution. (It’s kind of like a “No one got fired for buying IBM” argument, but more like, “People who bought IBM early looked brilliant!”) These approaches are useful in dealing with other objections as well. Frame the purchase as inevitable and the next logical thing—and subtly suggest that the prospect will be kicking himself in a year when all his colleagues and competitors have implemented these sorts of solutions and he looks like a caveman. In fact, this is an opportunity for him to look advanced, and to advance his career!
Lastly, there’s the fear-of-change aspect. Your prospect believes that she has the problem, and she believes that your solution is the right one to address it—that it’s quantitatively and qualitatively better than what she has in place. But she’s afraid that it won’t actually end up that way for some unknown reason—a generic boogeyman. This goes back to our persuasion formula—in this case, the belief term is where we need help. The best way to address this is with your arguments around “How we will make this easy for you,” as that’s often where the concern flows from. Existing proofs of success, using real customer success stories, may also help. But mainly this is a nonspecific concern—while this all sounds great, and makes sense in theory, the prospect simply isn’t sure it will come to pass in practice. And the best way to handle that is to say, “Here are all the resources we have in place to ensure that you capture the value we both agree is on the table for you. We will make you successful.”
This is a variant of, “We’re happy with how we do it now,” but a slightly better version. The prospect agrees that his organization has the need, that the solution addresses it better than what they have in place right now, and that they will get value out of progressing with the purchase. And given that he hasn’t just jumped to the king of objections—no budget—it would seem that he knows they can pay for it. The sticky part is that they have other things that are higher priority right now. This objection may also appear as its cousin, “The timing is bad.”
The reality is that your prospect always has a bunch of competing priorities, including day-to-day execution of his role, so the key to addressing this objection is to reduce the perception that implementing your solution will be a lot of work. The implication here is that he only has so much time to roll out a new solution and that that time is already spoken for. Once again, a great way to address this is with your arguments around how easy you will make it. Make it clear that all he has to do is say yes, and poof, it will be done without any more involvement from him, short of providing authority and names for users.
example“The timing is bad because I am in the middle of rolling out a new applicant tracking system” could be addressed by a Textio salesperson with, “That’s actually a great time to start using Textio, because you’re already going to be changing business process around how your job postings are written and deployed. It’s a great time to cement new, better habits. And the good news is, we have six customer success specialists on staff who can run daily webinars for your team on how to get the best use out of Textio, and ensure that all your hiring managers have attended and passed out of the training. This is fantastic, because as you roll out your new ATS, you’ll see even better ROI from it by mixing the two solutions.”
Another approach is to help characterize why working on your solution should actually be a higher priority, even assuming scarce time resources. In this course of argument, you’ll now need to do some more discovery around what other programs they are considering implementing. For example, you’ve just discovered a new type of competition, which isn’t pure competition—it’s just something else competing for the headspace and time of your prospect. This can be dicey if the prospect has already committed to that course of action (commitment bias is a two-edged sword!). But you can certainly sniff out what those alternative programs are, and their perceived ROI, to position your solution as a higher-priority project—again, using numerical and qualitative arguments that compare the opportunity cost of not adopting your solution to the opportunity cost of not adopting that other product. This is where being a student of your market is important, because you’ll have to make the other solution’s ROI argument for it (in a way where your solution wins!) in a credible way. But it certainly can be done, because often prospects haven’t been super rigorous in their analysis of whether to spend their scarce time and budgetary resources on this project versus that. So now you get to help them do that, with a preference for your solution!
These have been examples of how to actually change minds. But you can use sleight of hand without challenging the underlying objection—“This is not a priority right now” or, “The timing is off”—and still get the deal done. You can capitalize on the fact that you have the prospect’s attention and buy-in right now and that they agree that this is a project that is worthwhile. When will be the right time? In a couple weeks? In a month? In that case, let’s just get this deal done now and make sure that it gets on the prospect’s dance card for when he does have time. Why would he jump at doing that now? Well, you can take a couple of approaches.
exampleYou can create a pricing inducement, like “If you buy now, I can give you fourteen months of service for the cost of twelve” or, “It’s likely our pricing will go up in the new year.” You could use both of those together. Or you could try, “You can buy now, and I’ll start the contract in a month.” These various approaches can be especially helpful at the end of the year, or of an organization’s fiscal year, when they are making budget allocation decisions for the year ahead, even if they don’t intend to take the associated actions for a couple months.
The upshot on this bucket of objections is this: if you’ve got the momentum of a prospect agreeing that your solution should be implemented, it’s just a question of when—take appropriate actions to make that “When?” be now.
An objection around price is actually a great place to be—it would appear that the prospect is convinced and wants to do this. Now you’re just haggling over the price.
importantPricing objections can mean a couple different things, and it’s important to precisely nail down what the prospect is actually objecting to. Sometimes vague price objections amount to posturing for a discount. In that case, you need to just get down to pricing negotiation rather than a deeper conversation around value provided compared to price. We’ll talk about pricing negotiation in a section a bit further on, but the important thing here is to figure out which conversation you’re having: one about value, or one that’s just about discounting.
A great way to do that is to specifically ask, using language like, “I’m happy to talk about the value that the product provides, and we believe that our pricing is a fair split of the value created. But could you help me understand what you think would be a fair price?” or, “Are we far apart here? How far would you say?” If they come back with something that is, say, 10% below the price you quoted, this is clearly just a discounting conversation, and you don’t need to make it any more complicated than that. We’ll talk about how to handle that when we get to negotiation.
But if the response that comes back is something more like, “Well, I couldn’t pay more than [50% of your quoted price] for this,” then you’re not really talking discounts. You’re talking about your prospect’s understanding of the potential value your offering provides. The best way to approach that is to walk her through the way the offering will create value, piece by piece, along with the projected ROI associated with it, or the relevant market comparables. Essentially, you’re going to be justifying the decisions that you made when concocting your pricing, something we touched on in Pricing.
exampleIn the case of something like HIRABL, the response might be, “Based on your submission volume and recruiter counts, we quoted you a price of forty thousand for the year. From the hundreds of customers we’ve serviced, and hundreds of thousands of candidate submissions we’ve tracked, we know that over the ensuing twelve months, we will most likely catch twenty missed fees for your organization—not to mention the ones that we will identify from the last eighteen months of submission data. And given that you make an average fee of thirty thousand dollars, we anticipate that HIRABL will drive an incremental six hundred thousand dollars of revenue to your organization that you would otherwise miss out on. Given that, we feel that forty thousand is a very fair price and will be nearly paid for by your first collected fee. Can you help me understand where my analysis is falling down?”
exampleOr in the case where your pricing is based on comps, like TalentBin pricing just below LinkedIn Recruiter, it might be something like, “Well, currently you pay nine thousand dollars per year for a seat of LinkedIn Recruiter for each of your technical recruiters. TalentBin, meanwhile, only costs seven thousand per year per seat. Not only does TalentBin have 3–10x the number of potential candidates for certain technical skill profiles in the geographies you recruit for, but we also provide personal email addresses for candidates—something that can double or triple response rates to recruiting outreach. Moreover, we don’t cap your outreach activities. Whereas each of those LinkedIn Recruiter seats only gets one hundred fifty InMails a month, you can send as many emails as you’d like through TalentBin. And those emails are open- and click-tracked, unlike LinkedIn InMails. Lastly, TalentBin offers automation functionality, like drip-marketing campaigns, that not only raise response rates, but save your recruiters tons of time for sourcing. Given all that, can you help me understand how this isn’t a fair price for the value TalentBin will offer your technical recruiters?”
In both of these cases, what you’re doing is laying out the ROI argument and providing an opportunity for the prospect to object to something in the analysis. If there isn’t a distinct justification for her price/value objection, then you’ll quickly find yourself converging back on a different objection (likely the true objection)—maybe she only has ~$5K in budget, which is why she was saying she would only pay ~$5K. Or you’ll find yourself having a discounting conversation, but closer to your proposed pricing.
However, if there is a legitimate rationale for the objection, this can also be an opportunity to understand why your pricing model may actually not be set up in a way that aligns with the value that is being provided to the user. Take the HIRABL example. Perhaps the prospect would point out that her average fees are actually more like ~$15K (instead of the ~$30K you cited) and could prove that to you. Well, if that is indeed true, and your pricing targets a 15x ROI, then she might have a point, and you might consider making an exception here. Moreover, you might consider modifying your pricing model to accommodate this sort of thing if you think it’s going to be a more common case.
Another legitimate rationale might be that the prospect only intends to use a portion of your solution’s functionality.
exampleTake TalentBin’s pricing argument above. Imagine a situation where the customer already has a marketing automation solution like Marketo or Outreach.io that they intend to use for recruiting purposes, using TalentBin’s profile and email addresses simply as leads to import into that system. All of a sudden the bundle that is TalentBin’s search, qualification, contact information, and recruitment marketing automation becomes less valuable to them, because they’ve already got the automation part handled and paid for. Again, in a case like this, you might want to consider some sort of exception, and if the exception ends up being common, this could be an opportunity to segment your solution.
Lastly, you might encounter a situation where a prospect’s best alternative is substantially different than most of your prospects’. They may already be addressing the problem your product solves, but with a bailing wire and duct tape solution—still, a solution nonetheless.
exampleTake HIRABL again. The prospect might already be doing backdoor reference checking, but doing so in a manual fashion, using existing staff. Perhaps twice a year, they have some of their clerical staff take all the submissions from the last six months, sort them by the most valuable fees (perhaps cutting off those below ~$10K in value), and then manually go through LinkedIn profiles to see if those candidates ended up at places they were submitted by the recruiting agency. In this case, the marginal value that HIRABL provides isn’t the same as what it provides to a prospect who isn’t doing any of this at all. Rather, HIRABL’s ROI argument here might be that their solution does all of this automatically, so those clerical workers who take a whole week to do this manually, at a cost of ~$20K in salary expense, could be redirected to more valuable activities—like recruiting and business development activities. Or that now they can track all their submittals, not just those above ~$10K. Or that rather than doing this twice a year, monitoring happens on a continual basis, which aids in collections efforts. With all that said, it is certainly the case that HIRABL would bring less value to this prospect than to the same prospect with no backdoor hire checks in place at all. So HIRABL might consider making an exception case here.
importantIn general, these deeper discussions around price and value (assuming they are about that, and not discounting conversations in disguise) are a great opportunity to learn what parts of your product are valuable for what customers. When you are early-stage, I suggest getting a deal done rather than drawing a fixed line in the sand. As long as the prospect meets your ideal customer profile, and will actually get value from the solution, usually it’s better to have them onboard, even if it’s at half of your list price.
If you do engage in this sort of pricing modification (I don’t want to call it discounting per se, because it’s really a reimagining of your pricing model to accommodate a previously unaddressed scenario), you need to clearly document the rationale, ideally in the contract, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, when the renewal comes around, and the scenario has changed (for example, in HIRABL’s case, the customer’s average fee is now ~$25K, not ~$15K), you have it documented and can remove that concession. Secondly, you don’t want this pricing concession to be construed by a third party as standard. We wouldn’t want someone paying ~$5K for a “no marketing automation” seat of TalentBin to tell his buddy who doesn’t have a marketing automation solution in-house that the product costs ~$5K a seat—because that buddy is more than likely going to want to use the TalentBin recruitment marketing automation.
cautionThis does not mean that you should be selling to folks who won’t get value out of your solution just because it’s cheap. If someone is saying he won’t pay more than X because of the low amount of value the tool would provide him, and he’s right (that the solution actually doesn’t provide a lot of value), then you need to pass on the conversation. Moreover, it’s better to have learned this earlier in your sales cycle during discovery and qualification. Don’t sell to people who will get minimal value. They will only use up your customer success resources, churn out, and generally fail to provide you enough revenue to surmount their cost. It’s also a distraction. Avoid it.
Not having budget is often a failure of imagination on the part of the prospect, and it’s just a question of you helping them find that budget (unless it’s being used as a red herring for another objection, in which case you still need to get to the real issue). In Discovery, we talked about qualification using frameworks like BANT and ANUM (where B is budget and M is money), and how the challenge with new-technology sales is that there often isn’t an already-existing budget that addresses the solution you’re selling. This challenge will also show up in closing conversations as an objection to be handled.
In discovery and qualification, did you validate that the organization does actually purchase tools for solving business pains, and that the decision-maker that you’re working with has done this before, or knows that it can be done? If no, that was a big boo-boo back then, because they really may have no budget, in the sense that they don’t have a process by which to spend money on products to help their business. Yikes. So we’re not going to address that as an objection, as it is really a disqualifier—if the organization doesn’t have a notion of spending money to make money, well, we’re not in the business of teaching market capitalism, per se.
If yes, then great. Now you just need to make it clear that this solution is worth spending money on in much the same way that the organization has done before. A great first step there is to sort out what the current budget is for solving the problem you address, and if it is recurring in nature or already fully committed. While there may not be budget currently available and earmarked for your exact solution, there could well be budget dedicated to addressing the problem.
exampleIn the case of TalentBin, prospects typically spent a goodly amount of budget to solve the problem of needing to hire engineers to build their product. Purchasing our product was a question of digging into that budget to see what was already spent and what could be shifted. One of the ways that organizations hire software engineers is to spend money on recruiting agencies that typically charge 20–30% of a first year’s salary as their fee. Well, when an organization was budgeting for its year, they may have budgeted for one or two fees per quarter. Presto! We found our budget. Another way to do budgetary horse trading like this is to sort out if there is any existing source of budget that is coming up for renewal soon. If there were ten seats of LinkedIn Recruiter coming up for renewal, then we could propose that three seats’ worth of that budget be allocated to this new, better solution and bridge the time gap with free months.
A more complicated version of this fiscal maneuvering is when budget is transferred from one substantially separate bucket into another, like from payroll expense to tooling.
exampleImagine you’re selling support-ticketing software like Zendesk. The prospect’s current means of addressing inbound support ticketing is a shared email inbox with very little automation, business rules, or templating support. The company’s support organization is growing to accommodate a growing customer base, at a ratio of, say, one new support agent per 200 customers added. In that environment, the adoption of a mature support system like Zendesk, with all of its automation functionality, could raise that ratio to something more like one support agent per 300 customers added. That means that if the organization’s plan is to add 1K customers in the coming year, the adoption of something like Zendesk would mean hiring three new agents in the coming year, versus five under the current staffing plan. Assuming CSRs cost ~$50K a year, fully loaded, we’re talking a cost reduction of ~$100K—money that was already allocated for the year when the support organization signed up to support 1K new customers. Poof! There’s our budget.
Of course, this sort of cross-bucket budgetary horse trading often involves more than just the budget holder you’ve been engaging, like the head of support, head of recruiting, or what have you. It may require looping in a finance staffer like a controller or CFO, or another CXO type. And while that’s another moving part, it’s actually a good thing, in that those staff are more used to looking at the big picture.
Beyond budgetary transfers, there’s also discretionary budget, and one-off budgetary justification. While the individual you’re interacting with—the VP of Recruiting, VP of Customer Success, VP of Engineering, and so on—may have already exhausted her allocated budget, that doesn’t mean that she, or especially the CFO, doesn’t have a hidden kitty of money. You just have to make sure to ask for it. And moreover, if your decision-maker hasn’t considered this, you need to work with her to go together to the CFO, or other budgetary controller, to see what may be squirreled away. This is where having a solid ROI argument is key—because since this discretionary budget is being held aside for exactly this sort of thing, but also for other unexpected opportunities, you’re essentially competing with those potential projects. So you need to bring your A game.
Typically these pools of budget are specifically earmarked for experiments, and whoever disburses the money will be looking at your solution as exactly that. So just be aware that it’ll probably be a purchase at the small end of what you do—whether a single seat, a constrained time period, or what have you—and you’ll have to work to make sure it sticks. This is the sort of budget that land and expand solutions are often depending on. This doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to try to access discretionary budget if you can, it just means that you need to weigh that reality compared to your other options (for example, financing, pricing inducements, and so forth).
The bigger version of this approach is a one-off budgetary justification. In other words, don’t go after discretionary budget that already was sitting there—create your own new bucket of discretionary budget. Doing this usually means working with your prospect to advance a one-off justification to the part of the organization that makes these decisions—again, usually finance. While this adds complexity, it can be a fantastic opportunity to grow the deal. First, your decision-maker is now going to be having a strategic discussion with the CFO, COO, or what have you to address a deeper question in their organization. It’s less a case of, “Are we going to buy a single seat of TalentBin” and more a question of, “Should we reduce our reliance on recruiting agencies, in general?” And if the ROI justifications to embrace this change at an organizational level exist, then this is exactly what the CFO and COO are there to do: make capital-returning judgments. Moreover, given the time cost associated with meetings, and the collaborative partnering between you and the decision-maker, you have an opportunity to enlarge the deal size—the difference between ~$40K of incremental spend versus ~$20K of incremental spend may not be a meaningful one.
Outside of budgetary horse trading, discretionary spend, and off-cycle budget justification, there are a number of clever moves that can be made to paper over a lack of budget. If it’s a case of timing before the next budget cycle, then you can often place a marker on that budget in the future by getting the deal done now and simply starting it later, or providing free months to bridge the gap. This is akin to the timing objection above, but this is the budgetary version thereof.
If the organization is simply cash poor (or thinks it is), then you can potentially help with financing. This isn’t to say that your organization is going to offer financing to your customer—but through pricing inducements, you can help them think about existing financing instruments they could potentially access. If you traditionally charge ~$9K up front for a seat of your solution for a 12-month contract, but the customer states they don’t have the budget to swing that, you can offer monthly pricing of ~$999 for a 12-month contract. Monthly payments are undesirable to you, in that they can become a collections issue, and typically you would love to have that cash in hand to cover payroll.
However, offering this option can help get a deal done in a couple of ways. Over the course of a year, that would amount to ~$12K, 33% more than the organization would otherwise pay. Once the opportunity cost of taking that approach becomes clear, the organization can figure out how to rustle up that ~$9K and save itself ~$3K over 12 months.
A hybrid approach is to start with monthly payments (at the rate that is higher than the up-front price), but offer the customer the ability to pre-pay the rest of their tab at any given point of time. This can work particularly well when your solution drives a cash-centric ROI.
exampleIn addition to finding missed fees, HIRABL’s solutions help staffing agencies sniff out new business opportunities when candidates they’ve previously placed moved to new organizations, or hiring managers they currently work with move to new organizations. All of those things represent new revenue for a staffing agency using HIRABL. The challenge can be that that ~$30K missed fee or fee from a new client might not show up for a month or two after the organization starts using HIRABL. No problem! What would have been a ~$20K license for 20 recruiters for the year can be broken down to ~$2.2K a month. And then when that first ~$30K missed fee comes in, the client can decide to buy out the rest of that contract and save himself the 33% on whatever remains on the term. Win, win!
cautionThis is one that will show up frequently, and you need to be careful. The concept of a trial is not a bad one. In fact, a demo that is well tailored to the prospect, ideally including his organization’s data, is pretty darn close to a trial. And the notion of a customer reference is a good one too; it is an example of a powerful piece of proof data. But you need to use caution here for two reasons: One, the prospect may be using this as a way to avoid saying no or surfacing the actual underlying objection, and simply putting off a decision. And two, you don’t want to lose control of the deal or add unnecessary time and complication to it. When someone asks for a trial, and you just flip him a set of credentials with no structure, you’re simply asking for him to come back at the end of the week and say, “Wow, yeah, I didn’t get to this. Can I have another week?” Make sure this doesn’t happen to you, as it wastes your time, hurts deal momentum, and plants the seed in the user’s head that he may not end up using the product after he buys it (he isn’t using it right now, right?).
When the prospect says, “I need a trial,” really what she is saying is, “I’m not sure I believe this, and I need more proof points, ideally ones that I can hold in my hand/see in my browser.” Her proposed solution to that is a trial (vague, abstract, but something she feels would help achieve this goal of seeing it with her own eyes). You can often address this very easily by asking what she would want to see to help address her concern.
example“I’m happy to help you get more comfortable with the value the solution provides. What sort of further proof would you be looking for?”
You will be amazed how many times this turns out to be something as simple as, “Well, I’d like to see some proof of prior success.” That can take the form of marketing collateral focused on qualitative and quantitative proof of a better solution, like customer success stories, ROI studies, or customer references. Conveniently, you should already have a bunch of this documentation in hand—in your deck appendix, for instance. In fact, she may have already seen it and now just needs to be reminded. So great! Use that as your means by which to surmount this issue without adding more time and complication to the deal.
But if instead the prospect is eager to see what the tooling looks like in her own hands or the hands of her team, and won’t be satisfied with collateral, that’s fine as well. When a decision-maker wants to have the team look at something, often they’ll use the term trial when what they really want is another demo for the larger group—in which case, great! That will be a good opportunity for you to do value selling in a presentation and demo to this new group of stakeholders. Offer to do just that:
example“Showing this to your team sounds like a great idea! I would love to give them a guided tour, and let them get their hands dirty with my help.”
If the goal is further understanding of how the UI works, or the usability of certain features, you can achieve that with a guided walk-through or ride-along. Schedule another meeting specifically to walk through all the pieces of the product that the prospect might want to investigate, and let her control the mouse and screen so she can see how things work and satisfy her curiosity.
exampleAt TalentBin our sales reps would often schedule a follow-up hour after the initial demo to do just this, and let the prospect click around and make sure that the demo she saw wasn’t smoke and mirrors—and that when she controlled the mouse, the profile volume and quality was just the same.
Of course, you’re there the whole time, to support prospects if they get sidetracked, add commentary about the value of the various features they’re using, and, most importantly, make sure the product actually gets used.
cautionIf your product is not set up for freemium usage, or unattended trial, just handing users the keys to the car and assuming they’re going to know how to use it as well as you or one of your customer success staff, is a terrible idea. They’re not going to be experiencing the product the way they would after they’ve been fully trained and gone through an implementation process. Now, if your product management and engineering staff has invested in features that help users get to value quickly, by all means, you should leverage that (and you probably already are for the purposes of lead generation). But if that investment hasn’t taken place, do not assume that your prospects will just magically get it if you let them have an unattended trial. Rather, if they actually end up using their trials (a big if), they will likely run into small issues here and there that stop them in their tracks and lead them to blame the tool. And that’s hard on your deal.
While the grand majority of trial requests can be handled in the ways outlined above, more mature buyers with better process may seek to do a formal pilot—a time-bounded experiment where they go through certain key actions in the product to see examples of the promised ROI.
exampleWith something like Textio, prospective buyers might want to optimize a single job posting, and set it live on Monster to see how it performs compared to their existing postings. Or with TalentBin, they might use the tool for a week to execute outreach to candidates and gauge responsiveness.
importantIn all of these cases, frame the pilot in a way that makes it clear how success will be defined, and for prospective buyers to be held accountable for participating in training sessions and check-in meetings and acting on defined activities, which they know will be instrumented and reportable. To the extent that you can remove the risk of non-execution on their part, you should seek to do so, because the biggest issue in trials is always non-usage.
As you can see, all of sudden it becomes clear that you only want to be doing this for the largest deals, where there is a lot of revenue opportunity. It can be worth it, but you need to be realistic about the associated time costs (you could be doing demos for new, potential slam-dunk prospects who don’t need a structured pilot to prove things out). Include that time cost in calculating whether you want to offer a structured pilot.
The alternative is not an unstructured pilot, as that will simply blow up your deal. So for small customers who may not be worth the time associated with a structured trial, you can draw the line in the sand and say:
example“We don’t do this because people don’t use it and don’t have success, and that’s not fair to them, nor to me. I am committed to helping you get comfortable with this solution ahead of purchase, so we can do an hour-long guided session where you have control. But I can’t do an unguided trial.”
If this comes up enough, you can decide to prioritize product and engineering resources to make unstructured pilots and self-serve usage an easier process. Raised close rates and faster deal times may justify the investment, much the same way you can build in features that make demos better and more tailored to prospects. But just tossing the keys to a prospect is usually a losing proposition.
We’ve looked at the major buckets of objections that show up regularly, regardless of the specifics of your solution. But that doesn’t mean those are the only ones you’ll run into. Undoubtedly, a number of objections that are specific to your market and your solution will pop up again and again. This is to be expected, and like the generic objections above, should be viewed as a positive—it’s a signal of an engaged prospect who’s actually thinking about how your solution could potentially impact her business. So you should be ready to knock those objections out of the park.
Because I don’t know what those specific objections will be for your solution, I’ll just talk to a generic framework for handling them, and then you can apply it as appropriate. Solution-specific objections will usually involve questions about whether this is actually a better way to solve the problem your solution addresses. So the best way to tackle those is using the same approach you did in your core narrative: with quantitative and qualitative proof—ideally documented in the form of a slide!
exampleSay that you’re HIRABL, selling software to help catch missed contingency recruiting fees. A prospect might believe everything you’ve discussed, but might be concerned that even if you surface these backdoor hires to them, they won’t be able to collect on the fees that they’re owed. So how would you address this objection? Well, you might point out your clients’ aggregate collection rate to give them comfort. Or you might talk about how catching backdoor hires quickly, within a few weeks of the hire, makes collection many times more likely to happen because it’s still in the “Whoops, that was an accident!” phase. Or you might talk about how your customer success staff has all sorts of tools to help broach those topics with clients, so the prospect need not worry about angering them. Or you might do a combination of all of the above!
As touched on in the section on sales decks, I recommend that if you hear an objection a couple of times, you might as well build a slide to address it and put it in the appendix of your deck. This has the benefit of making you look like you’re super prepared and expert in all things regarding your solution. It also acts as a handy little script so you can nail all the points you want to make when handling that objection. Beyond this, you should also just keep a running list of objections in a living document, like a Google Doc, so that you can refer to them as necessary. Moreover, when you start hiring reps to help you scale your efforts, all of those objections, and their associated responses, will already be ready for them!
If an objection gets to the point where it shows up very frequently, you can make the call to actually include it in the main part of your pitch and narrative. This can be a two-edged sword, because you’re now proactively bringing up a potential concern that the prospect may not have thought of on her own. But if it’s such a common objection, it’s often better to just bring it up, and demolish it, proactively. Otherwise, the prospect may not think of it until later, when you’re not present, and have to reason through it on her own without your help.
exampleWith TalentBin, this might have been something like “Now, I know what you’re thinking. ‘Do candidates get weirded out by the fact that you know everything about their activity on GitHub, Stack Overflow, Twitter, Meetup, and so on?’ It turns out, they’re pretty used to it, since they know that this information is readily available on the web. And moreover, they view it as a positive, because it demonstrates that you’ve gone the distance in actually qualifying them for this potential role, as compared to many recruiters who just spray and pray job opportunities willy-nilly. So yeah, they prefer this approach! In fact, you can see how preferable it is by the 3x email response rates recruiters get with TalentBin, versus sending generic LinkedIn InMails, based on a study our customer success team ran.”
Competitive objections can be a really helpful way of proactively framing the conversation around other players in your market. While bringing up competition proactively can be problematic, if the prospect brings it up, you should jump all over it. First, if you already know, based on your discovery questions, that the prospect has a competitor in place, or is considering one, you can take the initiative to address it. Or, if that didn’t arise in discovery, but a question asked later in the pitch indicates that he is thinking about competition, you can run with it.
importantWith competitive objections, be sure to not just address the one-off objection—which might show up in the form of a single feature-comparison question—but rather to frame the competitive conversation in the context of your existing messaging. That way, if the prospect ends up interacting with the competition again before you close the deal, you’ve planted seeds of how to think about the holistic comparisons between the two solutions.
exampleTake TalentBin again. Occasionally we would get asked about code scoring for the recruiting profiles our talent search engine built, because one of our competitors, Gild, had long ago acquired a small code-analysis project. They ostensibly used the technology to make judgments about the quality of a given engineering candidate based on the code she had published on GitHub. When given an opening, rather than just addressing that one point, we would use it as an opportunity to frame the whole conversation about competition, specifically around how our solution was vastly superior when properly evaluated along all relevant vectors (not just this one particular one).
For example, we might say something like “Well, that’s a great question! We actually use a number of data signals in helping to understand what a given candidate is into, professionally, and we can talk more about that in a second. But importantly, when we think about talent search engines, it’s important to think about all parts of the talent search process: search and discovery, qualification information, contact information availability, and then outreach and pipeline management functionality and automation. Your question touches on data that can be used for both search and recall, and also qualification of particular candidates. On that front, TalentBin consumes candidate data from the broadest set of sources available—not just places where code is published, like GitHub, but dozens of other sites like Meetup, where folks demonstrate their interest in various software engineering technologies. We look at candidates’ online activity with the widest possible lens to make sure you can see all the engineers who have a skill you’re looking for. Isn’t that great?”
So we would take the one-off question, “Do you score code?” and address the question that’s under that question: “Can you help me understand how you use data to help me hire software engineers, and how does your approach compare to this other approach over here?” This strategy works for most objections. As they talk about in press training, “Answer the question you wanted them to ask.”
From a materials standpoint, like with other solution-specific objections, it’s good to have a slide, or potential slides, to support this conversation. To start, you could have a slide that presents the competitive framework that’s pertinent to your solution and the ways your solution wins out in those buckets. And assuming you have multiple competitors, you could have one of these competitive roll-up slides for each. (You wouldn’t want to feature multiple competitors on one slide. There’s no need to present to a prospect the other solutions she might want to research.) Later, a more advanced version of this is to have competitive mini decks for each competitor of merit, including a handful of slides that describe how your solution and the competitor stack up in each bucket of your messaging framework. But that’s pretty advanced. To start, a single slide per competitor of merit is good.
Regardless of the type of objection, whether it’s one of the more generic ones or one that is solution-specific, the pattern of handling them remains the same. You want to catch the objection; turn it to the question under the question; respond to the objection with quantitative and qualitative arguments that prove the case, supported by visual and textual sales materials; validate understanding of these arguments (“Does that answer your question? Does that make sense?”); and then pick up where you were before that objection. As you drive to a close, keep uncovering any further objections with questions like, “Do you have other questions, or are you satisfied that this would be a fit for you?” As you can see, this is a loop, where you handle an objection and then return to your close to handle the next objection, repeating until there are no more objections left (or the prospect has made it to the other side of the persuasion threshold, and they’re willing to take the leap even with other objections outstanding).
Depending on the cost and complexity of your solution, your prospects probably won’t be purchasing directly from you at the point of demo, or immediately thereafter. There will likely be some sort of follow-up required. In the best-case scenario, that might be sending the prospect a contract that she can e-sign immediately. Fantastic! It might be sending a proposal with pricing options as discussed in your demo. It might be the delivery of some key information to help with the decision-making process and to address objections that arose in the demo, like ROI proofs, and so on. Or it might be a further demo or meeting with another stakeholder whose agreement is required to progress to a sale. There are many permutations.
However, regardless of which variety of follow-up item is required, the approach to executing them all is largely the same. Firstly, you must directly and concretely state what the next action is. Remember our discussion above about contracting for each next step? This is where it becomes very important to guard against spending your time on useless opportunities and to hold your prospect accountable with those micro-contracts. Don’t resort to, “Well, I’ll send you some information. Let me know what you think!” Instead, you should concretely articulate the state of the deal, what you will do, and what the prospect will do in return.
example“Based on our agreement that this solution makes sense for your organization, and your desire to spend budget on it, after we get off this call, I am going to send you a contract for one seat using our e-sign system, and you will be able to execute that today. Is that correct?” Or, “You would like to purchase three seats of our software, provided I supply you with the ROI study that we discussed in our call. I will provide that after I get off the phone, and then we will reconvene to discuss your analysis of that ROI study and whether it has resolved your concerns.” And so forth.