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Successful Objection Handling in Lead Generation

Posted on Nov 19, 2009 by Laura Johnson, Program Director

Last week, Jon provided some great tips on developing a telemarketing call guide. One of the key points provided was that a guide allows for flexibility in ways that a script just can’t. If telemarketing is anything, it is unpredictable. You never know what you’re going to get when you dial the phone. We tend to write call guides with the ideal call outcome in mind—the qualified lead. The fact is, nearly 90% of all completed calls are not leads. This makes it critical that agents are prepared to handle situations that are less than ideal.

One way that clients can help with this is to come up with a list of potential objections, along with pointed responses that address the actual objection, as well as any underlying preconceived notions that might be causing the objection. Are they really not interested in the topic? Or are they actually just not interested in taking a telemarketing call right now? Are they loyal to one of your competitors? Or did they once have a bad experience with your company that’s causing them to brush you off? We train our agents to be able to handle these “false objections.” However, we often need our clients’ help in coming up with the appropriate responses to more real objections. This can mean asking yourself some tough questions about what the marketplace thinks of your brand and your products. It also means keeping an eye on industry trends as well as calling trends.

One trusty objection-handling technique has always been to ask the prospect additional probing questions until their objection falls apart on its own, and this is typically what I get when I ask my clients to provide some objection-handling prior to a campaign. This is definitely a useful technique, especially when you uncover the real reason for the objection. However, merely pulling the objection to pieces only takes you halfway. You’ve got to do some rebuilding after that in order to generate an interest and gain permission to continue the conversation.

In this case, some canned responses can help an agent to sound confident and authoritative and can help to bring the prospect back to the more guided dialog of the call. For example, “I understand. Let me tell you what we’re doing to address that….” or “I can see how you would be hesitant. I’d like to tell you a little about what we offer to see if it might be a good fit…” This is one area of the call where I think it’s okay to have a planned response because it is so crucial to continuing the conversation. The response needs to be factual, honest, and real. It cannot sound like a bunch of jargon, and it needs to have meaning for the contact. Arming agents with these tools in advance is the key to helping them to develop the skills necessary to break through initial objections and ultimately generate qualified leads.

Finally, it’s important to also remember that, as unpredictable as that call can be, the actual objections that come up in the course of calling may be significantly different from pre-call expectations. For this reason, it is also important to remember to do periodic reality checks throughout your calling efforts to make sure that agents are adequately armed to handle real-world situations.

Tagged: lead generation, telemarketing lead generation, targeted lead generation, telemarketing objection handling, telemareketing sales leads

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