One of the most difficult things about selling in modern day culture is building relationships with clients. It is common for potential customers to be concerned with finding a solution to their pain quickly and for them to have little interest in developing business relationships with the sales person. This makes it difficult for a salesperson to have an extended conversation with a prospect and even more difficult to dig down through their pain funnel and discover the subtleties and details of the problem at hand. Prospects in this situation do not want to be asked open ended questions and definitely do not wish to give thoughtful, meaningful answers in response to them that would allow the seller a chance to explore the sales situation in more detail while simultaneously fostering a long term, mutually beneficial business partnership. Many prospects simply want to be told what solutions the seller can provide, some relevant details of each, have their questions answered, and buy the product or service if the price is appealing to them. Scenarios such as this are a natural part of the sales world, and unavoidable by the salesperson no matter the selling approach or technique they used to set up the meeting with the client.
While this is a difficult spot in which to be a successful salesperson, it is not impossible. It is important for the salesperson to observe what could be motivating the client or shutting them off from his or her attempts to gain a more complete understanding of the business situation. When a prospect is closed minded and unwilling to engage in constructive conversation, it is not helpful to be pushy, which would annoy the client at best and set them against the salesperson and the represented business at worst. However, a good salesperson with situational awareness and the skills with people to help them look at the situation in a new light could give legitimate help to a prospect before the details of a deal are ever considered and work together in order to find the best solution available to the pain the prospect has, regardless of whether or not the sale is completed in the end. If the prospect closes their mind to this possibility or cannot break themself of the mentality that salespeople are always closing and seeking a quick sale every time, there is nothing the salesperson can do even though the prospect only makes it harder to find a positive solution, but it is always worthwhile in sales to take an open minded approach and do the very best to show the client that taking their money is not the most important part of the job to them – coming along side and helping find a solution to the problem, through making a sale or not, is the end goal of the good seller.
BoweryJE22