Salespeople that have an innate ability to negotiate are ones that are able to instantly dial into a customer’s specific fears and concerns. They can immediately disseminate what is preoccupying their customer, what is stopping them from moving forward with a purchase, and how best to confront the prospect's fear head-on. So, what is it about these salespeople that allows them to intuitively understand why a customer may, or may not, move forward? Sometimes it's innate. However, in many instances, it's something that must be learned.
Why Won’t the Customer Move Forward?
Now, not all salespeople have this aforementioned ability to intuitively understand a customer’s fears. Some have to work hard to understand why a customer can’t move forward – or better yet, won’t move forward until their concerns are addressed. Ultimately, it comes down to understanding our own fears as business development professionals.
- First, as salespeople, we have a fear of the unknown. We don’t know how the sales call will go, how the customer will respond to us, whether or not we’ll be able to connect with them, how friendly or unfriendly the customer will be, and whether or not they’ll respect us enough not to use our pricing to lower our competitor’s offer.
- Second, we have a fear of uncertainty. This is common for those salespeople who have a product and service that sells itself, but yet, they are still unable to close. Our fear focuses on our inability to make the easy sale – when in fact, no sale is easy.
- Third, we have a fear of being challenged. We don’t want to be challenged on our approaches, strategies, pricing, ideas and success or failure by those we report to.
- Fourth, as salespeople, we have a concern our company’s ability to support the customer. After-sales service is a concern for us because of the promises we’ve made to the customer.
- Finally, we have a fear of our own comfort zone. We are trained to subtlety take control of the sales process. When a customer controls that process, we sometimes feel we aren’t doing our job.
The above list of customer list is taken from the post: Five Customer Concerns That Cost You Sales and Market Share
All of these aforementioned fears are the exact same fears customers have. They don’t like the unknown. We may have the best product available but to a new customer, it doesn’t matter. Customers fear uncertainty. No matter how good something sounds, it sometimes sounds too good to be true. Our customers don’t like being challenged – by us as salespeople or by those they report to. Customers have a fear about how we as salespeople will support them – not just customer service.
Finally, our customers have a fear that we will take control of the sales process. Each of these fears are ones you must understand as salespeople in order to develop specific answers to alleviating these concerns.
To learn more about these aforementioned customer issues, please see: Sales Negotiation Training: Identifying a Customer’s Fears & Concerns
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