The Toughest Objection of Them All

If you are like most sales and recruiting professionals in the staffing industry, you’re probably frustrated hearing your prospects and customers tell you, “We’re not hiring and we have no budget.”

How does one overcome such an objection?

Better yet, how does one even engage in a meaningful conversation when you know your prospect or customer is operating under those circumstances? Here is an idea that has worked for me, and hundreds of others.

As we all know, the employment market is currently very challenging and many or most organizations do not have the budget to hire consultants.

Rather than hoping our prospect or client doesn’t bring up the “no budget/not hiring” objection, we need to do the opposite. We need to bring it up.

Yes, you read that correctly.

We as sales people need to bring up that objection and address it head-on. If we don’t, then we’re stuck in objection-handling mode. And coming up with a rebuttal for this objection is much more difficult to overcome than if we address this objection on our terms.

Here is an abbreviated sample conversation:

Recruiter/Sales Rep: “John, can I assume your business circumstances are similar to most of my other customers in that you’re not hiring and don’t have the budget to hire any additional help now or in the near future?”

Customer: “Yes, that is the case. I wish I could but the funding is locked down. We are currently not spending any money on new hires. Try me back in 6 months.”

Recruiter/Sales Rep: (Show empathy for his current situation) “Gosh, John, how are you and your team coping with that?”

Customer: “Well, we are swamped but we are getting by.”

Recruiter/Sales Rep: “John, now that we understand that and expectations are clear that you don’t have the budget to hire, let’s change gears and talk about your current projects and all this work that is keeping you so busy.”

Customer: “Uh, ok, what specifically would you like to discuss?”

From here, we steer the conversation to learn more about the specific details of their projects and more specifically the challenges and issues the customer currently faces.

By leading with the objection we take away the prospect’s excuse for not talking with us. Now that we have eliminated their objection from their “bag of objections,” we are able to move forward with the conversation and discuss their projects and challenges.

You may be asking yourself, “Why would I want to talk with a manager who has no budget and can’t hire?”

Because in a down economy, you have to actually sell in order to generate job orders and make placements. And by selling, I mean creating sales opportunities where no pre-defined, budget-approved job order exists. More specifically, you have to identify the customer’s pain points or critical business issues and then convert that into a job order.

In this tough economy, your prospects and customers have a ton of “pain.” You just have to identify it and convert it into a sales opportunity.

The difference between a down economy and a good economy is that in a good economy, your customers have these very same issues and challenges but you never know about them because you never have to ask. They just give you a job order. But now, in a down economy, you have to uncover what those issues are and sell to them. You have to offer a solution to their problem.

In a good economy, they do that for you by developing a pre-defined job order. If you’re not familiar with this style of selling (it’s the only way to sell in this market), read my industry white paper, Effective Sales Strategies For Selling IT Staffing During A Recession by clicking here.

In a tough economy, you need to stop seeking out pre-defined job orders and instead seek out customer problems. It’s only when you find a customer problem that you have an opportunity to make a sale.

Happy Selling.