Secrets to Making Sales When Customers Just Say No

Another brief but value-packed e-book by Andy Ferrari Norman

1.     Sales is not a function, a goal or a number but an outcome, the outcome is customer satisfaction.  Regardless of how solid your product or service is, nothing happens without a sale.  If you did not make the sale, there is no customer satisfaction but instead lots of frustration for salespeople!

2.     Today customers are all suffering from Frazzled Customer Syndrome (FCS): a state of extreme exhaustion, that’s why they are not returning your call and give you the cold shoulder.  They are extremely checked out because of heavy workload, too many choices, rapidly changing market and past bad experience with salespeople.  How can we blame them for this?

3.     The result: customers keep you at a distance, brush you off, dismiss you entirely and stick with the status quo, no matter how undesirable the status quo is. Once you can empathize how customers feel, you can help them to improve and get out of this frazzle trap.

4.     Reasons for customers staying status quo:

·        If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

·        It’s risky to make decision on purchasing that may affect your career

·        Most of the options provided by vendors are like near-clones of one another

·        It’s best to stick to established names as ‘nobody ever gets fired from specifying IBM’ is still the most trusted philosophy

5.     As a salesperson, we need to reframe these frazzled customers as call for action and not call for give-up.  They are not rejecting us but just calling us for help.  For example, when they procrastinate, it’s not that they are lazy but is that they need a sense of achievement, and the task of deciding to buy is simply too difficult for them at this moment!

6.     In order to quickly get into the customer’s mind, a salesperson needs to instantly add value to the customer.

7.     Before we can talk about salespeople adding value to customers, salespeople must not be seen by customers as wasting their time. Customers consider salespeople as irrelevant and wasting time when:

·        They talk about their products and services first without finding out what customers need and want;

In short, the salesperson must focus on the customer's needs, not his own needs. In this way, he still can make sales even when customers say no. 

By Andy Ng of Asia Trainers at www.asiatrainers.com/SeminarsList.php