Overcoming Price Objections And Closing More Deals

As a Sales Leader, one of your primary challenges is equipping your team to handle price objections effectively.

While price discussions are an inevitable part of the sales process, many salespeople struggle to maintain confidence and commitment when faced with these objections.

Here is your step-by-step strategy to coach your team in developing conviction in their value proposition, enabling them to navigate price discussions competently and close more deals.

Lets get into it!

Understanding the Root Causes

To coach effectively, it's crucial to start by understanding why price objections occur so often.

Three primary reasons include:

1. Conditioned Negotiation Tactics: Prospects often expect to negotiate on price due to past purchasing experiences. They are in effect - expert negotiators.
2. Lack of Value Internalisation: Salespeople may not fully internalise the value of their own product, leading to a lack of confidence in justifying costs.
3. Poor Discovery of Business Impact: Insufficient understanding of how the prospect's problems impact key business metrics makes it challenging to position the solution as a wise investment.

Coaching Strategy

Step 1: Encourage Customer Interviews

Coach your team to conduct brief interviews with 3-5 successful customers to:

• Understand specific business problems solved
• Quantify business outcomes achieved
• Gather testimonials about the overall experience of how they went from their prior state to their current state

This exercise provides your team with powerful case studies and stories to reference during pricing discussions.

If you're interested in learning more about sales team coaching techniques, we have a deep dive article here.

Step 2: Coach up their discovery skills

Train your team to shift from product-focused conversations to in-depth discussions of business challenges. Coach them to ask questions like:

• "How long have you been dealing with [core problems]? What has been the year-over-year impact?"
• "What specific business metrics have been affected? Can you quantify those impacts in pounds/dollars?"
• "What financial risks do these issues pose if left unaddressed?"

This discovery process helps prospects recognise the true cost of inaction, positioning your solution as a wise investment.

If you're interested in learning more about coaching sales discovery calls, we have a deep dive article here.

Step 3: Develop Proper Price Positioning Skills

Coach your team on strategic responses to price inquiries:

• Provide price ranges for early inquiries
• Emphasise value over price by recapping business impacts
• Frame the solution as an investment, highlighting expected returns
• Use confirmation questions to refocus discussions on value

Encourage confidence in your team, reminding them that thorough discovery will always be the route to validating cost.

Step 4: Foster Commitment to Change

To drive long-term improvement in handling price objections, coach your team to change their mindsets and approaches:

• Have them track call outcomes and quantify the impact of lost deals due to price objections. When sales people realise how much commission they have missed out on due to handling these situations poorly, it's often a powerful catalyst for change.
• Discuss career aspirations and how improved pricing confidence can support their goals
• Share success stories of team members who have mastered these skills. Sales people can relate to their peers to a much higher degree than those people outside of their own company.

Implement ongoing coaching and accountability measures to reinforce these new behaviours.

Conclusion

This strategy was developed from episode 1 of our youtube series Coaching Conundrums with our host and Head Of Growth Richard Smith, with expert advice from Sales Coach Steve Myers.

If you're interested in learning how expert sales coaches handle the toughest conundrums in the world of sales today, and want stay at the top of the curve to help your sales team - watch the full episode here, and subscribe to the channel.

As a sales leader, your role in helping your team overcome price objections goes beyond teaching tactics. By coaching your team to gain conviction in their value, commit to discovery-based conversations, and find intrinsic motivation to change their approach to these situations, you can help them navigate pricing discussions with confidence and close more deals.

Dedicate time to continuous learning and improvement, and watch as price objections become less of a roadblock to your team's success.

If you are interested in learning how to be the best sales leader you can be, check out our essential guide to effective sales leadership here.

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