Overcoming Sales Objections Starts in Your Nurture Emails

Every objection you hear on a sales call is a belief your lead walked in with. She was carrying it before she downloaded your lead magnet. Overcoming sales objections gets a lot easier when your follow-up emails take those beliefs out one at a time, days before she ever books a call.

I call this the stool of false beliefs. This post shows you the three legs I'd expect under one kind of lead, what each leg blocks, and how to write the email that removes it.

Every lead sits on a stool of false beliefs

Every lead you have is sitting on a stool. A stool only stands because of its legs. Each leg is something she believes that keeps her right where she is.

When one of those beliefs comes out of her mouth on a sales call, you hear it as an objection. So the common sales objections in your business are really the legs of your lead's stool. You already know your clients' legs because you hear them on every sales call.

Our job is to methodically remove the legs that are keeping her stuck and rebuild the stool with the beliefs that are actually true. Your nurture emails are where that work happens, one email at a time.

Meet Jen and Carol

I'll show you with two example characters from my latest video. Jen and Carol are made up for this example.

Jen is a 48 year old fitness coach. She helps women over 40 lose weight on a GLP-1 without losing their muscle. Her lead magnet is "Lose Fat, Not Muscle on Your GLP-1," a 5-day bodyweight workout and protein plan. Her $1,495 program picks up where the plan leaves off.

Carol is Jen's newest lead. She's 51 and she's been on the shot for three months. Carol's stool has three legs, and each one stops her from hiring Jen in a different way.

Leg one: "I can do this myself, I already am"

This is the first leg, in Carol's words: "I can do this myself, I already am."

This leg keeps her from ever seeing the need for a coach, and definitely from seeing Jen as the right coach. If you're coaching women on a GLP-1, you've heard some version of it on a call. She's doing fine on her own, so why pay someone?

In my 10 email sequence, email 4 goes after this leg. We never argue with her. I break down the exact move I use in email 4 in the full video, and the whole email is written out in the Lead Nurture Playbook.

Leg two: "I'm a 51 year old woman"

The second leg sounds like this: "I can't lift weights and eat tons of protein. I'm a 51 year old woman, and I have no desire to bodybuild or go to the gym and be gawked at."

That leg keeps her from giving herself permission to lose her weight the right way. She can agree she has a problem and still not picture herself doing what it takes.

Email 5 goes after this leg, and it's built on self-efficacy from a psychologist named Albert Bandura. People only try something when they believe they can actually pull it off. So the email makes the plan feel small enough to start this week.

Jen shows Carol how to get her protein in when she's never hungry, and why protein is required for healthy aging. She shows her she can start with two short 15 minute at-home strength workouts every week, even if she's never picked up a weight. Then she gives evidence that working out and eating protein will not create a bulky physique. She cites the studies and shows images of clients.

These easy first steps give Carol a better feeling of control, and she can picture herself doing every one of them.

Leg three: "The scale's going down, so it's working"

The third leg is the one I consider the monster: "The scale's going down, so it's working."

That one keeps her blind to the problem at all. I call this the wallpaper effect. Carol has done a fantastic job of wallpapering over the truth.

This leg is hard to argue with, so email 6 doesn't try. It uses a reframe. We take the thing Carol loves most right now, the scale dropping, and we flip what it means. The email shows her what's really coming off her body when she barely eats.

Now every pound she loses makes her wonder how much of that is muscle.

How to handle objections in sales emails, one leg at a time

So how do you handle objections in sales before the call? You give every leg its own email. The goal of every email is to take away one false belief and put a true one in its place.

Pick one leg per email. I send 10 emails over 10 days, and each one has its own job. Emails 4, 5 and 6 each saw off one leg of her stool.

Send her back to your lead magnet. Every email points to the core message in your lead magnet, and your lead magnet points to your offer. For Jen, that's the 5-day plan and the messaging about keeping her muscle.

Give the argument room. Each email runs at least 300 to 400 words, because the real story needs room to breathe.

Get the order right. Leg three blinds her to the problem, so the emails before it need to start opening her eyes. In my sequence, emails 2 and 3 help Carol see she has a problem. Email 2 shows her what she's losing right now, which is muscle and every calorie that muscle used to burn for her. Email 3 brings in a real number from a real study. People who came off a GLP-1 drug put back on two thirds of the weight within a year. By the end of email three, Carol should be clearly seeing some gaps. Then emails 4, 5 and 6 go after the legs.

By the end of email seven, all three legs should be significantly weakened or altogether gone. When Carol gets on a call with Jen after that, there's a lot less left to object to.

Jen cares enough about Carol to dismantle those false beliefs and get her on the right track. Caring enough to do that is the most honest thing a coach can do.

Find the three legs under your own leads

Your leads' legs are already in your sales call notes. Pull up your notes from your last few sales calls and write down the things you hear over and over.

Then sort them. Ask which belief keeps a lead from seeing she needs a coach, which keeps her from giving herself permission, and which keeps her blind to the problem at all.

Start with this question. What's the one thing your clients are sure they already know that they're completely wrong about? That's the first leg of the stool. Write the email that removes it, then write the next one. Overcoming sales objections this way happens in the emails she reads before she ever talks to you.

Once your emails are written, you build them into a workflow inside a CRM like Thrive Engine, so every new lead gets them in order, one per day. Your job is to read the replies and answer the people who write back.

I walk through all 10 emails, the stool and the psychology behind each email in the full video, How to Get Coaching Clients With Email (Why Your Follow-Up Isn't Working). Watch it here: [VIDEO LINK]