The Budget Objection is Crap

We’ve all heard these phrases way too often – “we don’t have any budget” or “budgets are fixed.” They’re similar to the “It’s not you it’s me” line which unfortunately I also heard heard way too often in my earlier years. That said, all of them are crap.

Most purchases companies make throughout the year are not budgeted. There’s a bucket of money that gets allocated to specific solutions but those solutions usually aren’t actual line items in the budget. I had a CFO tell me once that a budget is ultimately a best guesstimate on how much money a company thinks it will need to spend to hit their guesstimated revenue targets. It’s a guideline to prevent against misuse of funds but is also fluid and changes with priorities.

Here’s a phrase that proves budgets aren’t fixed – “priorities have changed.” Have you ever hear that one? Yeah, me too. When we hear that, it usually means we were dealing with someone lower on the totem pole and someone from above came and took our money. Or, someone internally or externally did a better job selling the value of their solution over ours.

What they’re really saying when they say they don’t have budget is that we haven’t justified our solution’s value enough to make them consider shifting budget from one area to the other. It usually isn’t a one to one comparison either. Our solution could be less expensive or better than their current one but those value points are outweighed by the cost of change and/or time involved to make the transition. People below the power line tend to use the budget objection more often because they don’t want to take the risk or invest the time, regardless of how obvious the one to one comparison is to their current solution.

This is why it’s so critical to get as high as we can within organizations and find true Champions. The two main characteristics of true Champions are 1) they can steal budget and 2) they agree to be our Champion. We need to find people who will not only help us sell internally but who actually have influence on the final decision and can stand up and fight for us when the time comes. We also can’t assume anyone is our Champion based on a few good conversations. We need to be direct and ask them. At a certain stage of the sales process, I ask “will you be my Champion” or “will you fight for me when the time comes?” There are two answers to that question: 1) yes! and 2) anything other than that. If they hesitate then you know you don’t have a true Champion and you have more work to do.

Once we identify who could be a true Champion for us then we need to figure out a way to justify the value of our solutions and get it on the priority list. A lot of this has to do with what I wrote about last week on how to create a sense of urgency by selling to priorities.

At the end of the day, we’re always going to have to face the budget objection but instead of looking it as an impossible roadblock look at it as a challenge and an opportunity to show real value. Good luck and happy selling.