The Follow Up
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How to respond to: "We don't have budget"

How to respond to: "We don't have budget"

The oldest objection in the book

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In today’s Follow Up:

Responding to “we don’t have a budget” 🎤
Sales in the news 🗞️
Sales weapon of the day 🛠️
LinkedIn Influencers & Memes 🖼️

Sales Fact of The Day

The best sellers have a “talk to listen” ratio of ~46%. Average salespeople are in the high 60s.

Source: Gong.io

Fact or Fiction: “We don’t have budget”

It’s every sales rep’s 4 least favorite words:

The open bar’s closed “We don’t have budget.”

You’ve heard it, I’ve heard it… and anyone that’s tried to sell anything has heard it.

Sometimes it’s true.

But sometimes it’s simply an excuse to get them off your back.

The key is to figure out which one it is, and how you can overcome it.

Before we jump into how to overcome the objection, let’s lay some groundwork.

How do corporate budgets work?

Budgets are handled differently at every company, but there’s a few things that are common.

Every company starts with a master budget which includes each department’s budget (these are the budgets we care about).

Each department usually receives its budget based on:

How much they spent last year
How much they need to hit their targets.

Most managers will try to spend their entire budget (even if they don’t need it), because if not, they’ll get less next year.

Luckily for us, this works to our advantage.

Now let’s get to the part you really care about.

How to overcome “we don’t have budget”.

This objection can pop up on a cold call and all the way down to the closing call.

And it should be treated differently depending on the stage of the sales cycle.

1. Cold call/top of the funnel

This is the stage where you’re just trying to drum up interest and get the prospect to look at your product.

At this stage, your goal is to pivot the conversation to show the value you can provide, or the money/time you can save them.

I totally understand, and most companies I work with are also on super-tight budgets. If you’re open to it, I’d love to share how our product is saving (insert other company) money, by automating…xyz. What are your thoughts on a 30min call later this week to see if we may be worth adding to your next budget?

This is a very generic template but can be customized to fit your company & voice.

Kick the “budget” talk down the road until you’ve proven the value of what you’re selling.

2. Middle and bottom of the funnel.

We’ve almost made it to the finish line, and now you’re about to ask the prospect to pull out their wallet.

By this time, you should’ve already established:

How valuable your product is to the prospect.
How much time or money it will save them (direct ROI).
How much their problem is costing them without your product.

And now it’s your turn to address the elephant in the room.

Hey Johnny, before we move on to the next step, do you have a budget for this project?

I know what you’re thinking. Of course, they’re going to say “no”, but that’s ok. This is the time to re-establish your value and why they need your product.

As we discussed, this issue is a major pain point in your org. How much do you expect your company to invest in fixing this problem?

This is when you want them to give you that magic number. Maybe it’s way off from the price of your product, but now you have something to work with.

Now time for the kill shot…

Thank you for sharing. I want to be transparent with you and let you know that our solution is typically in the range of $xx,xxx to $xx,xxx. Knowing that, does it seem totally unreasonable to continue the conversation?

In some cases, it might actually be a waste of everyone’s time to move forward and that’s ok.

As salespeople, it’s not our job to sell to everyone.

Our job is to find people that have a problem and sell them the solution to fix it.

…and make that commish’.

Have you ever closed a deal after someone said they had no budget?

Sales Tip of The Day

On your next cold call, try a strong pattern interrupt like:

🗣️ “Hey John, I know what your thinking, and yes… this is a cold call…”

🗣️ “Hey John, I honestly didn’t expect you to pick up…”

By interrupting the pattern that someone expects from a salesperson, you’ll get them to let their guard down and listen to what you have to say.

Sales in the News

Selling Power released their “50 Best Companies to Sell for in 2023”. All of the companies applied and paid a fee to get on it (so read it with a grain of salt).
A business coach shares 4 ways to level up your sales follow up game.
33 sales contest ideas to give your sales team a boost.
From Reddit: The “miracle deal” that took this rep to 108% quota

Sales Weapon of The Day

Tome: Get rid of your boring PowerPoints and create beautiful pitch decks or presentations in seconds with the help of AI.

A word from our LinkedIn Influencers:

#SDRsMatter 🏆️

Sales Meme of the Day

And that’s a wrap!