What Is An Objection In Sales?
A sales objection is any excuse or reason your prospect gives to explain why they don’t want to buy your product or service.
For example, if you ask your prospect for the sale and they say,
“You know, this sounds really great, but we want to take some time to think about it.”
That’s an objection. ❌
Basically, when you ask for the sale, if your prospect says anything other than “here’s my credit card” or “where do I sign?”—then whatever they say instead is an objection.
What are the most common sales objections?
There are hundreds of possible objections. These are the most common:
- “I don’t have time for this.”
- “I’m too busy.”
- “Just send me an email.”
- “We’re going to wait.”
- “Call me back next year.”
- “I need to talk to my team and then get back to you.”
- “I’m not the one who makes these decisions.”
- “We already use one of your competitors.”
- “Your product doesn’t do X.”
- “It’s just not a priority.”
- “It’s too expensive.”
- “It’s not in our budget.”
If you’ve been in sales long enough, you start to hear the same objections over and over again. The exact wording of each objection will be different depending on the situation, but most objections actually fall into one of just four categories.
Most objections fall into one of four categories.
The four categories are:
- Budget
- Authority
- Need
- Timeline
You can use BANT as an easy acronym to remember.
For example, here are the categories for some of the above objections:
- “It’s too expensive” — Budget
- “I need to talk to my team” — Authority
- “It’s just not a priority” — Need
- “We’re going to wait” — Timeline
How do you respond to an objection?
Whatever you do, don’t start your response with the word but.
Also, don’t respond too fast. Make sure you’ve listened to the full objection and then pause before your start to respond.
We recommend following these five steps when responding to objections:
- Listen to the objection
- Make an empathy statement
- Ask a question
- Show value
- Ask for the sale
We call these five steps The Objection Pentagon.
If you want to learn more, there’s a whole section for handling objections included in our Sales Bootcamp.