322: No Cushion, No Sale In Japan

<p style="font-weight: 400;">A cushion, in the sales world, isn’t that thing you bite into with frustration when your old client buys from your competitor rather than you.  It is a ploy, a trick, a device, a subterfuge to stop us making a mess of the deal. Most salespeople have no idea what a cushion is or how to employ it, which is why they are losing sales on a regular basis.  The hardest people to teach this technique to are seasoned salespeople.  Actually, in my recall, teaching anything to experienced salespeople is fraught. They believe they know it all or they feel their own methodologies are the best and need no additions or alterations.  “Cushion, smushion” is often the view, when we introduce this idea to salespeople.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Where do we use this cushion and what is it?  After we have dug deep and found out where the client is now, where they want to be and why they are not there yet, we are in a position to offer some of our potential solutions to help them get there and for them to enjoy the kudos associated with it.  At this point we will get pushback, hesitations and objections to our genius ideas to fix their problem.   This is when we need to bring out the cushion.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Being emotional creatures, we don’t like pushback from buyers, because all we want to hear is “yes we will take it”, at our original non-discounted price and right away, pronto.  If we get “your price is too high” we become agitated and we do dumb things like trying to justify the offer.  This is typically what these so-called “seasoned” salespeople do and then they can’t work out why they have to drop the price all of the time, to land the deal.  What if you could land the deal without any discounting?  Sounds good doesn't it and let’s explore how to do that.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Chemicals from the brain are released the moment we hear “your price is too high and we go into fight mode with the client.  Actually, we cannot control the release of the chemicals, but we