In sales (and life), a ‘no’ should never dishearten you.
You see, a ‘no’ is almost always an invitation to get curious and ask better questions.
On the other side of your questions, you may uncover a hidden ‘yes’ or a solid ‘no’ with firm reasoning behind it. Either way, you move forward.
But getting stuck at the first no, that’s rookie stuff. Which is fine- but you’ve got to level up at some point.
I’ve been focusing on my objection handling skills the past couple months and wanted to break it down into a basic framework you can implement with an example of how I turned a ‘no’ into a ‘yes’
Here’s the context:
Last few months, I’ve been working with my friend Ross to bring sponsors to his Instagram channel.
He has a geopolitics brand- with over 400k followers across Instagram, Tiktok and a newsletter.
Anyhow, last week I got a response from a potential buyer that “we weren’t a good fit”.
This is what I emailed him back:
And this was his response (cropped to remove sensitive details)
Essentially- here’s what I did:
I was just curious to know the reason why he said we’re not a good fit and took the pressure off by adding a line like “perhaps we’ll work together down the line”.
That’s pretty much the gist of all sales training on handling objections.
Ask questions, break the objection down into it’s component parts and solve for each. That is the way to turn a ‘No’ into a ‘Yes’.
The psychology behind this is something I picked up from reading ‘Never Split The Difference’:
Always negotiate from the same side of the table- never opposite. This means- the problem we face (not being a good fit) is the enemy- not you or I. We are trying to tackle the problem together.
This mindset makes it easy to handle any objection or ‘no’ and turn many of them into ‘yeses’.
Sitting at the same side of the table means genuinely wanting a good outcome for the other person as much as for me. Which means being okay with not getting their business if it doesn’t make sense.
That’s why adding lines that de-pressurise the ‘sell’ are so good at putting that across.
And the deal?
We’re currently negotiating terms for a proof of concept engagement, which I estimate could get us around $5-10k monthly recurring revenue if we’re successful.
Sales is the best job ever.