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. It is old and widely taught, 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 — and it works just as well on an internal objection as on a customer one.

What each move is doing

Feel — acknowledge

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 — normalise

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 — inform

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 first two moves buy you nothing commercially. They lower the tension so that the third move, the only one carrying real information, is heard rather than fought. Skip to the third and you are simply arguing with better data, and better data has never yet talked anybody out of a position they were defending.

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 client 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.

What it sounds like in practice

Take a price objection: you have quoted a monthly fee and the buyer says a competitor is several hundred pounds a month cheaper. 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 acknowledges the gap in real money first — a difference of £450 a month is £5,400 a year, and it is a fair question to ask. Then it normalises: most of the work you picked up last year came to you from a cheaper provider, so this is the usual starting point rather than an awkward one. Only then does the information arrive, and only if it is genuinely true of your business: what those clients found was that the monthly fee was not the real cost, because supervision time and repeat visits sat behind it.

Then, crucially, finish on 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 somebody reaches on their own paper is worth ten of yours. Note also that if your honest numbers only close part of the gap, you have to have something to say about the rest. The version that pretends otherwise is the version that gets caught.

How to use it

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.

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 rather than about your sales patter.

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.

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.

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.

Debrief the ones you lose

Write down the objection and what you said within an hour of the meeting. Six weeks of that is better sales training 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.

Questions to ask yourself

• What are the three objections you hear most, and have you ever written down your best answer to any of them?
• Out of ten, how honest is the evidence you use when somebody 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 everybody who sells for you answer these objections the same way, and would you be comfortable if you heard it?
• Where in the last month did you argue with an objection instead of acknowledging it?

Objection handling sits inside Business Coaching, alongside pricing and the rest of how work is won. It pairs naturally with The Dangers of Discounting, because most owners fold on price in the ninety seconds after an objection, and DISC and Personality Style, which explains why the same answer lands well with one buyer and badly with another.