Episode #322: No Cushion, No Sale In Japan

A cushion, in the sales world, isn’t that thing you bite into with frustration when your old client buys from your competitor rather than you. It is a ploy, a trick, a device, a subterfuge to stop us making a mess of the deal. Most salespeople have no idea what a cushion is or how to employ it, which is why they are losing sales on a regular basis. The hardest people to teach this technique to are seasoned salespeople. Actually, in my recall, teaching anything to experienced salespeople is fraught. They believe they know it all or they feel their own methodologies are the best and need no additions or alterations. “Cushion, smushion” is often the view, when we introduce this idea to salespeople.

Where do we use this cushion and what is it? After we have dug deep and found out where the client is now, where they want to be and why they are not there yet, we are in a position to offer some of our potential solutions to help them get there and for them to enjoy the kudos associated with it. At this point we will get pushback, hesitations and objections to our genius ideas to fix their problem. This is when we need to bring out the cushion.

Being emotional creatures, we don’t like pushback from buyers, because all we want to hear is “yes we will take it”, at our original non-discounted price and right away, pronto. If we get “your price is too high” we become agitated and we do dumb things like trying to justify the offer. This is typically what these so-called “seasoned” salespeople do and then they can’t work out why they have to drop the price all of the time, to land the deal. What if you could land the deal without any discounting? Sounds good doesn't it and let’s explore how to do that.

Chemicals from the brain are released the moment we hear “your price is too high and we go into fight mode with the client. Actually, we cannot control the release of the chemicals, but we can control what we do in terms of our reaction. The first reaction is to justify the price, by talking about the tremendous value our solution represents. We try to get the client to buy through force of will or by going on and on about how great our solution is and why it isn’t really that expensive, especially when you amortise the cost over a thousand years.

Clients become defensive in response to these assaults on their opinion and often get in their little bunker and hunker down to resist all that we say, until they hear those magic words, “I will drop the price”. So arguing with the client isn’t the smartest method, but still it is a favourite with some of these seasoned salespeople.

We have to get more information before we know what to say to the client’s attack on our pricing. Objections are also often smoke screens. What they say may not be what they are thinking. Even if we bite and do a brilliant job on answering their pushback, we still don’t get the deal done, because that wasn’t the core issue. We answered it brilliantly but to no avail. We need to test for the real objection before we try and answer anything and this is where the cushion comes to the rescue.

A cushion is a neutral statement which neither agrees nor disagrees with the client’s opinion. “Your price is too high” receives a cushion like this, “budgeting is certainly an important element of every business”. That short little offering is a breaker, like the circuit breaker in our homes, to stop an electrical surge burning down the house. It stops us from answering the client’s preposterous claim that our price is too high and reminds us we need to say only one thing in response.

We have created a breaker from the chemical reaction and have allowed the brain to start functioning properly again and we say, very, very sweetly, “May I ask you why you say that?” and then we shut up and do not speak. This is a genius question because now the client has to justify their claim and provide us with the reason. As we assemble more information, we get more possibilities available to us and more angles from which to approach our answer. We are going to give a very well considered response, as opposed to that first chemically induced, emotional response we would have given.

If we can manage that process directly, then we don’t need a cushion. The problem is “your price is too high” is the siren call to battle with the client and it is very hard to stop yourself from diving straight into the entrails of why the buyer is wrong.

Once we get an answer from the client we cannot stop there. We need to keep ferreting out the real objection. After hearing their answer, we say, in “in addition to “x” are there any other concerns” and we keep repeating this process until we have them all out on the table. Usually they have two or three and occasionally four, but rarely more than that. Next, we ask them to choose which is the most concerning for them and that is the one we answer.

The cushion is a key to a better conversation with the client, helping us to clear the emotional fog clouding our minds when we get an objection. The chances of us finding an answer, which doesn’t require us to drop the price, go right up when we use this method. I like that!