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Objections: an index card stretched to three hundred pages

Jeb Blount · Wiley, 2018
17 de mayo de 2026 por
Objections: an index card stretched to three hundred pages
Andrés Briñez

Blount sorts objections by where they appear: the ones you get asking for a meeting, the ones you get asking for a small commitment, the ones you get asking for the decision, and the ones you get negotiating terms. Each type is answered differently, and confusing them causes most clumsy replies. Around that sits a lot of exhortation.

What I took from it

First, the classification itself. A "now is not the time" at the start does not mean what it means at the end: the first is a reflex for getting rid of a stranger, the second is a real objection that deserves a real answer. Treating them alike loses both.

Second, having a written answer to the five objections you genuinely hear. Not a script to recite, but a sentence thought through in the cold, because improvising in the moment somebody has just told you no is the worst possible condition for thinking. Writing them also forces you to find out which ones are legitimate objections that should change the service rather than the conversation.

Third, uncomfortable and true: fear of hearing no is what stops people asking for the next step, and then the no arrives anyway, later and without an explanation. Since keeping that in mind, every conversation ends with a specific question said out loud, and the answer gets written down as they said it.

What I left out

The tone. The book is written for a sales floor with quotas and noise, heavy on motivation and high-volume examples. Someone selling a few large engagements a year does not live in that world: objections arrive in writing, with days in between, and there is time to think. I also left the pressure techniques for closing, which work once and destroy the referral, which is where the next job comes from.

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Marc Peter Deisenroth, A. Aldo Faisal and Cheng Soon Ong · Cambridge University Press, 2020
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