Nobody Wants To Be Overcome.
They Want To Be Understood.
An objection is not a wall. It is the only reliable sign that the person is still in the conversation with you.
I handle more objections at home than I ever do at the office.
We are not watching that show again. We already had pizza this week. You said you would clean the garage two months ago.
Every one of those is a moment where I can build a little trust or lose the remote for the night, and the difference is almost never about having a better argument. It is about whether the other person felt heard before I opened my mouth.
Which is worth remembering the next time you are on a call with a candidate or a client, because the mechanics do not change just because there is money involved.
Start with the word
We talk about overcoming objections, and I have never liked it. It makes the whole thing sound like an obstacle course. You against them, and one of you is going to end up on the floor.
Nobody wants to be overcome. They want to be understood.
Picture actually saying the thing that language implies. You just do not get it. This is the best job. Nobody has ever been persuaded that way in the history of conversations.
The job is not to push harder. It is to lean in softer.
Objections are vital signs.
If you hear nothing,
they are already
gone.
Silence is the bad outcome, not the objection
Think about objections the way a clinician thinks about vital signs. If you are not getting any readings, that is not good news. It means the person has either lost interest or already made a decision they are not going to share with you.
An objection means there is still life in the conversation.
Every one of them is really the same sentence underneath. Help me understand why this is right for me.
Treat that as a dead end and you will never find out what was actually stopping them. Treat it as dialogue and you have a chance to earn some trust, which is the only currency that matters here.
The unspoken objection is the dangerous one. That is the person who goes quiet, stops replying, and disappears, and you never learn why. Most ghosting is a concern that never got said out loud.
The pause is the whole skill
Here is the thing almost nobody does well, and it is not complicated.
When an objection lands, pause before responding.
Not a beat. An actual pause. Long enough to think about what the objection means rather than reaching for the answer you already have loaded.
There is a story about Lincoln I come back to often. When he was angry he would write it all down, every furious word, in a letter he had no intention of sending. Then he would put it away. That pause between the feeling and the sending saved him from a lot of bad decisions.
It will save you deals too.
You do not have to have the fastest answer to win. You have to be the one who listened long enough for the real concern to surface, because the first objection somebody gives you is very often not the real one.
Gong analysed over a million recorded sales calls looking for what separates top performers from everyone else. One of the clearest signals was talk time.
Top performers talk about 43 percent of the call. Average reps sit closer to 65 percent. In deals that were lost, talk time averaged 64 percent.
The finding I find most useful is this. High performers hold roughly the same talk-to-listen ratio whether the deal is going well or badly. Low performers do not. Their talk time climbs from about 54 percent in deals they win to 64 percent in deals they lose.
Which means when it starts slipping, the weaker instinct is to talk more. And talking more is what loses it.
That last part is the whole article in one statistic. Under pressure, the untrained response is to fill the space. The trained response is to leave it open.
One at a time
When someone raises three concerns at once, the temptation is to answer all three. Do not.
Think spotlight, not floodlight. Handle the one that matters most, completely, and earn the right to move to the next one.
And be careful about volume, because this is a trap I have walked into myself. Have you ever talked so much that you created a brand new objection that was not there when you started? I have. You keep going, you mention something they had not thought to worry about, and now you are handling two.
Stick to the issue on the table. Solve it. Stop.
Tone decides whether they keep talking
Speak like a calm guide, not a courtroom attorney.
When people feel safe they keep talking. When they feel judged they shut down, and once they stop talking to you it is finished. They will not tell you why. They will just stop responding.
The frame I use is to behave like a therapist rather than a closer. Calm, curious, unhurried, genuinely trying to help them get past whatever is in the way. It works because it is not a technique. If you are actually curious, people can tell, and it changes what they are willing to say.
One phrase I use constantly: sorry, I am genuinely curious, can you explain that a bit more? It buys understanding and it signals that you are not about to argue.
Most people do not listen
to understand.
They listen
to reload.
A structure for the conversation
If you want something more concrete than be curious and pause, the method I teach is LAARC. It is five steps and the value is that it keeps you from skipping to the answer.
Listen
Pause and let them fully express the concern. Not the first sentence of it. All of it. When you simply let someone talk, a surprising amount of the objection dissolves on its own before you have said anything.
Acknowledge
Show that you understand their perspective. And be clear on this, because it is where people get stuck: acknowledgement is not agreement. You do not have to agree with them. You have to make them feel heard. Once someone feels acknowledged they are far more open to whatever comes next.
Ask
Get to the real reason underneath. The objection someone leads with is often a socially acceptable version of the actual concern. One good question usually surfaces the thing they were not sure how to say.
Respond
Now, and only now, give a response built around what they actually said rather than the objection you assumed you were getting.
Confirm
The step nearly everybody skips. A conversation is not finished because somebody nodded. Ask a direct question that tells you whether the concern is genuinely resolved. If it was about money, confirm the value landed. If it was about a specific request, confirm they can get the outcome they wanted another way. Get a yes before you move on, and if you get a no, you are not finished, you are back at the start.
Skipping the confirm step is the most common and most expensive habit I see. People answer the objection, hear silence, decide silence means agreement, and move on. Then the person disappears a week later and nobody knows why.
Usable on your next call
- Pause before you answer. Count to three if you have to. The silence feels much longer to you than it does to them, and half the objection often resolves itself while you wait.
- Ask one more question before you respond. The first objection is frequently a stand-in for the real one. Curiosity gets you to the actual concern faster than any rebuttal will.
- Handle one thing at a time. Spotlight, not floodlight. Finish it before moving on, and stop talking once it is finished.
- Watch your talk time when it is going badly. That is the moment the instinct to fill the space is strongest and most expensive. The data says talking more is what losing sounds like.
A no is usually a not yet
Most of the time a no is not a verdict. It is a not yet, delivered by somebody who has a concern they have not fully articulated, sometimes not even to themselves.
John Maxwell has a line I use often. It is not our job to win the conversation. It is to win their trust.
That reframe changes what you are optimising for. You stop trying to be right and start trying to be the person they will tell the truth to, and the truth is the only thing that lets you actually help.
Ask yourself how you would want your own hesitation handled. Or better, how you would want it handled if the person on the other end were your mother, or your closest friend. Would you want them steamrolled? Or would you want somebody who said, I completely understand why that would concern you, let us talk it through.
That is the blueprint. It is not a technique and there is nothing clever about it, which is precisely why it works.
An objection is a vital sign, not a wall. Silence is the outcome to fear, because unspoken concerns become people who simply stop replying. Pause before answering, ask one more question, handle one issue at a time, and watch your talk time hardest when the deal is slipping, because that is exactly when the instinct to fill the space costs the most. Nobody wants to be overcome. They want to be understood.
Keynotes and
workshops.
Chris speaks at sales kickoffs and to revenue teams on consistency, mindset, and handling objections, drawn from building and leading sales organizations rather than studying them. For the other half of the deal, see how to close more deals.
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