Sales is a tricky field, if not one of the most trickiest. Scoring a new customer or making a sale can takes hours, days or months of careful negotiations. Losing one can be achieved in 5 seconds.
Follow these 4 simple steps to drive clients away from your business as fast as you can say the word “bud”:
- Talk your clients down
- Speak before you think
- Make your needs and desires evident, even if you have to ignore your clients’
- Lie to your clients so they can find out the truth with a few phone calls
This evening after work, I decided to take my car to a reputable car dealer from the area. I’ve serviced my cars there for the past 2 years and I even bought my last from them. It’s more expensive than your average garage but the guys are fast and they get the job done.
Today, 30 minutes after I dropped my car at the service place, a rep approached me, squatted down next to me, touched my fore-arm and in a very solemn tone of voice told me: “your engine has internal damage”. The situation felt like a doctor telling me I had a terminal illness or that someone had passed away.
The repair job would cost $4500. At that time, I thought my best bet would be to get a new car, so I followed her to the sales office.
There I met Matt, a salesman in his middle to late twenties (I’m over 30). He started talking me into getting into a loan. I told him that my plan wasn’t to stay in the US for the long haul so I was reluctant to getting into debt since I wanted to save money for when I decide to go back (I just finished paying off my car last week). Furthermore, I wasn’t too keen on buying a new car considering that 1 hour ago the idea wasn’t even in the horizon.
People in my country call me Fer, Fernando or che! Fer; sometimes, people addresses me as Licenciado, Mr., sometimes even as Doctor (which I’m not, but being a psychologist, people have a tendency to call you Dr.). In a professional setting, what people don’t call me is “bud”.
Well, Matt called me “bud” and “bro” throughout our whole negotiation, and I let him play his game. As his pitch progressed, he started to seem more comfortable with the situation (sales people always look confident anyways) to a point where he was so confident that the word shit slipped out of his lips, too late to realize that my girlfriend was sitting next to me. He quickly corrected himself.
If you are trying to sell me a car, don’t treat me as a kid who’s just stopped by to buy candy. The fact that I have an accent doesn’t lower my IQ.
{ 1 comment }
