Why great salespeople rarely get objections (and how you can too)

Most objections aren’t surprises.

They’re symptoms.

In this episode, we break down why top-performing sellers rarely hear “It’s too expensive,” “We need to think about it,” or “Send me something and we’ll get back to you.” Not because they’re better at rebuttals — but because they prevent resistance long before it surfaces.

You’ll learn why objections typically stem from:

• Incomplete discovery
 • Unclear business impact
 • Hidden stakeholders
 • Unaddressed risk
 • Poor process control

We explore how elite sellers surface concerns early, quantify consequences before discussing price, align decision-makers upfront, and structure conversations so buyers feel safe moving forward.

Because by the time a buyer raises an objection, the real issue has usually been building for weeks.

This episode will help you design cleaner deals, reduce friction at proposal stage, and move opportunities forward with greater control and confidence.

Great sellers don’t win arguments at the end.

They eliminate objections at the beginning.

🎧 Follow the show for practical insights designed for sales professionals who intend to outperform — not participate.

Welcome to the podcast!

Transcript

Objections Are Self-Created Symptoms

SPEAKER_00 0:07

If you're constantly handling objections and you're not going to want to hear this, but the chances are that you're probably creating them. So, objections are rarely the real problem. They're symptoms of earlier gaps in your sales process. And this is what we're going to talk about in this podcast. So, my name is Graham Elliott from Salescraft Training. And please remember to give me a like and subscribe if you find this useful. So, what we're going to be looking at in this episode is why price objections are usually failures of clarity, why the phrase we need to think about it is predictable. And how top salespeople prevent resistance before it surfaces. And that's really important. So the first thing I want to point out, and you may well have experienced this, is that most sales training, when it comes to objections, they teach you to overcome objections, reframe them, handle objections. But where I want you to go is to regard them differently. And when you get an objection, to ask yourself, what did I miss earlier? And the reason for this is that usually, and I would say in most cases, objections are delayed concerns. In other words, they've been there probably for some time in the buyer's mind, but they haven't come up, they haven't come into the conversation. And the key thing to do is to make sure that you take ownership of this. You look at what you can do, let's call it discovery phase, but however you like to term the part of the sales process where you're discussing your solution with the client. You need to make sure that all of these potential objections are handled at that stage. So if they've surfaced late, it means that the risk wasn't fully addressed or the consequences weren't clearly quantified, or it might be that stakeholder agreement wasn't secured. So the key thing to remember here is that an objection is rarely new information. It's usually information you didn't surface soon enough. So I'm going to dive into this a little bit data with five uh deeper, I should say, with five root causes of most objections. And the very first one is in complete discovery, which I've already mentioned. So if your discovery process, and what I mean by that is when you're discussing in detail the client's requirement, if it's surface level, you leave yourself wide open to objections later later on. So you need to explore, and this is just a short list, so I'm sure you can come up with others once you stop and think about it, but you need to explore business impact, personal consequences, the cost of inaction, and also the timeline because you want to build urgency into the timeline so that they take action. If you don't explore those issues, then the buyer's likely to hesitate later. So things, let's take a price objection. That often means the value gap wasn't closed. So a strategy that you can implement to basically eliminate price objections is first of all to stay longer in that discussion about the consequences of not taking any action. So in other words, ask what happens if nothing changes. Clarify what failure to change looks like and do that first because you want to establish pain in the client. Is the clients already in pain or else they wouldn't be speaking to you? I'm not talking physical pain necessarily, but uh that there is an issue there that's taken them to the point where they're now giving up time to have a conversation with you. So it's really important that you work that process and you take advantage of that time. Now, in the uh the course I have, um what I do is dive through or go through all of this in a lot more detail, and I'll give you a lot more questions you can ask, ways of building that questioning into your discussion. So, second one, number two, hidden stakeholders. So if you get, we need to run this by somebody else, whoever that somebody else might be, this is really unlikely to be new information. Again, it's a process design failure because what top salespeople will do very early on is map who the decision influencers are and the decision makers are so that they really from the start of the process know who is involved in this sale and who needs to be um spoken to, convinced, however you want to call it. So the question to ask here is who else needs to feel confident in this decision? Just an example. And it's really important to involve economic buyers before proposal. So depending on what you're selling, you may well have stakeholders or buyers, influencers, whatever you want to call them, who will have different interests. Some might be financial, some might be impact on personnel, um, others might be impact on production, whatever it is that you are, uh the kind of businesses you work with. It's really important that you understand who the stakeholders are and who has a say in the final decision. The third thing to consider is unspoken risk. So it is really unlikely that a buyer will say, I'm afraid this won't work. Uh again, in the course consultative selling, I know I'm talking about that again, um, but we dive into a whole process of how you identify the people who are more like to say that. But rather than saying, I'm afraid this won't work, you you may get it's expensive, we're not sure, or let's revisit next quarter. It'll be some delaying signal, or the worst case is where you don't get anything at all, they're just very agreeable to you, to your face, and then they ghost you. So again, it's really important in that initial discovery phase that you get as much of this out as you can, and top salespeople will tend to normalize doubt, they will invite hesitation early, and they will ask questions like what concerns would stop this from moving forward. The important thing here is to name the fear, if you like, it's to get really clear on what the doubts are in the buyer's mind, and you'll only do that by asking the right questions as a salesperson. But if you do it at the discussion phase where there's no proposal, there's no pitching going on, nothing like that, then that's the time where you are going to almost likely to get these things out. So it's really important that you get all of these, you do a full risk assessment, basically, that you really create a relationship with your client where they will open up to you about what their concerns are. Now, the fourth reason is poor process control. So this can be in the closing or early part of the closing stage, where a salesperson will just say, uh, let me know what you think. I mean, that's really weak. So a much stronger way of bringing in a close is based on what we've discussed, the next logical step is whatever that step is. Does that do you agree with that? Does that align with what you're thinking? So I spoke about this in the last episode, but this is really important because objections grow where you have an unstructured environment. And by having a structured approach, by making sure that you tackle the things that might derail you later on, that you tackle those early in the process, you are much less likely to get an objection when it comes to the point of closing the deal. And then finally, the fifth reason, uh, the fifth root cause of um objections is a surprise at the proposal stage. So really that could be either from either side. But what I mean by that is that the scope changes, the scope of the solution, the price changes, the timeline changes, or expectations change. If any of those happen, you are likely to have a lot of objections suddenly come in. Um it's really important that if if you do proposals, if you um give formal proposals to prospective clients, that there's nothing new in there. Make sure that the proposal is a confirmation of decisions that have already been made. So, in other words, when you're having your discussions, you get really, really clear on all aspects that need to be in the proposal. You get agreement and you do all of that before you go to the stage of a formal proposal. So, if you do go into proposal, you really need to make sure that that proposal is really a formality and it's a confirmation of discussions, which you've already confirmed, um, maybe informally earlier in the process. So, what do top salespeople do differently? And this is really important. So, the first thing they'll do is to make sure that doubts, tensions, any issues are brought to the surface, brought out into the open early. So they will ask uncomfortable questions before the buyer does. And remember, if you raise these issues yourself, these become points for discussion. If the buyer or the client raises them, they become objections. So it's really important that you are proactive with this and you bring up these issues. Because if you don't, there's a good chance they're sitting there under the surface and they'll just come up later when it's much more difficult to deal with them effectively. The second thing is they co-create value. So, in other words, they're not presenting value, they build it collaboratively, and I think that's really important because until you have a solid discussion with a client, you don't really know what this solution that you're offering is worth to them. And I've often heard this phrase said to me as a salesperson, what's this worth? And I I've been tempted, I don't remember if I've actually said, I think I may have done actually once or twice. Um, but honestly, I can tell you what the monetary value is to buy it, but I cannot tell a client what this solution is worth to them until I've had a really good discussion with them. Because what the value is, is not the ticket price, and that's really important to understand as well. And the only way you really get a good feel for what the true value of your solution is is by having that conversation with your client, by working collaboratively with them. Okay, the third thing um to do differently here is to just check. I'll call them micro commitments. Um, so this is a way of just making sure that you and the client are aligned, you're on the same page, but they're relatively minor points, so they're not deal breakers, but they do, if you can get a consistent agreement throughout the whole process, then that is is really good. That sets you up for the sale very well. So the kind of um questions you can ask for clarification here is does this reflect what we discussed? Is this still the priority? What you're doing is you're just checking in, you're just making sure that the goalposts haven't moved, to use a phrase, that you're what you believe the right solution is is still true. Um, especially if a deal's gone on for a while and maybe you haven't spoken to the client for um a short time or a particular time, it's really good to just re-qualify everything. Otherwise, you can get caught out down the track. And the truth is that the need may have changed to the point where you can no longer provide a valid solution at that point. If there isn't some middle ground, some something that you can work on together, the best thing you can do is walk away from it because you're not to make the sale and you've had limited time, so you need to be where you can where you've got the best chance of um actually making a sale. And then the other thing that top salespeople will do, and this is more or less what I've been talking about, but this is just notching it up a level, and that's to invite resistance proactively. So you might say something like, What might make this difficult internally? And again, this is this can be absolute gold because by you raising it, this isn't an objection, this is a conversation, and what you will get from that conversation is it might be confirmation that there's nothing in that particular area that's blocking the sale moving forward. But if there is a problem, you get a heads up on it very early on, so you've got a chance to discuss how you get over it. How do you, you know, whatever that difficulty might be, um, work with your client to come up with a solution. So you're basically working your way through, ticking all of the boxes one by one until you get to the point where everything is aligned, everything's ready to go. So just to recap on those five root causes. So the first one is incomplete discovery, not having the right discovery process, second one is hidden stakeholders, so not identifying stakeholders for want of a better term, um, early on. And you need it really important to do that. Unspoken risk, so you haven't acknowledged or you haven't discovered um some doubts that are sitting there, poor process control, in other words, um you're not managing the sale effectively, is another way of looking at that, and that um and and making sure that you remain aligned, and then surprise at the proposal stage. So that is making sure that the proposal comes when you've pretty much agreed everything. It should essentially be a confirmation of however long the discussion has taken taken place, and then so the um the the ways that I recommend you handle that, uh, make sure surface tensions are identified. Make sure tensions, any issue that might get in the way of the sale is identified early. Work with the client to establish what the value to the client is. So it's really important that you understand that value is not necessarily what you think it is, and you only know what the true value of the solution is by talking to the client, that you get micro commitments as you move along, and you invite resistance, you invite that difficult discussion. Now, just an additional insight here, and it's something that's important to remember, and I did a podcast on this um a few podcasts ago now, but objections can be emotional. If you are in a business-to-consumer selling environment, they're much more likely to be emotional. Emotion plays a huge part in uh the decision-making process when you're in business to consumer. If you're in business to business, you might think that it's all about facts, figures. Um, it's basically logic, logic that drives the sale, but it isn't. So emotional emotion will still play a role, it will be different sometimes. So it could be um a buyer is concerned about the impact on their career if they make a mistake, they may not personally like you or your brand, you know, that it can be all of these kinds of things. So do remember that that misunderstanding can create friction. And again, what top sales people will do is respond to uncertainty, to fear, to risk, and to social pressure. So the I guess the thing to remember here to summar, summarize that aspect of it, is that objections don't need better answers. You actually need better earlier conversations. You need to make sure those early conversations that you have with a client are very client-focused, and you unearth everything that you can that might come and come and trip you up later. Okay, so just bringing this back, so I said right at the start that if you're getting a lot of objections, it might be that you're responsible for them. So that might have been a little harsh. Um, but hopefully now you see why I made that statement. So if you are hearing a lot of objections, first of all, it doesn't mean that you're bad at sales, it doesn't mean that your product is wrong. It basically means that your the depth of your discovery process or the process that you use in your sales um uh discussions just needs some refinement. So I've given you some tips there on things you can do. There is more in the uh the online course if you if you are really interested in developing this, but this is a skill development issue and not a personality issue, and that's the important thing to take away from this podcast. So I guess to summarize this particular podcast, it's really important to remember that as salespeople, our goal isn't to win arguments, the goal is to design clarity. And this week, instead of let's say preparing better rebuttals, I don't know if you do that, but if you're one of those people who kind of goes down that route, stop doing that and just prepare better questions. Think about the questions you use in the discovery phase and the early part of the conversation when you're sat down with the client having a conversation about their what they need and what the potential issues are, shortcomings. But that discussion needs to be all about them, and that's really important. So the probably the key thing to do here, I'm guessing for most people, would really be to review the questions you're asking and maybe ask better questions. Okay, so the final thing to remember in terms of objections is that great salespeople, the top salespeople, don't fight objections at the end of deals, they work to eliminate them at the beginning, and that is really, really important because once you've done that, this whole fear around objections, and I know from talking to lots and lots of salespeople, it's it's one of the biggest fears salespeople have. Um, two things to remember on that. One is an objection is not always a no, and I haven't really gone into that, but I have another work and it's in the course. But secondly, you can derail objections really early on by just getting your initial questioning right. Okay, so um that's it for this one. Now, on Monday, the next uh podcast in this um this series that I'm running, I guess, you can run a perfect meeting, but you can still lose the deals. So what you need to understand is the real decision making often doesn't happen when you're in the room. The real decision making happens afterwards. So in the next episode, this would be episode seven, I'm going to unpack why most deals are won or lost after the meeting. And again, how top salespeople design follow ups that build urgency, alignment, and commitment. And they do that instead of silence. Uh so if you're one of those salespeople who gets to the end, makes the offer, and then sits and waits, um, we should talk. So we can have that conversation on Monday. So good luck with you selling. I hope you have a good week, and I will speak to you on Monday. Bye for now.