How do you find recurring objections in sales calls?
You find them by reading or listening back across many calls instead of one, and tagging every place a prospect pushed back. Most objections cluster into a handful of repeated themes, so once you have transcripts from a few dozen calls, the same two or three concerns tend to show up again and again. The fix is a simple running list, and it needs no special tool.
Key takeaways
- We trust a theme once several different prospects raise it, and that usually takes a few dozen calls.
- In Gong's cold-call data, about half of all objections were brush-offs like "send me some information."
- Sales keeps the objection list because it hears the buyer's own words, and marketing reads it whenever it changes.
- A monthly review should cover your own answers too, since Gong found average reps reply with a 21-second monologue.
How many calls do you need before a pattern is reliable?
In our experience a few dozen calls is where a pattern starts to hold, and we want a theme to come from several different prospects before we act on it.
Our rule of thumb is an opinion, and we hold it loosely. We start trusting a theme when different companies raise it in their own words, across more than one week. By thirty calls you can usually tell which concerns repeat and which belonged to one buyer having a bad quarter.
Volume matters less than the habit. Gong Labs sorted the objections from more than 300 million cold calls into three types. A small team does not need anything close to that many calls to see its own top two or three.
Picture a cold call where the prospect stays on for five friendly minutes. Then they say "send me some information," you agree, and the call ends on a warm note. It is easy to log that as interest.
What is the difference between a real objection and a stalling comment?
A real objection names a reason the deal does not fit, such as price, budget, or a contract with a competitor. A stalling comment ends the conversation without giving one.
Go back to that friendly call. Gong files "send me some information" under dismissive objections, next to "not interested" and "call me in 6 months." In its cold-call data, dismissive objections made up 49.5% of all objections. The call you logged as interest was the most common kind of no.
These are cold-call numbers. We would not expect the same split on a demo or a discovery call, or across every industry and deal size. For a small team the useful part is the sorting. Tag each pushback with a type, and count the situational and existing-solution ones on their own, since those carry a reason you can answer before the next call.
Whether a stall on a discovery call hides the same reasons as a stall on a cold call is something we have not seen anyone publish. We tag them anyway, and we still do not know what most of them mean.
| Type | Share of cold-call objections (Gong) | Examples Gong gives |
|---|---|---|
| Dismissive | 49.5% | "Not interested", "call me in 6 months", "send me some information" |
| Situational | 42.6% | "Too expensive", "no budget", "no resources / bandwidth" |
| Existing solution | 7.9% | An in-house solution, a competitor, being stuck in a contract |
Should marketing or sales own the objection list?
The people on the calls should keep the list, and marketing should read it every time it changes. In a team without sales ops, everyone who talks to buyers adds to the same document.
Sales hears the objection first and in the buyer's own words. If marketing builds the list from call summaries, the wording gets cleaned up, and the cleaned-up version is the one no buyer recognizes on a landing page.
The habit we like is plain. Keep a shared doc called something like "things prospects said no to this month," with one line per objection holding the exact phrase from the transcript, the date, and the type. Marketing reads it for the pages and posts that should answer the concern before a call. Sales reads it to see which answers are not landing.
Rebuttal scripts are easy to find, and the pages that rank for objection handling on gong.io and hubspot.com are full of them. A script answers an objection you already know about. The list is how you find out which ones are yours.
How often should the list get reviewed?
Once a month, with the transcripts open. Read the answers you gave as closely as the objections themselves.
Monthly is a judgment call. It suits a team running a handful of calls a week. A weekly review mostly shows you the same five calls twice, and a quarterly one lets a new objection run for weeks before anyone notices.
The review is also where you hear how you answer. Gong pulled 67,149 recorded demo calls from a database of over a million to find what winning reps do differently, and objection handling was part of what turned up. Average reps answered an objection with a knee-jerk monologue of about 21.45 seconds.
Gong's sales stats add two details you can check in your own transcripts. After an objection, the best salespeople pause 5 times longer than the average rep. They keep their normal pace, 176 words per minute against 173 normally, while average reps speed up to 188.
Where the facts in this piece come from
FAQs about How do you find recurring objections in sales calls
1. Do I need conversation intelligence software to find recurring objections?
No. Transcripts from any meeting recorder and a shared document are enough for a small team. Software starts to help once there are more calls than people have time to read.
2. Are Gong's objection percentages true for my industry?
They come from cold calls, so use them as a frame for sorting and expect a different split on demos and discovery calls, and in other industries. Your own tagged calls are the better number.
3. What should we do with the objections once we find them?
Answer the most common reasoned ones before the call happens, on your website and in your posts, and agree on one answer the team gives on calls. Our guide to go-to-market strategy covers where that work fits.
About Corvan
Corvan makes Corvan AI, AI agents that run your marketing: they plan your campaigns, write every post in your voice, and show you which posts booked meetings. The team also runs go-to-market services: consultation, ad operations, and AI search ranking. Every piece under Resources is written by the team that runs the work, with sources. Meet the team on the team page, or read what it returned for Drive Me Barcelona.
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