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Objection handling questions.

78 objection handlingquestions from the bank — open to read. Pick one and practice it out loud; a coach note comes back in seconds.

Practice objection handling

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The objection loop: acknowledge, isolate, reframe, confirm Price pressure: value framing, anchors, and give-get

All 78 questions

'Your product is 3x more expensive than your nearest competitor and they have feature parity.' Respond.Reframing the objectionMid–senior 'We've decided to stay with the current vendor.' What's your move?Surfacing the underlying concernMid–senior 'This is more capability than we need right now.' Respond.Value Anchored responseMid–senior After three months of working a deal, the prospect asks for a free three-month trial. Walk me through your response.Knowing when to walk awaySenior–leadership 'I don't see how this is different from what we already use internally.' Respond.Reframing the objectionMid–senior 'Let me think about it and circle back.' How do you respond?Surfacing the underlying concernEntry–mid 'We can't justify this in our current budget cycle.' Walk me through your response.Value Anchored responseMid–senior A prospect demands a feature that's not on your roadmap as the only path to closing. What do you say?Knowing when to walk awaySenior–leadership 'I worry your roadmap doesn't match where my team is heading.' Respond.Reframing the objectionSenior–staff+'We had a bad experience with a similar tool last year.' Respond.Surfacing the underlying concernMid–senior 'Procurement is going to push back on this price.' Respond.Value Anchored responseSenior–leadership A prospect keeps coming back asking for incremental discounts each week. How do you respond on the third ask?Knowing when to walk awaySenior–leadership 'Our team is too small to use this fully.' Respond.Reframing the objectionMid–senior 'I love it but my CEO doesn't see the priority.' Respond.Surfacing the underlying concernSenior–leadership 'I'd rather invest this in headcount than tooling.' Respond.Value Anchored responseSenior–staff+'Your reference customers are too different from us to be useful.' Respond.Reframing the objectionSenior–staff+'We need to wait until the new fiscal year.' Respond.Surfacing the underlying concernMid–senior 'Your competitor will throw in additional services for free if we close with them.' Respond.Value Anchored responseSenior–leadership A prospect threatens to escalate to your CEO unless you match a competitor's price. What's your response?Knowing when to walk awaySenior–leadership 'We need this to work with three legacy systems you've never integrated with.' Respond.Reframing the objectionSenior–staff+'We're worried about lock-in.' Respond.Surfacing the underlying concernMid–senior 'Your competitor's product is good enough for our needs.' Respond.Value Anchored responseSenior–leadership 'I don't see what would change for me if we adopted this.' Respond.Reframing the objectionMid–senior 'I keep getting pushback from my engineering team.' Respond.Surfacing the underlying concernSenior–leadership 'We'd save more by just hiring one person to do this manually.' Respond.Value Anchored responseMid–senior A prospect won't share goals, decision criteria, or timeline. Walk me through your response.Knowing when to walk awaySenior–leadership 'Your sales process took longer than your competitor's.' Respond.Reframing the objectionSenior–leadership 'You're hard to read about online — I can't find clear case studies.' Respond.Surfacing the underlying concernMid–senior 'I'm worried adoption will be hard inside our team.' Respond.Value Anchored responseMid–senior 'You're a startup — what happens to my data if you go under?' Respond.Reframing the objectionSenior–leadership 'We're happy with our current process.' Respond.Surfacing the underlying concernEntry–mid 'Can you just send me some information and I'll review it?' How do you respond?Reframing the objectionEntry–mid 'I need to run this by a few more people first.' Walk me through your response.Surfacing the underlying concernEntry–mid 'Your onboarding timeline is too long for us.' Respond.Reframing the objectionEntry–mid A prospect says 'I don't have time for this right now' in your second call. What do you say?Surfacing the underlying concernEntry–mid 'We've never spent this much on this category before.' Respond.Value Anchored responseEntry–mid 'I don't think my manager will approve this.' How do you respond?Surfacing the underlying concernEntry–mid A prospect keeps rescheduling meetings for the fourth time. Walk me through your response.Knowing when to walk awayEntry–mid 'This seems complicated to set up.' Respond.Reframing the objectionEntry–mid 'What's the ROI on this?' when you're selling to a small team lead. How do you respond?Value Anchored responseEntry–mid A prospect won't answer basic qualifying questions after two attempts. What's your move?Knowing when to walk awayEntry–mid 'Our engineers say they can build this themselves with AI in a sprint.' Respond.Reframing the objectionMid–senior 'Every dollar of software budget not labeled AI is frozen this year.' Respond.Surfacing the underlying concernSenior–leadership 'Your product is a thin wrapper on the same model we could call directly.' Respond.Value Anchored responseMid–senior 'Our security team won't allow customer data to touch any external AI service.' Respond.Surfacing the underlying concernSenior–leadership 'Honestly, we'd pay more for the version without the AI features — to us they're risk, not value.' Respond.Value Anchored responseSenior–staff+'I can't tell you apart from the five other AI tools that emailed me this week.' Respond.Reframing the objectionEntry–mid 'We're going to wait a year and see how the AI market settles before buying anything.' Respond.Surfacing the underlying concernMid–senior 'I can't take usage-based pricing to my CFO — we can't budget a number that moves.' Respond.Value Anchored responseSenior–leadership 'Why would we pay for this when ChatGPT is free?' Respond.Value Anchored responseEntry–mid Legal redlines arrive demanding you contractually guarantee your AI will never produce an incorrect output. Walk me through your response.Knowing when to walk awaySenior–leadership 'We don't have capacity to run a security review on a vendor your size this quarter.' Respond.Surfacing the underlying concernMid–senior 'This email is obviously automated. Does a human actually work there?' Respond — and tell me what you'd change about your sequences afterward.Reframing the objectionEntry–mid 'Your implementation timeline is twice as long as your competitor's.' Respond.Reframing the objectionMid–senior A prospect says 'We're happy with our current solution, we're just exploring alternatives.' How do you respond?Surfacing the underlying concernEntry–mid 'I can get a freelancer to build this for one-tenth the cost.' Respond.Value Anchored responseEntry–senior Your champion says 'The CFO will never approve this.' Walk me through your response.Surfacing the underlying concernMid–leadership 'We need at least five customer references in our vertical before we can move forward.' Respond.Reframing the objectionMid–senior A prospect says 'Your contract terms are too restrictive compared to what we're used to.' How do you respond?Surfacing the underlying concernMid–senior 'I don't have the internal resources to manage a migration right now.' Respond.Value Anchored responseEntry–senior After presenting your solution, the prospect says 'This feels like overkill for what we need.' Walk me through your response.Reframing the objectionEntry–mid A prospect demands a 60-day payment term when your standard is net-30. How do you respond?Knowing when to walk awayMid–senior 'Your customer support SLA doesn't meet our uptime requirements.' Respond.Value Anchored responseMid–senior A prospect says 'We're waiting to see what [major competitor] announces next quarter.' How do you respond?Surfacing the underlying concernMid–leadership 'We've been burned by vendors over-promising and under-delivering before.' Respond.Reframing the objectionEntry–senior Your prospect says 'Legal is backed up for at least two months.' Walk me through your response.Surfacing the underlying concernMid–senior 'I need to see a live demo with our actual data before I can commit.' Respond.Knowing when to walk awayMid–senior A prospect says 'Your company is too small—what happens if you get acquired or go out of business?' How do you respond?Reframing the objectionEntry–senior 'We need this to integrate with [legacy system you don't support].' Respond.Value Anchored responseMid–senior Your champion leaves the company mid-deal. The new stakeholder says 'I wasn't part of these conversations.' Walk me through your response.Surfacing the underlying concernSenior–leadership 'Your solution requires too much change management for our organization.' Respond.Reframing the objectionMid–leadership A prospect asks for a custom pricing model that would set a bad precedent for your business. How do you respond?Knowing when to walk awaySenior–leadership 'I've heard from peers that your customer success team is hard to reach.' Respond.Surfacing the underlying concernEntry–senior 'We want to start with a pilot, but only if it's free and includes full enterprise features.' Walk me through your response.Knowing when to walk awayMid–senior A prospect says 'Your reporting capabilities don't match what our board expects to see.' How do you respond?Value Anchored responseMid–leadership 'I can't get my team to agree on whether we even need a solution like this.' Respond.Surfacing the underlying concernMid–senior A prospect says 'We need you to match [competitor]'s discount or we're walking.' How do you respond?Knowing when to walk awayMid–leadership 'Your onboarding process looks too technical for our non-technical users.' Respond.Reframing the objectionEntry–mid