Episode #314: Don’t Argue With The Client

The client is always right. No they aren’t. We usually have more information about our offering than the buyer and are across the breadth of our range of solution in a way they can never be. We are interacting with a variety of buyers in the industry and the sector and are constantly picking up intelligence on what is working and what isn’t. We are not being driven by internal politicking, as ambitious rivals jockey for position. We have the client’s best interests at the forefront and firmly in our mind, because we have one goal for our business and that is getting the re-order. Clients however will have partial information, wrong information and will lack information, none of which disqualifies them from telling us their view of the world as they see it.

This can become very frustrating for salespeople. We are often setting ourselves up for frustration because we forget that the buyer isn't the same as us in terms of scope. We are expecting too much of them and when we don’t get it we are upset. We know the buyer but they forget and ask another company to supply them. They met us a while ago and that memory has disappeared. They just went to our competitor because it suited them to, but we absolutely don’t like that. We feel betrayed. Add these frustrations to the pressure cooker that is sales and tempers can be short or fraying.

I divide clients into two bundles – those I like and would want to make a friend and those I just do business with. The chemistry won’t be there with every client and we still need to get business done, so if the stars don’t align, so what, make the sales anyway. If we can turn the client into a friend, then that is better because we all spend so much time at work it makes sense to find people you like in that environment. If you are in sales then you had better be spending your days with buyers, if you want to get anywhere. It stands to reason some number of the buyers will become friends.

For the others, it will be a strictly professional relationship of supply and demand. Inside this group will be people you just don’t like as human beings. There will clients who are arrogant, rude, have short tempers, are unrealistically demanding and are a hand full. There are variations of this idea – some more colourful than others - but there is the “no idiots” rule in sales, which says who not to do business with. We effectively “fire the client” because we don’t want to deal with them.

On the path to firing them we will be doing our best to squeeze a deal out of the process. When trying to serve them we may be biting our tongues, holding our breath, counting to 30 in order not to explode, but the tension is palpable. Our degree of perseverance will depend a great deal on the health of our sales funnel. If we have numerous buyers in the funnel and the new buyers are constantly being refreshed, then we can be relaxed about firing a nasty client.

The problems arise when we are desperate and are not seeing much revenue coming down the pike. We tend to have to suck it up a lot more and somehow these nasty clients sense that and can become even more demanding and unreasonable, simply because they can. Power doesn't always sit well in the hands of certain individuals and the buyers always feel they have power in the relationship.

Where is the line between making the point to the client that what they want or what they are saying is not going to fly with our values and our situation and the start of an argument? This is often a hard one, because few of us are trained for this type of conflict. We are usually working off a trial and error formula, which can be the hard way to do it. Proper training would give us the needed edge to work out how to help the client understand this arrangement is not attractive to our company and we don’t want to do it, without getting into a massive bun fight with the buyer.

Arguing with the buyer isn’t effective. We should be looking for points of agreement rather than zooming into the pain points. We should be carefully educating the buyer on what they don’t know about the current state of the market or about the intricacies of our solution. We also want to keep in mind that idea of “coming back to fight again another day”. We don’t want to destroy the relationship just because we might not be able to find a middle ground today to do business together. Things change inside companies and markets and a “no” today can become a “yes” tomorrow, if things change sufficiently.

Sometimes the client’s ideas are not very good and what they want us to do won’t fix their problem. We might be tempted by getting a deal, any deal, but the relief is short and the pain is long in these cases. Naturally, when it doesn’t work we get the blame and the brand collateral damage. I believe it is always better to walk away for those types of deals which have potential brand damage written all over them.