Email prospecting is a vital part of any business’s sales strategy. Sales representatives have been trying various approaches to increase their outreach and with the help of platforms like Outplay, they have observed a substantial increase in engagement. But too many responses lead to another problem - how do we read and respond to 100s of emails, and that too in time? We know that not all responses outrightly say “Let’s close the deal!!”. There are a plethora of objections that the sales representatives have to resolve before getting that sweet “I am interested!” response.

And as always, Outplay is ready to suit you up and fight this battle with you. In this article, we will share how Outplay helps you identify and efficiently handle objections with our AI-powered feature – Objection Handling.
 

To better appreciate the feature, let’s first understand what are objections and why are they important.

‍What are Objections?

Storytime – a long time back, I asked my parents to buy me a bicycle. And like any other parent, their answer was no (objection). I remember giving random reasons why I needed a bicycle (objection handling). While I did get it on my birthday, I am quite sure it was not because of my reasons 😜. Coming back to the sales world, as a sales representative, you send cold emails to the prospects, and not all prospects respond with an interest in buying or meeting. Instead, they come up with some problems that could either be bad timing, budget issues, using competitor products, authority issues, not being interested, etc. We call these “Objections”. 

Why is Objection Handling important?

As sales representatives, it is a challenge to go through prospects’ replies to spot opportunities and objections. You are supposed to be quick in responding to the emails or risk losing the opportunity to your competitor. 

According to Harvard Business Review, lead qualification drops 10 times over if you wait longer than 5 minutes to respond to a lead, suggesting that even a few minutes’ delay can affect your results.

As per Forbes, “The majority of sales reps’ time is spent in sales technology (62.8%) with email for sales-related purposes taking the most time (33.2%)"

Research also suggests that between 35 and 50 percent of sales go to the first-responding vendor.

Such a short window is insufficient to read the responses and create personalized replies to tackle the raised objections. Another remarkable point is that the correspondence should be cordial and optimistic while keeping the potential prospective deals in mind. We don’t want to send out random responses to each and every prospect, like my Bicycle pitch 🙃. This makes objection handling a complex problem for any sales representative to solve in time. 

But, the same is not true for an intelligent machine (read AI 🧠) It can read all of your emails, identify the objections and create personalized responses in no time! Additionally, some explanations could make it a lot easier for the sales representatives to understand the reasons for the identified objection and easily decide on the suggested reply.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at different OutPlay’s Objection Handling features, shall we?  

1. Objection Identification:

Objection identification uses a state-of-the-art AI model trained to detect multiple objections in sales like Not Interested, bad Timing, Budget issues, Authority issues, presence of a Competitor, etc and opportunities like Interested with great accuracy. At Outplay, we are a firm believer in the right to explanations. AI has the power to automate decisions and those decisions have business impacts. Explainability helps by providing insights into how AI makes decisions, so that AI is no longer a black box! 
 

Powered by explainable AI, Objection Identification can help you to identify the objections in the mail by highlighting the text with the objection. Below is a screenshot of a sample reply

Our approach to AI product development is via collaborative human-machine interaction. As salespersons, you will be able to correct AI by removing objections or even marking new objections of your own. We believe that we can learn, grow and help you sell better through this bidirectional interaction. This approach is better than complete machine automation because there is a certain human charm in sales that can never be replaced by any machine.

Identifying Objections is just the beginning. The next big question is how do we handle these objections. And this is where Flashcards come into the picture. 

2. Flashcards

Flashcards are quick suggestions generated by our AI model to handle objections and queries. Salespersons can choose from the most appropriate ones and use them for their replies. If you want to address a different objection or require a different response, you can use the arrow keys, as shown in the image below, to select accordingly.

In this way, manual effort and time can be saved to a great extent. Additionally, you can also try Objection Handling with our Magicmail to write more impactful and personalized replies with just a click of a button. Magicmail creates ready-to-sent emails in seconds by considering all of the information we have about the prospect and account.

At Outplay AI, we believe in and strive for ethical, responsible, and explainable AI. Our vision is to effortlessly embed AI to boost the sales lifecycle. And finally, this is just one of the many AI Features in our arsenal to help our customers become better at sales and increase their productivity. Try it out today and let us know what you think.