Objection Handling В2В. How to defend the terms and save the relationship

There is a phrase that has cost me more than any other phrase in my life. It sounds polite, well-mannered, almost noble:

“Well then, I understand. All the best. Health and happiness to you.”

I said it dozens of times. And every time I said it, money silently disappeared from my pocket. Sometimes tens of thousands. Sometimes millions. The most unpleasant part is that in that moment I felt like a well-bred man and a professional. The client said “no” — and I didn’t push. What a gentleman, right?

Be honest: how many times over the past month have you said something similar to a client? “All right, I understand.” “Okay, I’ll call back later.” “Agreed, talk soon.” Count them. Right now, don’t put it off.

And now a harder question. How much money was lying on the table in each of those conversations? In actual currency. For some it’s fifty thousand rubles, for some it’s a million and a half, for some it’s twenty. Add those sums together — and you get a figure I call “money frozen inside someone else’s ‘no.’” That money hasn’t gone anywhere. It hasn’t burned up. It’s simply sitting there, waiting — with clients you have already found, already met, already made an offer to. Only one thing remains: go back and collect it.

This book is the third in the series. In the first, we broke down SPIN — the questioning technology that uncovers the client’s needs and makes them want change on their own. In the second, the selling presentation: how to show your offer so that the client calculates their own benefit themselves. And now we’ve reached the most tense moment of any sale. The presentation is done. The client has heard everything. They understand what you’re offering and what it costs. They look at you and say:

“No.”

“Too expensive.” “Not right now.” “We already have a supplier.” “The shelf is taken.” “We work with someone else and we’re happy.” “The project specifies a different material.”

This is where the real sale begins. Everything that came before — rapport, questions, the presentation — even an average salesperson does in one form or another. But after the word “no,” the paths diverge: one politely says goodbye and leaves, the other gets to work. The difference between them is precisely the difference in income you see inside any sales team.

In this chapter, we’ll figure out what an objection actually is, what categories everything you hear from clients falls into, which of the four roles you’re in when you meet a refusal — and why six completely different people hide behind the word “expensive,” and each of them needs to be spoken to differently.

But we won’t start with the client. We’ll start with you.

The “Two Minus One” Formula

Before we talk about technique, we need to deal with the reason. Technique without a reason doesn’t work: you can learn the best phrases in the world and never once say them, because there’s no reason to make the effort.

Take a sheet of paper. Seriously, take one — the exercise will take three minutes and will keep working for a whole year.

Number one. Calculate how much you earn per month today. Monthly average: add up your income for the last three months and divide by three. You don’t have to show anyone — write it honestly.

Number two. Now imagine you’ve seriously decided to raise your personal sales. Not “the company grew,” not “the season took off” — but you specifically put your head and hands to work. Write down the monthly amount you want to reach after three months of good, intensive work. Just adjust for the season: if your income grows on its own during peak season, add extra on top — so that it’s the result of your deliberate effort, not just “everyone suddenly wants to buy and you’re shipping orders.” I usually ask people to lower this number: doubling right away is hard. Let point B be realistic.

Now subtract the first number from the second. The difference is the third number — the most important one. This is your reason. This is what you’ll be changing anything in your work for at all. Multiply it by twelve — you get your expected annual increase. For some it comes out to six hundred thousand, for others a million two hundred.

And the last step. Write down three reasons why you need this money. Not five — three. And try not to burn the entire budget on one thing. “I’m building a house” — that’s wonderful, but a house will devour any amount of money, and you’ll never know whether you earned it or not. Among your three reasons, find at least one that lights a fire in you personally. A vacation, a more serious car, a jet ski — by the way, a jet ski sometimes costs more than a car; check your license while you’re at it. One salesman wrote to me: “paying for my daughter’s education.” Noble. But admit it honestly: are you ready to spend a month pushing difficult clients over the line for the sake of a line item that says “semester tuition”? The body has to want it. Give it what it wants.

Why is this exercise in a book about objections? Because objection handling is the most energy-intensive part of a sale. If a salesperson has no reason to push themselves, they won’t sit there in the evening thinking about whom to call back, whom to meet for a second round of negotiations, whom to convince to buy at a higher price. They’ll live in the mode of “discount, discount — they refused, oh well, they refused.” If there’s no reason to fight, there will be no growth, no matter what you read in this book.

And immediately the second question — the main one. Fine, you’ve decided: plus seventy thousand a month. How? What exactly will you do differently over the next three months?

I ask salespeople this question constantly, and do you know what I hear? “I’ll work more.” A street sweeper works more. He doesn’t increase his income. “I’ll grow my client base.” Great — and what will you do to grow it? “I’ll get new knowledge in the field of sales.” Knowledge by itself doesn’t help: first understand what you’re going to do, then ask yourself what information will help you do it more effectively — only then does training make sense.

That’s a surface-level answer, and it doesn’t help. It’s like “what will you do to look good?” — “I’ll lose weight.” And what will you do to lose weight? That’s where the real answer begins.

A goal is an order from the brain to the body. Write that down somewhere. If the goal is formulated as “work more,” the body doesn’t understand what to do. So it doesn’t do anything. But “this week I will call back five clients who turned me down last quarter and find out the true reason for the refusal” — that’s an order. The body picks up the phone and dials.

Remember: a goal is an order from the brain to the body. If the body doesn’t understand what exactly to do, it’s not a goal — it’s a wish.

Hang a question on your refrigerator: “How am I going to increase my sales?” Let it hang there. Gradually, more and more precise answers will start coming to mind — and you’ll begin to manage your sales instead of just watching them.

Check Yourself

— What is the difference you got between point A and point B — and what exactly will you spend it on?

— How does the formulation “I’ll work more” differ from an order from the brain to the body?

— By your estimate, how much money is frozen today in clients who told you “no”?

Practice

Write down three clients who refused you in the last three months, and next to each one — the amount of the deal that didn’t happen. In monthly terms: how much money per month each would bring in if they had agreed. Add it up. That figure is your personal fund of frozen money. The goal of this book is to unfreeze at least a third of it.

Do They Buy From You — or Do You Sell?

Every salesperson — myself included — lives in two roles within their job. Sometimes one dominates and the other sags. I call these roles: the loader-salesman and the salesman-salesman.

The loader is the one people buy from. What does that mean? I have a product. There are people who already know this product, already want it, and are simply waiting for someone to walk up and say: “You taking it?” They answer: “Of course.” Others call on their own, visit the website, place an order. My job is to get the invoice out in time and organize the shipment. That’s not bad and nothing to be ashamed of — it’s part of the job. But it’s not selling. It’s shipping.

The salesman-salesman is a different situation. A person uses a competitor’s product, is used to it, is perfectly happy with it. I come and convince them to switch. Or they don’t use this category of product at all — and I convince them to start. Now that is selling.

The problem is that salespeople who have been in the market a long time imperceptibly slide into the loader role. Familiar clients keep ordering things, requests come in, invoices go out, the day is full of motion — and it creates the feeling of vigorous selling. Then you ask such a salesperson: “How will you increase your income?” And he answers: “Well… I’ll sell more” — meaning that for some miraculous reason clients will start buying more.

I ask salespeople to do a simple exercise: divide their reality into two columns. On the left — what people buy from me: products, services, characteristics that clients take on their own, by default. On the right — what I have to sell: the things that don’t move on their own.

Once I was working through this exercise with a team of salespeople in the construction materials market. One says:

— People buy insulation board from me. What I sell is delivery and deferred payment.

— Wait, — I say. — Why are you selling delivery? Delivery is usually bought.

— Because our delivery costs more than the market average.

— There it is. You’re not selling delivery. You’re selling expensive delivery. Feel the difference? The task just became honest.

The second salesman:

— People buy insulation from us, but what we have to sell is profiled membrane. Retail barely knows it. And not just ours — the membrane as a category is poorly known. Clients don’t ask for it, and salespeople at the outlets don’t offer it.

— So your task is to sell a little-known product. That’s a different job from “selling membrane.” You fight obscurity differently than you fight price.

The third:

— Adhesive foam. The competition is savage: a retail outlet carries ten to fifteen manufacturers. The purchasing manager looks at the shelf and asks: why do I need a sixteenth?

— So you need to put your foam on an overcrowded shelf. Do you hear how the wording changed? “I sell foam” — that’s a murky task. “I’m putting foam on an overcrowded shelf” — that’s a specific task, and you can prepare arguments for it.

And the fourth case, the trickiest:

— Everything sells for me. Our board is the best-known on the market; people ask for it by name.

— Wonderful. And when a client says that a young competitor has the same board fifteen percent cheaper — what happens?

— Well… I have to explain why ours costs more.

— So the board is bought from you, but the price of the board — that you sell. Every day.

Look at your two columns. Objections arise only in the right one. Nobody objects to a loader — they either take from him or they don’t. People object to a salesman. So the longer your right column is, the more important this book is for you — and the more money is lying in it for you.

Remember: objections live only in the territory of “I sell.” If you almost never hear objections, you are most likely not selling — you’re shipping.

Check Yourself

— What in your product range is bought by default, and what do you actually have to sell — and why?

— In which role — loader or salesman — do you spend most of your working week? What signs told you?

— Which wording describes your hardest task more precisely: “I sell product X” or “I sell X under conditions Y”? Formulate your own “under conditions.”

Practice

Draw a table with two columns: “They buy from me” and “I sell.” Fill it in honestly, including product characteristics: price, novelty, shelf position, delivery terms. Next to each item in the right column, write one sentence: why this doesn’t get bought on its own. You have just drawn a map of your future objections.

What an Objection Is — and When It’s Real

Let me remind you of the map we’ve been following throughout the series. A sale consists of five stages: establishing contact, uncovering needs, presentation, objection handling, closing the deal. Not the stages of a visit, not a meeting agenda — precisely the stages of a sale you will pass through in your interaction with any client.

Notice: objections are the fourth stage, after the presentation. That’s not a coincidence — it’s a diagnosis. A real objection is possible only when the person has understood you correctly: heard the presentation, seen the price, grasped the offer — and something didn’t suit them. If an “objection” comes before the presentation, it’s most likely not an objection. It’s either a fantasy — the person is arguing with something you never said — or an attempt to brush off the conversation. Fantasies and brush-offs are handled differently; we’ll get there in the final chapter. For now, hold on to the rule: first the client must understand what they are refusing. A refusal without understanding is not a refusal.

Now the definition. I’ve been through many clever formulations and kept the simplest one. An objection is an obstacle on the way to closing the deal. I gave a presentation. Normally, a deal should follow a presentation: here’s the product, here’s the price, here’s the invoice. But between the presentation and the deal, an obstacle has grown. My job is to remove that obstacle: go around it, take it apart, seep through it. Not jump onto a different road, not turn around and drive away — remove the obstacle and reach the deal. The same one, the original one.

An important conclusion follows from the simple definition: an objection is not the client’s attitude toward me, not a verdict, and not an evaluation of my work. It’s a road sign that says “obstacle ahead.” You don’t take offense at road signs. You work with them.

Everything you hear from clients breaks down into six categories. Break it down — and the work gets easier, because each category has its own nature and its own moves.

The first category is price. “Too expensive” — and sometimes, by the way, “suspiciously cheap.” The most frequent, the most famous, and we have a separate conversation about it ahead.

The second is the product. Quality, color, functionality, characteristics: density, flammability, water absorption, thickness. Everything that relates to the product itself.

The third is service. Logistics, lead times, payment terms, claims handling, the option of small batches. “Nowhere to store it,” “delivery takes too long,” “no deferred payment” — all of that goes here.

The fourth is brand. The fame or obscurity of the mark, reputation, reviews. Note the difference: negative experience is about quality or service — the person got burned themselves. Negative reviews are about brand: the person didn’t get burned, they’ve been reading.

The fifth is the salesperson. An unpleasant but honest category: an objection to you personally. You let them down, didn’t call back on time, said something wrong — or the client simply wants to work with a different manager. This objection is almost never spoken aloud, which makes it all the more important to learn to recognize it.

The sixth is timing. “We need it, but not now.” Off-season, no warehouse space, let’s come back to this in the fall. The most insidious category: it sounds so reasonable that the salesperson agrees automatically. “When should I call you back?” he asks, feeling like a tactful professional. Which role is that, do you think? Right — the pushover; we’ll get to him in a few pages.

A timing objection has to be fought like any other. Let me tell you a story that, in its time, changed my attitude toward “not now.”

A negotiation. Me and three representatives of the client: a furniture factory, one of the Moscow ones. The general director, also the owner. The production director, also a co-owner. And the retail director — a hired manager; let’s call him Denis. We’re discussing a large training project for their salespeople. We talked and talked and talked — and then they exchange glances, all but high-five each other: “Done. Decided. Excellent project.” Inside, I’m already celebrating. And then the general director adds:

— We start in September.

And the calendar says May.

Everything inside me is boiling. What September? We just discussed everything, everyone likes everything — why wait four months? And here’s my choice. Option one, the polite one: “Understood, agreed, we’ll talk in August.” Option two — fight. By that point I already knew my sin of easy agreement, and I decided: no way. Honestly, I don’t remember word for word what I said. I only remember the internal “brrrr, what September?” — and another half hour of conversation: why September, what’s stopping us from starting earlier, what will happen over the summer, how much money the factory will fail to earn in four months with an untrained sales team.

Half an hour later, they’re high-fiving again: “That’s it, guys, decided. We start next week.”

And then Denis, the retail director, comes out of the negotiation hypnosis, looks at his partners and says:

— Guys, do you realize what he just did to us? We wanted September.

We started a week later. And then worked together for many years.

The moral is not that I’m so clever. The moral is that “we need it, but not now” is an objection. An ordinary objection that can and must be handled. But it looks like an objective circumstance that nothing can be done about. That is its strength — and your weakness, as long as you believe it.

Remember: an objection is an obstacle, not a verdict. It becomes a verdict only when the salesperson agrees with it on the first try.

Check Yourself

— Why is a real objection possible only after the presentation? What’s wrong with objections “at the door”?

— Recall the last three objections you heard. Which of the six categories does each belong to?

— Which timing objection did you most recently accept as an objective circumstance — and what could you have done differently?

Practice

Compile the top 5 objections of your market — word for word, as clients say them. Sort them into the six categories: price, product, service, brand, salesperson, timing. If some objection doesn’t fit into any category, it’s most likely worded too broadly. Refine the wording until it fits.

The Four Roles: Who Inside You Answers the Objection

When a client says “no,” it isn’t some abstract “you” who answers. One of four roles that live inside every salesperson answers. For many people, this classification turns out to be the most useful thing they take away from my materials at all — because it’s about the truth about themselves.

Role one: the pushover. What does the pushover do when he hears an objection? He agrees. Accepts. Folds. “We work with another supplier, we don’t need anything.” — “Understood, sorry to bother you.” “Our shelf is overloaded.” — “Oh, it really is overloaded. Well, I’ll be going.” “We can’t meet this month.” — “All right, let’s do it in a month.” The pushover’s firmware has it hard-coded: the client is right by default. Not because the pushover is stupid or cowardly — that’s just his default setting. They said “no” — so it’s no.

Role two: the discounter. This one doesn’t fold — he pays. And often even before the objection has been voiced: he immediately offers the cheapest option, leaving himself no room to negotiate. And if an objection does come, the discounter has one single argument: we’ll make it cheaper. Don’t like it? We’ll make it cheaper. You work with someone else? We’ll make it cheaper. You already have this product? We’ll make it cheaper. This role has a psychological foundation: deep down, the discounter doesn’t believe in the value of his own product. He wouldn’t buy it at that price himself — and so the only path to a deal he can see is a concession.

Role three: the fighter-arguer. Oh, now this is a serious character. Strong, emotional, technically savvy, never at a loss for words. Compared to the pushover — a real champ. But he has a defect: he argues. As soon as the arguer switches on, the salesperson stops hearing the client and starts piling on: an argument, another argument, three more arguments. Eyes blazing, facts flying in bursts. What the client feels in that moment is one thing: pressure. And he resists. The arguer knows how to talk a client into the ground. Lead them to a deal in which the client feels like the winner — no.