Over the weekend my Dad and Uncle bought yet another truck for their landscaping business, something they do on a very consistent basis. My Uncle headed to the local Ford dealership where they buy all of their vehicles knowing exactly what he wanted to buy and what he expected to pay for it. For the past few years they worked with a salesman who had a great relationship with them and was very straight forward and to the point, something that both my Dad and Uncle value when buying something for business. For some reason the salesman they knew switched jobs and a new salesman decided to handle the purchase. My Uncle said he was annoyed because before he could even ask him one question he began to start telling him a bunch of information about the truck that he was already aware of. When he told me about this experience it quickly reminded me about how we talked about answering unasked questions in class.
Even though in the end the salesman was able to pull of the sale he ended up giving the customer a bad experience by trying to answer questions that the customer was already aware of directing the attention away from the core questions that were needed to make the sale. If the salesman were more adaptable to the situation and listened the sale would have been a much more smooth, streamlined process.
BoweryJE22
Not to mention that the purchase your Uncle and Dad were making was not a cheap one. This is a great of example of how to be cautious with your questions. Your Dad and Uncle already knew what they wanted and what questions they were going to ask. This salesman had facts about the car that he thought they needed to know. I believe this has to do a lot with awareness and discerning which questions to ask and what non-verbal language is on display, I’m sure if the class were to record your Dad’s buying experience, your Uncle and Dad were rolling their eyes, or tapping their feet out of impatience. Salesman need to pick up on the cues and as you said adapt to what the customer needs.
I noticed an example of answering unasked questions over the weekend as well, during the Q&A portion of the presentations at startup weekend. When some teams were asked a question, they would answer it and then continue to explain more things that had nothing to do with the question. This was distracting and took away from the answer to the actual question.
This same thing happened to me when I was buying my car over the summer. I already knew exactly what I wanted because my mom already has one. She’s had it for 7-8 years so I’ve driven it a lot. My dad was with me and also already knew everything about the car because we’ve owned one for so long. The salesman started telling us all the stuff about it and we said 3-4 times that we already own this car so we know mostly everything about it. He continued to tell us random stuff that we didn’t ask about until we told him multiple times we already knew. That definitely gets annoying.