In this blog: what is objection handling and a real-life example:
Objection handling is 100% part of every marketing role.
Bringing new ideas to upper management.
Pitching strategies to clients. Getting the team onboard with new strategies.
No matter who you’re talking to, you need to be ready for objections.
I read on LinkedIn that this woman didn’t get a job because she wasn’t good at objection handling. That inspired this blog entry.
Throughout my career, I was faced with people telling me “we don’t have the budget” or “our competitors aren’t doing that.”
I got used to handling objections. First thing to do, is to see if you can adjust your idea to their concern. For example, if it’s a budget constraint, see if you can bootstrap the idea. The next step is to understand what’s most important to the person/company and use that to demonstrate how your idea is aligned with what they value most.
So here is just one example of objection I’ve encountered:
SITUATION: B2B business, traditional mentality
OBJECTION “We don’t need email automation. We’ve always done lead follow-up manually”
ANSWER: “By doing it manually, you are not following up with all the leads as many times as the customer journey requires. These leads might make their decision in 3 months but the team will have stopped following up. Plus, the cost of automating is very minor compared to the sales people you are paying to do this manually. The sales team can focus on the most qualified leads, not wasting time with hundreds of leads that might not be good leads to begin with.
EXPLANATION: In reality, this can take many meetings but what I learned is that companies with a traditional mentality value budgeting and their sales teams. So when handling objections with them, I always brought it back to “how X can save you money” and “this will benefit your sales team because of X.”
Understanding why you’re doing something is never a bad idea. As a marketer, you definitely need to know why you’re doing something. It helps eliminate bad ideas like copying a competitor for no reason.
Add handling objections on your resume if you can clearly convince your superiors to move forward with a project. Getting buy-in is 100% part of every marketing role.
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