333 How Do We Tell The Buyer They Are Wrong?

<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" xml:lang="EN-AU">Arguing with buyers is a slippery slope to sales oblivion.  “I told him off and made him fly straight”, is a leap into seller delusion.  In Japan, the buyer isn’t King, but GOD.  The seller is in no position to tell the buyer anything here, let alone start arguing the point.  The upshot is that Japanese salespeople, for the most part, are very weak in the face of the buyer’s remonstrations.  We often hear from our clients that they are concerned that their salespeople don’t stand up for the brand, the deal, the price and just roll over straight away whenever the buyer pushes back.  This raises a prickly point about how do we counter buyer assertions, which will make our sales job difficult or impossible, if unanswered?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" xml:lang="EN-AU">We will always know a lot more than the buyer about our firm, our goods and services and our capacity to become a trusted partner for them.  They will get things wrong for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes they will hear something in the market from our rivals, disparaging our financial state or our quality guarantees.  Maybe they are just suspicious of salespeople, based on hard won experience and they will challenge everything we purport.  Maybe they are analytical personality types, who won’t consider any numbers short of three decimal places and are hard to convince.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" xml:lang="EN-AU">When we get the pushback, it triggers a primeval, emotional chemical reaction where the brain starts pumping adrenaline into the body for flight or fight.  Because we need to make this sale, we always choose fight.  What comes out of our mouth next is critical and we absolutely cannot leave that to whim or chance.  We have to be in total control and choose our next words extremely carefully.  GOD doesn’t brook impertinent salespeople arguing with them.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" xml:lang="EN-AU">If the buyer is mistaken