Feel, Felt, Found

An objection is not usually a request for information. It is a statement of risk, and the person raising it is not waiting to be corrected. Argue with it and they will defend it, because people do not change their mind while they are defending it.

Feel, Felt, Found is a three-move structure for lowering that defence far enough that new information can actually land. It is old, it is well known, and delivered word for word as a script it is embarrassing. Used as a structure, in your own language, it is one of the most useful things a small business owner can learn.

What each move is doing

Feel. You acknowledge the position without agreeing with the conclusion. That distinction is the whole craft. "That is a fair question, £450 a month is a real difference" is acknowledgement. "Yes, we are expensive" is capitulation, and you have just conceded the argument you were about to have.

Felt. You normalise it. The message underneath is: you are not being difficult and you are not missing something obvious, other sensible people have raised exactly this. Nobody moves position while they think moving makes them look foolish.

Found. The new information. This is the only move that changes anything, and it is the one most people skip straight to. It works because by now nothing is being defended, so the facts get considered instead of repelled.

The rule that keeps you out of trouble

The "found" has to be true. If you do not have a genuine example of somebody who took the other view and discovered something, you do not have a third move, and you must not manufacture one.

This is not squeamishness, it is self-interest. An invented example survives about one follow-up question. "Who was that?" "What did they end up doing?" "Could I speak to them?" You will be caught, and you will be caught at the exact moment the buyer was starting to trust you. There is no recovery from that in a small market where everybody talks.

If you have no real example, use your own experience instead and say so plainly. "When we changed how we priced this, here is what we found in our own numbers" is honest, specific and does the same job.

A worked example

Take a commercial cleaning firm quoting £1,850 a month against a competitor at £1,400. The objection: "you are £450 a month more expensive."

The instinctive response is to defend the price, usually with the word "but" and a paragraph about quality. Tension goes up, the buyer digs in, and the conversation is over even if it carries on for twenty minutes.

The structured version. Feel: "£450 a month is £5,400 a year, and I would be asking the same question in your position." Felt: "most of the contracts we picked up last year came to us from a cheaper provider, so this is the normal starting point rather than an awkward one."

Found, and only if it is genuinely true of your business: "what those clients found was that the monthly fee was not the real cost. It was the re-cleans and the supervision. On a site of your size that tends to be about half a day a week of a facilities manager chasing standards. At a £38,000 salary that is roughly £21 an hour, so four hours a week across the year is about £3,900, and that is before anybody counts the complaints."

Then, crucially, a question rather than a close: "what does an hour of your facilities manager's time actually cost you?" Now they are doing the arithmetic themselves, and a conclusion someone reaches on their own paper is worth ten of yours. Figures illustrative, and the £3,900 does not fully close a £5,400 gap, which is deliberate. The honest version of this only works if you also have something to say about the remaining £1,500.

How to apply it this week

1. Write down your three most common objections. The real ones, in the buyer's words, not the tidied-up versions you use internally. Almost every business has three and hears them weekly.
2. Write a true "found" for each. An actual client experience or a number from your own business. If you cannot write one, that is a finding about your proposition, not about your sales patter.
3. Put the acknowledgement into your own words. Say it out loud. If it sounds like a sales course, rewrite it until it sounds like you talking to somebody you respect.
4. Never say the actual words. "I understand how you feel, others have felt the same" is a red flag to any buyer who has ever been sold to. Use the structure, bin the phrasing.
5. Finish on a question, not a close. The found gives them something to weigh. The question invites them to weigh it. Closing at that moment undoes the tension you have just spent three moves lowering.
6. Debrief the ones you lose. Write down the objection and what you said within an hour of the meeting. Six weeks of that is a better sales training programme than most things you could buy.

Where it does not apply

It is for a risk that can be answered with information. It is not for a genuine no. If somebody does not want what you sell, or truly cannot afford it, running a structure at them is not persuasion, it is pressure, and it costs you the referral they might otherwise have made.

It also fails when the stated objection is not the real one. Price is the socially acceptable objection, the polite way of saying "I am not convinced" or "I do not think you can do this". Handle the stated price objection perfectly and you will still lose, because you answered the wrong question. If the objection has three parts, or moves each time you deal with it, stop structuring and start asking.

The mistake most owners make

They use it to win. The purpose is not to manoeuvre somebody into agreement, it is to get the tension low enough for a decision to be made on the actual facts. Buyers can feel the difference immediately, and the technique used as a weapon is worse than no technique at all.

The second mistake is skipping the first two moves because they feel like fluff. They are not persuasion, they are permission. Without them the third move is just an argument delivered with better data, and better data has never yet talked anybody out of a position they were defending.

The questions to sit with

• What are the three objections you hear most, and have you ever written down your best answer to any of them?
• Out of 10, how honest is the evidence you use when someone challenges your price?
• When you last lost on price, was price the real reason? What would you have had to ask to find out?
• Does everyone who sells for you answer these objections the same way, and would you be comfortable if you heard it?

This is a working part of the Sales & Marketing Engine. Most owners do not lose deals because their price is wrong. They lose them in the ninety seconds after the objection, by defending instead of acknowledging, and by reaching for evidence before anybody was in a state to hear it.