4 Common Sales Objections and How to Handle Them

As a painting contractor, a big part of your job is sales. This means that in order to be successful, you’ll need to master the sales process and how to navigate common sales objections. Part of landing consistent sales is knowing how to steer potential customers away from objecting, which requires communicating your value and how your services will benefit your client.

If you are running headfirst into sales objections every time you participate in lead outreach, you should consider working with a business coach. At Painter’s Academy, our skilled team of business coaches intimately understands the painting industry and can provide essential insight into refining the sales process. Here’s a look at four common sales objections and how to handle them.

What Is a Sales Objection?

Sales objections are reasons for which customers choose not to buy your goods or services. They don’t always represent fully lost opportunities, and they often highlight areas for sales reps to improve and clarify the features about their products that are raising concern. This allows your sales team to use the feedback from sales objections to improve your sales funnel and hopefully convert customers in the future.

If you’ve owned your painting business for a while, it’s likely that you have started to become familiar with objections in your market, meaning it’s more likely that you’ll start to hear the same objections arise the longer you’ve been in business. However, while time and experience are the best ways to gain valuable sales insight, most sales objections fall into four categories, making them easier to anticipate and address for smaller painting companies in the earlier stages of their business. The most popular sales objections fall into one of the following categories:

• Budget
• Trust
• Need
• Urgency

Painting Project Budget

Of all the sales objections, a lack of budget is often the most common. If you own a painting business, it’s likely you’ve heard prospects say, “it’s too expensive” a time or two. Objections to price are common because the nature of a big painting project comes with some level of financial risk to the customer. This means sales reps must convince potential customers that the reward for their painting services is worth the risk. You’ll need to position your services in a way that demonstrates their value and payoff to the customer.

Trust in Your Painting Company

For companies in the early stages of their business, trust can be a challenging sales objection to overcome. Specifically, if your market is saturated with local painting contractors that have been in the business for a while and have built a strong reputation, it can be difficult to build trust and draw in potential prospects. In these scenarios, it is essential to double down on your value and have a strong elevator pitch. You’ll need to establish your business’s authority in your market.

Need for a Great Paint Job

In most need-based sales objections, potential customers will probably say something along the lines of, “I don’t understand how your service can help me.” This kind of sales objection can be harnessed as a great opportunity for converting the customer in the future. By using open-ended questions to gain insight into your customer’s needs, you can leverage the information in the future to adjust your pitch to provide unique value to specific customers.

Lack of Urgency

Another reason a potential prospect may object in the sales funnel is that they don’t feel a sense of urgency to convert at the time you are offering your services. In other words, they may have a lack of urgency. Similar to need-based objections, urgency objections provide opportunities to convert the customer in the future. In these scenarios, it is important for sales reps to ask prospects to elaborate on why they feel a purchase is not an urgent need for them. This can provide insight into competing services and highlight ways to market your services as an urgent need for your customers.

Contact the Business Coaches at Painter’s Academy to Implement an Effective Sales Funnel

If your painting business is struggling to gain conversions, the marketing professionals at Painter’s Academy are here to help. With over 13 years of experience helping painting businesses grow, we have the know-how to take your business to the next level. We have a proven track record of helping painters develop revenue streams and gain contracts that provide profitable returns.

If you want to grow your painting business, call (423) 800-0520 or complete our online contact form today.