Handling Customer Objections

What Is Objection Handling? Why Is It Important?

Objection handling is exactly what it sounds like - handling objections to various aspects of the SA’s product, proposal, or recommendations.

An SA runs into objections very frequently, almost on a daily basis. The most common objections are raised by either:

• Potential customers: Prospects may have doubts about the capabilities or features of the product, and as you might imagine, price is a common point of friction.
• Sales teams: Your internal partners may have doubts about the plans you’ve created for a particular customer.

A good SA relies on stakeholder management skills just as much as technical skills. This means an SA must have excellent listening skills, be able to deal with ambiguity, and be able to think on his/her feet to provide innovative solutions to complex problems. These skills are extensively tested during an SA interview, both during “discovery” and “demo” rounds.

How Is Objection Handling Tested In Interviews?

Because objection handling is so important, you’ll almost certainly be tested on this at some point.

The most natural place to assess objection handling is “live”, during a mock demo interview, but you may face objections in mock discovery calls. You may also get direct questions like “tell me about a time a customer objected to your proposal, and how you solved it” during behavioral rounds.

Later on in this lesson, we’ll give you a process for working through objections that will help you in interviews and on the job.

What Interviewers Look For

• Great listening skills: Can you anticipate potential questions and areas of friction? Can you detect hesitation and handle it gracefully? Do you know how to get to the root of a problem?
• Ability to think on your feet. How do you work under pressure? Can you pivot when surprised by, an unexpected question?
• No overpromising: It’s critical that SAs are able to say “I don’t know” rather than making something up, or overcommitting to save face. It’s perfectly acceptable to say “I don’t know, but I’m happy to find out and get back to you”, so get comfortable with this before your interview.

These qualities are critical because every customer you work with is going to be different, with a different technology stack, different levels of receptivity for your product, and different levels of willingness to buy the product you are selling.

Ability to articulate the kinds of objections that SAs face and typical ways to handle them is a great way to make a good impression on the interviewer. This shows that you have the “scars” from being in the field, and you have proven ability to handle tough conversations with a variety of stakeholders.

Questions On Objection Handling

Prepare to answer at least one of these in addition to any mock-objection-handling preparation you do for a demo or discovery interview.

1) “How do you handle a customer asking why your product is so expensive?”

In the sales cycle of an enterprise product, it is important to focus not just on the technical capabilities of the product, but also the value it brings to the prospective customer. This is referred to as “value-selling”. While the cost discussion is typically handled by the AE (Account Executive), it is important that you can show the interviewer that you can position the product as a strategic choice, rather than just a technical add-on.

For example, if an interviewer asks you to pitch Snowflake and raises an objection about the product being so expensive when selling Snowflake, you might pitch it not just as another “data platform”, but as a product that can uncover great business insights for the customer – unlocking millions in profit for the customer, enabling the customer to have a standardized, easily maintainable and scalable data platform for all possible stakeholders in the organization.

2) “How do you handle a customer comparing your product to a different product, and mentioning that the competing product has more technical features?”

In such a scenario, it is always important to understand why the customer is asking for a particular feature. Is it critical to their day-to-day function, or is it just something they saw in a competitor’s marketing slides?

Aim to find out the must-have features required by your customer, and whether any nice-to-have functionalities can be covered by other areas of your product. If your product does not have the feature being requested, a great question to ask is “What is the impact of this on your business?”

3) “How do you handle a difficult technical objection you can’t answer?”

Typically, technical audiences are very straightforward and appreciate black-and-white answers to questions. If the interviewer is asking a technical question, it is important to give them a straightforward answer. If you don’t know the answer, don’t be afraid of saying “I don’t know, but I will get back to you”. This elevates your standing in the eyes of the interviewer by establishing yourself as someone who is not afraid to speak the truth. In the real world, there is no expectation that you know every detail about every customer’s business and industry - there will be many occasions when you won’t know an answer. Get comfortable saying “I don’t know” now, and you’ll make your work life as an SA much easier.

A Framework For Objection Handling

Discovery: Understand Context

Before diving into a response to an objection, it is important to understand the context of the question.

Try to understand how important this feature is to the prospective customer, what an ideal solution might look like, and what happens if a particular feature is not available.

For example, let’s assume that the product in question is offered only as a SaaS product, and the customer is not comfortable hosting data anywhere except in their private cloud. The SA should ideally question the customer about the motivation behind this, whether there is an organization-wide mandate about not storing any business-critical data outside the private cloud, or if they are just generally uncomfortable using cloud products or worried about any data security.

Strategize: Formulate a Response

If the product can solve the objection(s), great! If not, it is important to strategize how the product can still solve the prospective customer’s challenge even if the exact functionality is not offered.

Continuing the previous example, let’s assume that the customer in question opted to host some data in the cloud in the past, but unfortunately suffered from a data breach. This is the reason they want to host the product on-premise and not store any data in the cloud.

An objection like this can be handled by talking about other customers successfully using your product without any breaches, and the extensive security certifications and testing your product undergoes on a regular basis, thus ensuring all customer data is completely secure.

Closing the Objection: Present a Solution (if Possible), or Concrete Next Steps

After you’ve formulated a basic strategy to close the objection, it is time to present the solution or workaround to the customer. It is important to not be defensive about the lack of a particular feature, but rather outline how other customers handle this particular business need with other areas of your product or other strategies.

Tips for Success

• Demonstrate great listening skills by searching for the business motivation behind the question: A question often has a hidden motive behind it, and it’s critical to suss that out in order to provide an effective and acceptable answer.
• Say "I don't know": It is very important to be honest. Don’t be afraid if you do not know the answer to a particular question - you can always find out, and report back.