Do any of these email responses from prospects or clients sound familiar to you?

“Everything is on hold at the moment.”

“Due to the circumstances, we just don’t have the budget at this time.”

“We are not making any decisions at this time.”

“This is not a good time for us, I’m sure you can understand.”

What all of these answers have in common is that they are just common stalls. Oh sure, the circumstances may be new (the Covid-19 pandemic is certainly new!), But in essence these objections are the same kinds of positions you usually get.

“It’s not a good time”, “I don’t have the budget”, “I’m not making decisions right now” are responses you receive during your normal sales process, aren’t they?

So how should you handle these positions now? Using the same best practice approach that you should always use – you need to isolate these objections.

What do you really want to know given these posts or objections? You want to know:

“If you had the budget, is it our product or service that you would choose?” Y,

“When the time is right to make these kinds of decisions again, would you seriously consider our solution?” Y,

“When circumstances change, are you interested enough in our solution to choose us?”

This is how you should respond when you receive these types of email posts during this pandemic.

Of course, you’ll want to soften your response by showing empathy for what your prospect or prospect is going through.

Here are a couple of good all-purpose email responses that you can customize for each of the above situations:

Dear prospect:

Thanks for your reply and don’t worry about the budget right now.

We work with many companies like yours, and timing should make sense, both in terms of budget and what your current needs are.

Quick question: Budgeting aside for a moment, I wonder if it makes sense to continue our conversation in the future based on what you know about how we work.

In other words, as long as the budget is available, is our (product or solution) something that you find enough value to talk about at another time?

Another example:

Dear prospect,

Good to know that you are keeping well.

I understand that things may be on hold for now, but I was wondering: How do you feel about what we covered in our demo last week?

Do you feel that this had value to you?

Let me know so I can properly follow up.

Thanks …

As you can see from these sample responses, what we are doing is bypassing their objection or deadlock so that you can determine whether or not they have a genuine interest in your product or service.

Until you know that, you will only be chasing your tail.

And that doesn’t sit well in any sales climate …