173: Dealing With Buyers Who Won't Reveal Their Problems

<p>Dealing With Buyers Who Won’t Reveal Their Problem</p> <p> </p> <p>The basics of professional selling requires good questioning skills on the part of the salesperson.  We understand the buyer need and then we match that need with our solution.  Pretty straight forward stuff really.  What do we do though when the buyer won’t reveal their real issues or are hiding the problem from us?  This is a deal killer right there because you have no where to go.  In desperation you start pitching your solution in the faint hope lightening strikes and you chance upon exactly what they need.</p> <p> </p> <p>When we analyse the reasons for this buyer smoke and mirrors we can see a couple of factors at work.  In the initial rapport building phase of the sales call, we failed to establish sufficient trust for the buyer to impart their woes to us.  We may have assumed too much about their level of interest and just started banging away, interrogating them about all the dirty laundry of their company.  Japan is pretty good at small talk in the early minutes of the meeting.  This is not going to help us much though, because it doesn’t address the trust issue to any great extent.</p> <p> </p> <p>We need to be looking for connections with the buyer such as shared experiences or people we know in common.  Maybe we have the same alma mater or have lived in the same city or travelled to the same places or share the same hobby.  We should use the start of the meeting to try and ascertain if we have anything in common.  Familiarity breeds comfort in this case.</p> <p> </p> <p>We also need to establish our credibility from the get go.  Our Credibility Statement has some layers.  We explain our company’s business in very broad terms.  Next we provide an example of where we have helped another similar company, quoting some verifiable data points around results as evidence.  We make the suggestion that “maybe” we could do the same for them.  It is important that we say “maybe”, because the client doesn’t want to be given any hard sell.  Fina