I ran inside sales at BRD Pest Solutions across seven offices before we started Plaibook. Every office had a script. Every office also had a drawer full of laminated objection cards that nobody looked at after week two. The cards were fine. The problem was that nobody could tell me which rebuttals actually worked, because nobody was listening to the calls.
Now we can. Plaibook has transcribed and scored more than 500,000 pest control and home service calls, and every objection on those calls is tagged with what the rep said next and whether the caller booked. This post is the script book that comes out of that. Eight objections, and for each one: what the caller usually means, the rebuttal that wins most often, an example exchange, and the mistake reps make.
One thing this post does not do. We already wrote about the objection that kills the most deals, which is not price, and why reps freeze on it. That argument lives in the top five deal-killing objections. Read that one for the ranking. Read this one when you need the exact words.
The names in the exchanges below are made up. The patterns are not.
1. "That's too expensive"
What the caller usually means: "I don't yet understand what I'm paying for." A homeowner who called you has a problem they want gone. Very few of them have a fixed budget in their head. What they have is a number they heard from a neighbor, a coupon in the mailbox, or a guess. When the price lands before the value, the guess wins.
The rebuttal that wins most often: ask what they were expecting, then break your price down against the problem and the guarantee. Do not discount. In the calls we score, reps who drop the price within the first ten seconds of hearing this objection close at a lower rate than reps who hold. A fast discount tells the caller the first number was padded.
Caller (Denise): Wow, that's a lot more than I thought.
Rep (Marcus): Fair enough. What were you expecting to hear?
Denise: I don't know, maybe half that?
Marcus: Got it. So you've got carpenter ants in the kitchen wall. The quarterly plan works out to a little over a dollar a day, and it covers the ants plus whatever shows up in the fall. If they come back between visits, we come back for free. What I don't want is you paying half that for a one-time spray and calling me again in August.
Denise: Okay. What days do you have?
The mistake reps make: answering the price objection with a smaller price. The second mistake is defending the price with adjectives ("we're the best in the valley"). Neither one gives the caller anything new to weigh.
2. "I need to talk to my spouse"
What the caller usually means: "I'm not sure enough to defend this decision to someone else." Sometimes it is literally true and the other person controls the checkbook. More often the caller is buying time, and the spouse is a polite way to get it.
The rebuttal that wins most often: make the spouse conversation easy, then hold the spot. Offer to text the price, the coverage and the guarantee so they have it in front of them tonight. Then book a tentative slot they can cancel. Callback rate on a bare "call us when you're ready" is under five percent. A texted summary plus a held slot turns the callback into a cancellation the caller has to make, which most of them never do.
Caller (Raj): Let me run it by my wife first.
Rep (Alicia): Of course. Most people do. Can I text you the plan, the price and the guarantee so she's looking at the same thing you are? And I've got a tech in your area Thursday morning. I'll pencil you in, and if she says no, you text me one word and it's gone. Sound fair?
Raj: Yeah, that works.
The mistake reps make: saying "no problem" and hanging up. This is the single most common untreated objection in our data and it gets its own writeup in the post linked above. The second mistake is the opposite one: trying to close around the spouse with pressure. Nobody wants to explain to their partner why they signed a contract because the guy on the phone was persistent.
3. "Let me think about it"
What the caller usually means: there is a specific concern they have not said out loud. When a rep asks one question after this line, the real objection comes out roughly four times in ten. It is usually price or a competing quote. The other six are people who want a polite exit, and you cannot fix that on this call, only on the follow-up.
The rebuttal that wins most often: isolate, then schedule. Ask what specifically they want to think through. If something comes out, handle it. If nothing comes out, set a day and a time to call back. Leads with a scheduled callback close at nearly four times the rate of leads told to call when ready.
Caller (Tom): I'm going to think it over.
Rep (Priya): Sure. Before I let you go, is there one thing in particular you want to think through? Sometimes it's the price, sometimes people want to read reviews first. If I know what it is I might be able to answer it right now.
Tom: Honestly, I wanted to check if the stuff is safe for my dog.
Priya: Good question, and I should have covered it. The products are pet safe once dry, which takes about an hour, and the tech will walk you through it on site. Does that take care of it, or do you still want a day?
The mistake reps make: treating "think about it" as an answer instead of a question. Also: asking "what do you need to think about?" in a tone that sounds like an accusation. The words matter less than sounding curious.
4. "I'll call you back"
What the caller usually means: "I want to end this call." It is the shortest of the stalls and the least sincere. Some callers really do have a pot boiling over. Most are done and want out without being rude.
The rebuttal that wins most often: take the callback away from them and own it yourself. "I'll call you" becomes "I will call you at two tomorrow, and I'll text you first so it's not a surprise." Then actually do it. A rep who sets a time and keeps it looks organized. A rep who waits looks forgettable.
Caller (Linda): I'll give you a call back later.
Rep (Devon): Sounds good. I'm on the phones until six, so I'll take that off your plate. Is two o'clock tomorrow okay? I'll text you first.
Linda: Two is fine.
Devon: Perfect. And if the ants get worse before then, text me and I'll move you up.
The mistake reps make: believing it. In the scored data, callers who say they will call back almost never do, and the rep who did not set a time has no reason to reach out that does not feel like chasing.
5. "I'm getting other quotes"
What the caller usually means: "I don't know how to compare you to the next company, so I'm going to compare on price." This one is honest. They are going to call two more places. The question is what they carry into those calls.
The rebuttal that wins most often: give them the comparison questions. Tell them what to ask the other two. Frequency, what is covered, what the guarantee actually says, whether the price on the first visit is the price on the fifth. If your offer is good, the questions sell you. If it isn't, you have a pricing problem, not a script problem.
Caller (Greg): I'm going to get a couple more quotes before I decide.
Rep (Sam): Smart. Can I give you three things to ask them? One, is the initial price the same as the ongoing price, because a lot of people get surprised on visit two. Two, what happens if the bugs come back between visits. Three, do they cover the yard or just the house. If they beat us on all three, go with them. I mean that.
Greg: Okay, that's helpful.
Sam: And I'll text you our answers to those same three so you're not going from memory.
The mistake reps make: bad-mouthing the competition, or matching a quote nobody has received yet. Both signal that the rep is nervous.
6. "I can just do it myself"
What the caller usually means: "I already tried the store-bought stuff and I'm embarrassed it didn't work." Almost everyone who calls a pest company about ants or roaches has already been to the hardware store. They are calling because that failed. The objection is a last bit of pride.
The rebuttal that wins most often: ask what they have tried, agree with them that it should have worked, and explain in one sentence why it didn't. Store sprays kill what they touch and scatter the rest. A professional treatment targets the colony. No jargon, no lecture.
Caller (Maria): I could probably just handle it with something from Home Depot.
Rep (Chris): You might. What have you tried so far?
Maria: The spray, and those little bait traps.
Chris: Yeah, that's what I'd have tried too. The problem with the spray is it kills the ones you see and splits the colony, so you get two trails next week instead of one. What we put down is a slow bait they carry back to the nest. Different tool for the same job. Want me to get a tech out there this week and settle it?
The mistake reps make: arguing that DIY doesn't work. The caller already knows. Say it for them and move on.
7. "I only want a one-time"
What the caller usually means: "I don't want to be locked into something." They are not objecting to the service. They are objecting to the word contract. Reps who hear "one-time" and quote a one-time are leaving the recurring revenue on the table and, worse, leaving the caller with a treatment that may not hold.
The rebuttal that wins most often: sell the outcome, not the plan. Explain that the one-time is priced higher per visit and comes with no guarantee, and that the recurring plan is how you can afford to come back for free. Then remove the commitment fear directly: cancel any time after the initial, or whatever your actual terms are.
Caller (Kevin): I don't want a contract, just a one-time spray.
Rep (Jordan): I can do that. Here's the honest trade-off. The one-time is more per visit and there's no guarantee, because we're only there once. The quarterly plan is less per visit, and if anything comes back we return for free. It's not a lock-in. You can cancel after the first service. Most people pick the plan once they hear that, but it's your call.
Kevin: If I can cancel, then sure, the plan.
The mistake reps make: quoting the one-time price without ever mentioning the recurring option. In scored calls this happens far more than managers assume, and it is invisible unless you are listening.
8. "Not right now" or "after the busy season"
What the caller usually means: "The problem isn't painful enough today." You hear this most in shoulder months, and from people calling about preventive service rather than an infestation. Pushing hard here reads as desperate.
The rebuttal that wins most often: agree on the timing and get a date on the calendar anyway. If they want to start in spring, book the spring. A booked appointment three months out is worth more than a note that says "call back in March," because your reps will not call back in March. Add the seasonal reason if you have one: the fall treatment is what keeps spiders out of the basement in January.
Caller (Anne): Let's revisit this after the holidays.
Rep (Elena): Totally fine. Can I put you on the schedule for the second week of January so you don't have to remember to call? Nothing charged until the tech is there. And I'll say one thing: the treatment we'd do now is the one that stops the spiders moving indoors when it gets cold. If you'd rather wait, January it is.
Anne: Hm. What would now look like?
The mistake reps make: accepting "later" without a date. "Later" never gets logged, never gets followed up, and never shows up in the lost-deals report because nobody counted it as a lead.
The number managers react to hardest: no attempt at all
When we show a new customer their objection data for the first time, the chart that gets the reaction is not close rate by objection. It is a simple split: for every price objection on every call, did the rep attempt any rebuttal at all, or did they say "okay" and end the call?
The share that got no attempt is red on the chart. I've told owners the same thing on every demo: if there is red, get rid of it. You do not need a better script to fix that segment. You need reps to say one sentence instead of zero. One owner looked at it and called it the lowest-hanging fruit he had seen in years, and I think that is exactly right. The gap between a bad rebuttal and no rebuttal is bigger than the gap between a bad rebuttal and a good one.
The size of the red segment varies a lot between teams. What does not vary is that it is almost always larger than the owner guessed before they saw it. Reps tell you they handle objections. They believe it. Then you listen and find that a meaningful share of "too expensive" ends with "no problem, have a good one."
How to measure it from recordings
You can do this by hand before you buy anything. It is tedious, which is the point, but a week of it will change how you coach.
- Pull every inbound sales call from one week, not a sample. Include the short ones. The short ones are where the untreated objections live.
- For each call, mark whether a price objection occurred. Use a loose definition: any pushback on cost, including "that's more than I expected."
- For each objection, mark one of three outcomes: no attempt (the rep acknowledged and ended), an attempt that did not book, or an attempt that booked.
- Compute the no-attempt share per rep. Do not average the team. The team number hides the two reps who account for most of it.
- Play the no-attempt calls back to the reps who made them. Not as a punishment. Most reps genuinely do not remember letting the caller go.
If you have call scoring in place, this is a standing report rather than a week of listening. Every call is transcribed, every objection is tagged, and the rep's next sentence is classified as an attempt or not. The red segment updates daily.
What a scorecard step for "handled the objection" does
Most pest control scorecards check for things the rep should say: greet the caller, confirm the address, describe the service, mention the guarantee, ask for the sale. Those are good. But they are all things the rep controls. An objection is something the caller does to the rep, and most scorecards are silent about it.
Adding one step changes the behavior more than any training session I have run. The step is simple: if the caller raised an objection, did the rep make at least one attempt to handle it before the call ended? Pass or fail. Not "did they handle it well." Just: did they try.
Three things happen once that step is on the card. Reps see their own fail rate on it, which is a fact and not a manager's opinion. The weekly one-on-one gets a specific target ("you passed this on sixty percent of calls last week, let's get to eighty"). And the leaderboard stops rewarding the rep who takes the easy calls and lets the hard ones go, because the easy calls do not have objections on them.
Once the no-attempt share is near zero, you can split the step into the quality question and start comparing rebuttals. That is where the scripts above came from: which sentence, after "too expensive," booked the most appointments across a lot of calls. Your team's version will differ a little from ours. The point is that you will know, instead of guessing from a laminated card.
If you want to see what that scorecard looks like on your own calls, the call scoring product grades every inbound call against your script steps, including objection handling, and backfills a month of historical calls so the red segment is visible on day one.