When You Say "No," What Do You Mean?

Every basic sales course makes the point that, in real life, there are "valid" objections (real, justified...) on the one hand, and "false" objections (fake, or just plain bluff) on the other.

Until about 25 years ago, sales trainers and coaches around the world taught techniques for telling whether an objection was valid or false. At the time, the professional literature took the same line.

When a customer said, for example, "The product is too expensive," the salesperson was supposed to ask something like: "And if it cost 10% less, would that be okay?" or "Expensive compared to what?"

This outdated approach no longer appears in current professional literature. Once it was shown that an "objection" is really a kind of conflict, it became clear that questions like these aren't just ineffective, they actually make the conflict worse.

One of the last places on earth where this approach is still taught is... Israel.

Say the customer threw out "too expensive" as a way (an extremely common one!) of trying to get the price down, with no connection to any alternative price (notice he didn't mention any alternative...). Now he's been backed into a corner. He can't admit he was just doing it as part of a negotiation... and that he has no idea what the alternatives cost. So he's likely to dig in his heels and say something like: "It's expensive, period," or "Leave it with me," or "If you can do something on the price, do it. If not, we'll go somewhere else"... or something along those lines. And just like that, the false objection has become a perfectly valid one.

Today's approach is that most objections (nearly all of them) are false, so the professional response is to react automatically as if the objection is false. Only if the conflict is still standing do you move on to the solutions that fit a valid objection.