Most founders completely misunderstand sales objections.

A while back I was invited by Professor Philip Tran to teach Objection Handling to his students at the College of San Mateo in California.

The lecture eventually became an official part of the curriculum chapter on handling objections.

"Objections" are a huge problem for managing a deal: most founders and Salespeople completely misunderstand the concept of objections.

A prospect says they are already working with a competitor, they don't have budget, or it's not a priority right now. The sales guy immediately starts hunting for the perfect comeback...

Wrong.

In most cases, the objection is not the problem. It's just the symptom. The real mistake was made weeks earlier.

It comes down to bad positioning, weak discovery, failure to expose pain, or failing to build real urgency and value.

That's why I've never liked the traditional playbook of building massive battle cards or memorizing generic responses.

Both approaches assume you know exactly what the prospect is going to say. You don't. Every prospect, deal, and buying committee is completely different.

Over the last 20+ years, I've handled thousands of objections across SaaS, Healthcare, RetailTech, IoT, and Enterprise sales. Eventually, I realized that objection handling is just one piece of a much larger puzzle.

That's why I built DealMentor

Yes, it helps handle objections. But it also helps with the 20+ OTHER key sales and business development challenges that quietly destroy revenue before you even get to a pitch, including things like positioning, messaging, discovery, competitive strategy, cold outreach, and meeting preparation.

Because by the time a prospect says "It's too expensive," the mistake was usually made long before. The objection is just the first visible crack in a broken revenue system.