Many sales reps ask me how to deal with objections when they are prospecting, and they are surprised when I tell them that there are no objections when cold calling. “What do you mean?” they ask. “I get the objections like ‘I'm not interested,’ and ‘I'm too busy,’” and ‘We are all set,’” and many others, they tell me. Those are not objections, I counter; those are simply initial resistance statements. I tell them that they use them all time themselves. Think about walking into a department store and being approached by a sales associate, I say. When they ask how they can help you, don't you reply, “I'm just looking?” That is not an objection; rather, it is simply your immediate reaction to someone trying to sell you something.

It's the same thing with your prospects. They get approached all the time, and they also have developed initial resistance statements to blow sales reps off. The reason these are not objections is because your prospect hasn't been pitched anything yet. Because they don't know what you are selling, nor the details of your offering, they can't be objecting yet. Instead, they are just trying to blow you off. The difference here might seem subtle, but it makes a huge difference in how you handle it.

How you handle an initial resistance statement on a prospecting call (and sometimes even close, for that matter) versus how you handle an objection makes a huge difference in terms of how successful you will be. The crucial difference is this: with an objection, your goal is to isolate it so you understand exactly what it is, then handle it with a proven, scripted approach, then confirm it, and then ask for the sale. With an initial resistance statement, however, your goal is not to try to deal with or overcome it. Instead, your goal is to briefly acknowledge it, and then move past it and back into your qualifying. The key here is that you don't buy into the resistance statement and get stuck in trying to overcome it. Remember, you haven't pitched anything yet, so you do not have anything to defend or overcome.

Once you learn to resist the temptation to overcome resistance statements, your cold calling and qualifying job becomes much easier. Once you form the habit of quickly acknowledging a prospect's initial resistance and then moving back into asking questions to engage and qualify your prospect, that is when you stop struggling and pushing against people. More important, once you get better at bypassing someone's initial resistance statements, that is when you get deeper into conversations with prospects, and that's when you begin doing what 80 percent of your competition doesn't do—discover qualified candidates.

All the initial resistance responses you will read in the following section teach you to do just that—briefly acknowledge and then move past the resistance and back into qualifying a prospect. By using the techniques outlined here, you will be able to move past your prospect's initial resistance, past their automatic defense, and into a real conversation to uncover their true needs. The key is that you must be persistent. You must make several attempts to overcome resistance before you give up.

Now, obviously, you won't always be able to get around a prospect's resistance, and sometimes you may determine that someone really isn't interested or a good fit for you at this time. How will you know when to stop? I say give a prospect three rebuttals, and if they still aren't interested in engaging, then let them go. At least you've seriously tried to get past their initial resistance, and you'll be free to move on to the next prospect without wondering if they were just blowing you off or if they really weren't in the market right now.

As with all the scripts and techniques in this book, these initial resistance statements will take practice to perfect. After you read them, take some time to customize your favorites so they fit what you are selling and your personality. Use them repeatedly until you form the new habit of acknowledging initial resistance and moving back into a qualifying question rather than fighting, challenging, or trying to overcome an objection. If you do this, you will keep control of the sales process, and you will get deeper and deeper into conversations with actual buyers.

Eighteen New Ways to Handle “I'm Not Interested”

Regardless of what kind of prospecting you're doing—whether you are calling back in‐bound leads who have contacted you, or old accounts who haven't purchased in a while, or just straight cold calls—you are still going to get a good dose of the blow‐off resistance statement “I'm not interested.” While I have provided many ways of handling this in the past, here are 18 new, customized responses for each of the lead categories from before.

Five New Ways to Handle “Just Email Me Something”

The method of this stall has changed throughout the years. It went from, “Just put a brochure in the mail, and I'll look at it,” to “Why don't you fax something to me, and I'll look it over,” to “Just email me your information.” Unfortunately, it all still means the same thing: your prospect either doesn't want to take the time to be pitched, or they don't need what you are selling.

Either way, this stall sets up one of the most frustrating parts of sales—the chase. Think about it: How many times have you sent off your information and, when you've been fortunate enough to “catch” the prospect again, you've heard: “I haven't looked at it” or “We're not interested at this time”? Probably a lot, right?

The way to avoid this is to earn the right to ask a few key qualifying (or disqualifying, as I like to call them) questions so you can save both of you a lot of time and effort later (to say nothing of saving yourself a lot of disappointment as well).

The solution, as always, is to be prepared for this brush‐off with a good script that fits your personality and product or service. Take the time now to adapt and customize two or more of the following responses so you are prepared the next time your prospect uses this stall.

Five (Nine, Really!) New Ways to Handle “I'm Too Busy”

Of all the brush‐offs you get while prospecting, the good old standby: “I'm too busy to talk now,” is right up there with, “I'm not interested,” and “Just email me something.” The reason this is such a popular response with prospects is that most salespeople don't know how to handle it and are easily put off and happy to “call back later.” Of course, this is just what the prospect wants them to do, and, since they now have your caller ID number, they will know to let the call go to voice mail the next time they see it!

The key to handling this stall—as with all others—is to bypass it first and earn the right to ask a few, quick qualifying questions to see if you are dealing with a qualified buyer or not.

That is what the following rebuttals allow you to do.

As with any brush‐off, objection, or stall, though, this one is easy to handle if you just take the time to learn some proven responses to it, and then use them with confidence when you get it.

To help you deal with this brush‐off more effectively, I urge you to pick any of the following responses that best suits your style, product, and service. Feel free to change them slightly so they are most comfortable for you to use, and then practice them every time you encounter this initial blow‐off. Here they are.

Five New Ways to Handle “We're Currently Working with Someone”

If you are selling one of the more popular products or services on the market (and who isn't?), then you probably run into this blow‐off all the time. Like most brush‐offs, prospects like to use this because it works—unprepared reps usually respond with a feeble: “Oh, okay, well, could I call you back in six months?”

Being prepared with a few good scripts will allow you to get past this objection, and will allow you to qualify an opportunity that most other people would miss. As always, I advise you to customize the following scripts to fit your personality, product, or service, and then to practice them repeatedly until they become automatic.

Ten New Ways to Handle “We're All Set”

I receive emails from my readers all the time asking me how to handle various objections and resistance statements. A common request I get is how to handle the initial resistance statement “We're all set.” A variation of this is anything along the lines of:

Or

Or

As you can see, these are all basically the same, and, more important, they aren't objections—rather, they are still initial resistance statements or blow‐offs. Essentially, they are saying something along the lines of: “I'm not interested in being pitched right now. Please go away.”

The key to handling resistance, remember, is not to try to overcome it (remember, it's not an objection) but rather to simply bypass it and get into your pitch. So with that in mind, here's how you handle the “We're all set” blow‐off and any of its variations:

How to Overcome “We Handle That in House”

If you are trying to set appointments for an outside sales team, or even if you are trying to generate leads so you can do an over‐the‐phone demo later, then many of the stalls we have discussed so far are probably very familiar to you. While we have already discussed common initial resistance statements like, “I'm not interested” and “Just email me something,” there are others that seem somewhat harder to overcome. One of the more frequently encountered statements is “We handle that in house, so we don't need you.”

Many sales reps are taught the normal, old‐school approaches like:

Or

While either of these responses can be used effectively in the right situation, there is a better way to handle this objection. What you want to do is offer value in your visit or demo, and then leave it up to your prospect to decide if it is worth taking your call or visit any further.

Try the following rebuttal (obviously, customize this to your particular service or product) to the objection “We handle that in house”:

As you can see here, you are not pitching, necessarily; you are instead offering to show them a better way. What they do after that is up to them.

Try using this for the next couple of weeks and see if you can get past a prospect's natural resistance to setting up a meeting. This approach can also be adapted if you are just setting up a demo over the phone rather than setting up an appointment. If you use it consistently, you are going to set more appointments, open more doors, and close more sales.

How to Handle the “We're happy with Status Quo” Objection

As you know, I often get emails from readers of my e‐zine, Secrets of the Top 20 Percent, asking me how I would handle various selling situations and objections. (If you have not signed up yet, you can do so for free on my homepage: www.mrinsidesales.com. By doing so, you will get new, word‐for‐word scripts each Tuesday.)

A reader recently sent in a request asking me how to deal with the “We are used to the status quo and don't want to make waves” objection. This reader also wrote that he had been told by another training company that he needed to “make them painfully aware of something they don't see coming (like a freight train) and develop a more compelling message.” As you might imagine, he wasn't able to come up with anything that was working.

By the way, I must comment here that I frequently hear this about other “sales training” companies: they are quick to offer what sounds like good advice, but they then do not provide the specific solutions to back it up. As you know from reading my e‐zines, watching my YouTube videos, or reading or listening to my books and CDs, I not only tell you what to do, but also how to do it.

In this case, I think the reader was having trouble with this technique because, to begin with, it's not a good approach. Trying to convince someone that what they are doing now is a bad idea and that it is going to lead to big trouble (so you can say, “I told you so” later) isn't going to endear you to anyone. What I recommend instead is to find a way to bypass this obvious initial resistance statement and find a way to present your product or service in a nonthreatening way.

Your goal on the prospecting call is not to overcome objections (which this isn't, by the way), but rather, to qualify and set a date up to demo your product or service. Here are some sample scripts to help you do just that.