Handling Appointment Objections    

Convert more calls to sales appointments
Gain more sales opportunities

Handling appointment objections successfully will mean you’ll convert more cold calls to sales appointments and have more opportunities to earn commission or grow your business. 

Getting more appointments from the calls you currently make is one of the best ways to increase your sales with no additional costs or resources required. 

Certain types of objections occur in the early part of your sales appointment calls. In the Introduction Stage of your call you can often get smoke screen objections and false excuses that stop the call. The sales training on this page will show you how to prevent and handle objections that arise in the first stage of your call, the Introduction Stage 

For objections that occur later in sales appointment calls see the links to more sales training on handling objections further down the page...


Preventing and Handling
Appointment Objections

Handling Smoke Screen Objections

Objections at the Introduction Stage of the appointment call are often smoke screens, not real objections, just excuses to try to get you off the phone. 

Typical smoke screens and appointment objections:

  • Not interested.
  • I’m on my way out, can you call back.
  • We have no budget until next year.
  • I’m moving house soon. 
  • I’m in the middle of a meeting.

Some typical reasons that prospects use smoke screen objections:

  • The prospect doesn’t see any benefit in listening to your call.
  • They think that what they were doing before you called is more important.
  • Some prospects fear they may have to make a decision if they listen to you.
  • In summary, you’ve not grabbed their attention.

It’s difficult when handling appointment objections that are smoke screens using normal objection handling techniques. This is because they are not based on specific issues, they are just excuses not to talk to you.

The prospect may be about to do something else, or may not have any available budget left this year. But how many times have you found time or money that wasn’t really available to do or buy something once your attention was grabbed and your interest gained?

What the prospect is really saying is: You haven’t grabbed their attention, and they don’t see a potential benefit that interests them.

The effective way to prevent these smoke screen appointment objections is to create an Introduction Stage that uses benefits to quickly gain the prospect’s attention.


Preventing Introduction Objections 

Getting the prospect to see the potential benefits of talking to you are the key to preventing appointment objections at the Introduction Stage.

As you introduce you, your company, and your products or services, give a wide ranging potential benefit the prospect may be able to gain as a result of meeting with you for a sales appointment.

For example: 

You've given your name and now you want to introduce the company.

I'm calling from XYZ investments,  providers of award winning investment packages that give the best returns to people getting close to retirement.

When you state your Reason for Calling, make sure there is a big potential benefit for the prospect that grabs their attention and keeps them listening. If the audience has been targeted well, and the prospect is nearing retirement, you could have lit a spark of interest. 

Example:

The reason I’m calling is to see if you qualify as someone who can benefit from this best performing financial package and if it's worth your while learning more about it.

At this stage of the call the prospect doesn’t want detail, they don’t want long winded features, they want benefits.

You’ve interrupted whatever they were doing and you now have limited time to explain who you are and why you are calling, and it has to sound more important than what they were doing when you called. 

If you get a lot of objections at the Introduction Stage, or if you want to see how to weave benefits into your Introduction Stage, take a look at this free sales training eBook that will give you a good start to your training on Sales Appointment Call Introductions


Handling Appointment Objections 

Sometimes you do get real objections at the Introduction Stage. 

When handling appointment objections that are real, you start by putting them into one of two categories, objections you can overcome, and objections that are outside of your control.

Here’s an example:

A prospect may tell you that they really have no budget or available funds to make a purchase this year, and after questioning it you believe it’s a real objection and not a smoke screen.

You then need to decide if you want to carry on and try to make an appointment, or if the circumstances mean you cannot sell to the prospect. Remember it's your selling time, you are the expert on your products and services, and it's your decision whether it is good use of your resources to meet with a prospect. 

You could continue with the appointment call as you think you could persuade the prospect to use funds assigned to other purchases to buy your product.

You might still want to meet the prospect and work on agreeing a purchase with a finance deal they can afford, or for when their new budget is available.

Or, this objection may go into your category of objections outside of your control as you have no way of selling your products to the prospect. Once you have decided that there is no point meeting the buyer just close the call politely and move on to the next cold call. 


The Objection is Within Your Control

If you have decided the objection is within your control, and the prospect is worth meeting, the key to handling appointment objections that you get at the Introduction Stage is to influence the prospect to put the objection on one side until you meet. Your response should make the prospect aware that there may be a way that they could still receive the benefits of your product. You just need to ask them a few questions to check if it's worthwhile you both meeting to discuss further. 

You can use this as a Motivator to get them to move forward to the next stage where you ask them questions to qualify them as a potential customer before gaining their agreement to a meeting. Often, handling appointment objections is not just about overcoming them, but also requires motivating prospects to move forward past the objection. 

A Motivator is Stage 3 of the appointment call process that I use to train sales teams. To see how to use a Motivator to get your prospects to move forward with you go to Cold Calling Scripts for Motivators. 


More Training on
Handling Appointment Objections 

See the main page on dealing with sales appointment objections and learn how to prevent and overcome other types of sales objections in different parts of the sales appointment setting process at Cold Calling Objection Techniques  

Prevent Common Sales Appointment and Cold Calling Objections

These common objections are a constant problem for anyone making sales appointment calls, on this page you'll find the solutions to overcome or prevent them: Common Sales Appointment Objections 

Stop the Objection Send me Information

If you make cold calls for sales or sales appointments you probably get prospects asking you to send them information when you go for a trial close or attempt to gain full agreement to a sale or a sales appointment. Learn how to stop it at Prevent the Information Objection 


Professional Training Course on
Making Sales Appointments

At the end of this professional course you will have a customised sales appointment call script, in your own words, that will fill you sales diary for you. 

You will know what to do and say at every step of the call process, how to prevent and overcome objections and obstacles, and make calls with confidence.

And there is a complete section on handling appointment objections...

This is the perfect course for making cold calls, follow up calls, and responding to enquiries. You can use the training many times over to create scripts for every type of call to make sales appointments.

Learn how to get past gatekeepers, motivate hesitant prospects to move forward, and see effective techniques to gain agreement to sales appointments. See what you get included in this course and what it will do for your sales role at: Making Sales Appointments 


The Sales Buzz - Newsletter Ezine

The Sales Buzz free sales training newsletter

The weekly Sales Buzz eZine newsletter covers all aspects of sales and appointment setting with a different tip, technique, or discussion point each week. 

See the latest pages to be added or updates on the Proven Sales Training website, real examples from the world of sales, and interesting innovations that sales people and businesses are using. 

When you ask for the Sales Buzz to be delivered you get 2 free sales training mini-courses that are unique to this website, and we have a strict privacy policy so you know your details are kept safe. 

See the 2 free mini-courses and get the Sales Buzz delivered by visiting: The Sales Buzz




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