We've been spending time on Gong.io's fascinating study of objection handling in sales calls. To learn more about this study, you can go to their blog -

We talked before about the power of slowing down. This can be especially true when dealing with objections on the phone. How you define an objection is subjective, but we feel that any time a prospect starts to ask you multiple questions, you should treat them in this manner.

Prospects asking questions is a great thing, as it demonstrates they are attempting to listen to your presentation and care enough to interrupt the conversation to seek clarification. What we have to be mindful of is losing control of the call. When you get multiple questions, either in one breath or one after the other, you must be careful not to spiral out of control of the conversation.

As you can see, their research shows that Top Performers are better at gaining control of the conversation by asking questions in return.

For example, if someone comes back at you with "the price is too high" an average performer would immediately try and justify their price. Top performers will hone in on this response from the prospect and start asking questions to better understand what is really meant.

The questions don't have to be fantastic or even totally related to the objection. What is needed is to get control back on your side and keep the conversation going.

Your price may be way too high, but until you have context how can you know what is truly being said?

Something as simple as, "Is price your most important consideration?" can get you back in control and lead the prospect to start justifying their position giving you more time to think and more information to use to your benefit.

We'll cover the types of questions to ask in further blog posts.

Until then, use the data to pause, slow down and then ask a question. Make sense?