The 5 Best Objection Handling Strategies
Objection handling is one of the most important skills to master if you want to be successful in tech sales.
Sometimes you’ll get lucky and you’ll find a prospect who says “yes” the first time you ask them for the sale.
But most of the time you’ll have to battle through hearing “no” multiple times before you finally get them to say “yes.” ✅
Like my old boss used to say,
“Sales isn’t about finding the yes’s. It’s about turning the no’s into yes’s.”
That ability to turn a “no” into a “yes” is something you can learn, but first, you need to know the right strategies.
Based on our own selling experience and the general consensus of all the salespeople on the internet, these are the five best objection handling strategies:
- 7-step objection handling technique from Chris Orlob at Gong
- LAER: The Bonding Process® from Carew International
- “Deflecting and Looping” from Jordan Belfort
- LAARC framework from Sam Aparicio at Ring.io
- 5-step objection handling method from Mike Brooks at NASP
7-step objection handling technique from Chris Orlob at Gong
We’re huge fans of Gong because they use data to validate their sales insights.
In this particular post, Chris Orlob writes,
“What makes this (one of) the BEST posts on objection handling you’ll read this year? It’s the only one that involves hard data. We studied 67,149 sales meetings from our database of five million recorded calls.”
Orlob then outlines a brilliant objection handling technique in 7 steps:
- Pause, speak with calm authority
- Start with a question
- Validate before objection handling
- Isolate the sales objection
- Get permission to address the objection
- Handle the sales objection with a “reframe”
- Finish handling an objection with an unbiased resolution
Click here to read the original post on the Gong website.
LAER: The Bonding Process® from Carew International
We originally found the LAER process when reading this post from Leslie Ye at HubSpot.
We honestly don’t know much about Carew International, but hey, if HubSpot recommends it, then it must be good.
According to Carew International, LAER has four steps:
- Listen
- Acknowledge
- Explore
- Respond
Overall, this one is pretty simple, but it’s easy to remember and includes the most important fundamentals of a good objection handling strategy.
Click here to read the original post from Carew International.
“Deflecting and Looping” from Jordan Belfort
In Chapter 12 of Way of the Wolf, Belfort introduces “The Art and Science of Looping.”
Here are the basic steps in “looping”:
- First objection
- Deflect: set aside or delay answering the objection
- Loop: return to a part of the presentation and re-sell
- Ask for the sale again
- Another objection
- Deflect and do another loop
In this video, Jordan Belfort explains “looping” like this:
“The objection itself is a smokescreen, so when you get caught up in that back-and-forth, trying to overcome the objection … you break rapport and you blow the sale. So what we do with looping, is instead of trying to overcome an objection, we essentially deflect it, which means we don’t actually have to answer it head-on, especially the first objection … we use it as an opportunity to essentially loop back into the sale … and we re-present more information about our product or our service to increase the prospect’s level of certainty to an even much higher level on the certainty scale … and then we ask for the order again.”
Click here to watch the full video of Belfort explaining the “Art of Looping.”
LAARC framework from Sam Aparicio at Ring.io
LAARC is a widely-used objection handling framework.
We’re not sure who originally invented LAARC, but this post written by Sam Aparicio (CEO & Co-founder of Ring.io) does a good job of explaining it.
LAARC has five steps:
- Listen
- Acknowledge the objection
- Ask a question
- Respond to the objection
- Confirm the objection was handled
Click here to read more about LAARC from Ring.io.
5-step objection handling method from Mike Brooks at NASP
The National Association of Sales Professionals (NASP) is “the largest online community of sales professionals in the world.”
This 5-step method comes from Mike Brooks at NASP:
- Hear them out, don’t interrupt
- Question and isolate the objection
- Answer the objection
- Confirm your answer
- Ask for the deal
Click here to read the original post from NASP.
What do all of these strategies have in common?
You’ve probably started to notice that these strategies are all pretty similar.
If we were to make an ultimate objection handling strategy that combines the above strategies into one, it would look something like this:
- Listen
- Pause
- Acknowledge
- Question
- Isolate
- Respond
- Confirm
- Ask for the sale
Introducing the Objection Pentagon
We took our research on all the different strategies, combined this knowledge with our own selling experience, and then came up with an objection handling strategy we call the “Objection Pentagon.”
Click here to read more about The Objection Pentagon.
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