3 Sales Strategies to Deal with Difficult Customers
All buyers are emotional. But sometimes those emotions can be negative, which turns them into the dreaded problem buyer.
A problem buyer is defined as a buyer who allows their negative emotions to guide their decision in whether or not to buy from you.
Dealing with problem buyers starts with what I call the unilateral empathy decision.
Unilateral empathy means that you as the expert salesperson, must make the decision upfront, unilaterally towards empathy.
Regardless of how difficult or frustrating your customer is being.
Some difficult customers make this very challenging to do. Do it anyway.
Here are three fairly unconventional strategies, to help you to deal with some of those problem buyers.
- Get them to talk more, not less.
Talking helps your customer move from their emotional brain to their logical brain. The buyer in time runs out of emotional steam as they talk more.
- Number the issues.
As they are talking, write down their issues and then repeat the issues back to the customer numerically.
This helps the difficult customer engage their logical brain.
So, you can say to a customer, “Okay, so there are three primary issues you’re dealing with, right? Let’s go over those.”
When you list the issues numerically, you get the customer thinking less emotionally.
- Make them a new proposal.
As a sales professional, you want to provide some sort of solution.
And if there’s only one solution, you have to tell them upfront.
They’re less likely to reject if they know there is no other offer or a solution.
After that, you want to transition to something that’s either positive or technical.
This once again gets the customer out of the emotional side of their brain, especially the negative emotion, so they can make a decision and move forward.
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