Stop Using The Word Objection In Developing Your Inside Sales Reps
Posted by
Matt Fitts on Thu, Nov 10, 2023 @ 03:56 PM
We have been having a lot of internal discussions about incenting behavior and different tactics to create an environment that drives a team’s actions to a desired result and ultimately achieving success for our clients, for the individual (inside sales reps), and the organization. These discussions have included everything from tweaks in the compensation plans, adjustments to the goals, to changing the performance metric targets. So needless to say, I have been thinking a lot about how I try to get this type of response in different areas of life, my kids, with my team, really across the board.
Last night I woke up at 4:30 in the morning and started thinking about an interaction I had earlier this week. It was a discussion about some training projects we are working on - from this conversation I realized that in the world of teleprospecting/inside sales we use the word “objection” to blanket a number of scenarios inside a conversation. Everything from “I am using a homegrown solution” to “my company is too small to leverage your solution” and then I started thinking about the definition of the word “objection” and I found this - The action of challenging or disagreeing with something.
And then it dawned on me – the last thing as a teleprospecting rep that we want to hear on the phone while attempting to have a business conversation and advance an opportunity, is a confrontational style. So why, when we train our inside teams do we use “objection” to refer to the statements they hear in their conversations? It would seem that we are creating a mind set in our inside sales reps that positions the things they hear from the prospect world as something that is “disagreeable”. I would argue that this makes the reps on our teams begin to get discouraged and stop looking to “progress “the conversation which is the exact behavior we are looking to incent towards.
My suggestion would lean towards the use of “opportunity to discuss” rather than “objection” when we train.
My Two Cents