How to Reduce Your Customers’ Skyrocketing Stress Levels

If you think you have a tough job as a salesperson, you’re right! There is no doubt that a sales person can make stress part of their job description. But, challenge yourself for a moment to think about the difficulty of being a buyer these days!

On the one hand, the cards are all in your hand – it’s an amazingly incredibly powerfully wonderful time for buyers because of the endless options usually at their finger tips. But, more options means more complicated decision factors, which means more stress.

On the other hand, most buyers are out searching because of a stress point they are already dealing with in their current situation.

Insert the stresses associated with making the right deal, market conditions, and finding the right fit in an endless sea of choices, and market concerns, and gas prices, and you get the idea.

It all leads to a recipe for one seriously stressed-out customer.

And how does that stress affect them more than anything else?

Stress clogs the buyer’s brain – they don’t think clearly.

Stressed buyers struggle with keeping everything straight.

The more data and information that you throw at them, the more clogged their brain becomes and the higher their stress level rises.

Giving your customer unnecessary information and data does not help them in their buying decision. It only further elevates their stress levels.

The sales process is a good parallel to our lives in this way — we get stressed about something and the stress makes it hard, if not impossible, to think clearly. We lose our equilibrium and get jerked into a furious tornado of chaos.

Before we know it even minor irritants cause us to snap because our threshold breaks from the weight of the stress we experience.

The same is true for your customer. If you overwhelm them with information that is not vital to their buying decision, then you subsequently increase their stress levels and run the risk of ushering them into the tornado of chaos.

Once a customer goes around and around in that tornado of chaos, the likelihood of that customer choosing to buy plummets.

What is the remedy? How do you avoid sending you customer into the fire of stress?

In a word: SIMPLICITY. Stressed out people abhor ambiguity, but they love straightforward.

Listen to your customer and only the provide them with the information that is vital to their unique buying decision in a simple, matter-of-fact way.

Your buyer doesn’t need you to present a draining hour-long speech on the features of your offering. First, it is likely your customer has already heard such presentations from other sales people.

And second, too much information is overwhelming and adds to the already high stress levels and clogged brains of your buyers.

Consider how your own presentation can compliment the simple and avoid the complicated.

Sales Stressors:

Feature-dumping

Long-winded answers without interaction

Lack of openness that causes the customer to wonder about your character

Product or price centered presentations

Stress Relievers:

Confirmation questions throughout the process

Explain things in simple steps

Giving the customer permission to ask questions when confused

Letting the customer know that stress is normal

Are you accidentally stressing out an already-stressed customer? It might be time to simplify. Only then do you truly have a shot at changing their world.