Tough Customers

There’s an old expression that dates back to those halcyon days between the two world wars when America was young and brave and life was rosy and business relationships were simple. Back in the day salespeople used to say, “My customers are the worst!”

Okay so maybe it wasn’t such a simple time after all. Maybe Al Capone was shooting up the streets of Chicago. Maybe people were people and customers were – well, they were just like they are today. A mixed bag. Maybe some of them could even drive you right up the wall.

What type of customer really drives you crazy? Maybe it’s the glassy-eyed prospect who pretends to be taking in every word you utter or the fact-gathering stoneface who takes copious notes. Perhaps you’ve been subjected to the criticizers who clearly enjoy poking holes in your pitch or the mental rehearsers who are too busy planning their remarks to actually listen to what you have to say. No matter the type, difficult prospects don’t make your job any easier. On the contrary.

“Any one of those types can exhaust your patience, even anger you,” says Arnold Sanow, sales speaker, trainer and president of The Business Source in Vienna, VA. Anger, however, is no way to win sales. So how do you handle difficult clients and get them eating out of your hand? To find out, Selling Power spoke with experts who explained how to make even the toughest prospects your next best customers.

Attention Fakers

These prospects just go through the motions. They may look intrigued with your presentation and talk as though they are interested, but they nevertheless give off telltale signals indicating that their interest is less than genuine. “Everyone listens in a different way,” Sanow explains. “So before you judge that your prospects are faking it, be certain that they are. Observe their body language. That often signals whether there is an internal problem. And, of course, notice your own body signals.”

Why is body language so important? “Studies have shown that only 7 percent of the messages people receive are conveyed by the words they hear,” says Sanow, author of Marketing Boot Camp (Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1994). “About 38 percent comes by way of the voice and 55 percent from perceived body language.

“So you can’t just focus on the words that clients use. Look at their bodies. Are they crossing their legs away from you? That could indicate unconscious rejection. Have they folded their arms or leaned back? You can’t generalize, but many people unconsciously indicate negative reception that way. When that happens, you have to stop and ask questions – such open-ended questions as ‘What do you think about that?’ or ‘How close does that come to answering your need?’”

At this point you should have a good idea whether you’re dealing with a viable customer or not. “If you’re convinced you’re dealing with an attention faker who’s clearly coasting in neutral, you might ask a specific question that will bring him back to reality. Ask with a genuinely friendly smile, of course, because you’re forcing him to change gears abruptly. You can’t just plow ahead. You need to take the conversation in another direction, sometimes with a surprising question or abrupt change of subject to really get that client’s attention.”

Keep these prospects actively involved in your discussion. “People can fake attention only if you’re the one talking, especially if you use diagnostic questioning in your sales approach,” says Jeffrey Geibel, a marketing and public relations consultant in Belmont, MA. “If they remain mentally disengaged even when they are talking, you’re probably dealing with the wrong person.”

Not all fakers are so obvious, however. Some may actually be adequate, albeit superficial, communicators. According to Gary Hattal, director of the Federal Mediation & Conciliation Institute for Conflict Management in Washington, DC, it goes back to basic communication theory: “The average person in this country speaks between 150 and 200 words a minute, depending on region. But average people also think four times that fast. And the hundreds of images that flash through their minds while someone else is talking make them impatient with the relatively slow pace of those spoken words.”

Listening requires a person to slow down to receive outside stimuli. Of course, the objective is to have a true meeting of minds between the speaker and the listener. This is easier said than done, considering the external visual bombardment most business people are used to. “Now, what are they [prospects] doing while you think they’re responding to you? They’re uttering a lot of nonverbals and ‘um-hums’ or partially verbal responses intended to make you think you’re on the same wavelength,” says Hattal. “They’re really engaging in ‘ego speak.’ They nod to indicate they’ve heard and understood you.

“One effective way to snap them out of it is to ask an open-ended, provocative question that requires a meaningful response – a question that requires more than a yes or no – such as ‘How can we go about meeting your needs? I have some ideas; what are yours?’”

If those gentle nudges don’t get your prospect back on focus, Hattal suggests trying a somewhat different approach. Attention fakers, he says, sometimes think they know exactly what they want. They believe they’ve done the proper research and have now narrowed their thinking. However, mediators often have reason to doubt that these people have the entire knowledge base. Likewise, salespeople just as often doubt that their prospects have all the available information.

So it may be time to dig deeper and ask more pertinent questions, Gary Hattal says. “For example, if you’re selling a telephone service you might ask, ‘What versatility do you need this service to provide – multiple phones or ways to reach salespeople with several phones that need to be networked because they may be hard to reach?’ That’s the kind of ‘question break’ both mediators and salespeople can interpose to restart the client’s engine.”

Of course, make sure that what you say keeps your prospects interested. A boring, rote presentation will keep anyone coasting in neutral. Before your meeting, you have to listen to yourself, Hattal points out. Your pitch may well stir a set of stored reactions instead of fresh responses to your statements and questions. “If the guy across the table seems to be in a trance,” he says, “I’ll change my speech pattern, be very self-effacing and say, ‘I’m sure I’ve not been clear about this. Let me retrace my steps. This is what I’m trying to say, and maybe you can help me out.’”

Fact Gatherers

This type of person is concerned with details – often obsessively, says Geibel. When he is engaged with such prospects, he has the right answer to their inquiries: “That’s a good question, but suppose we get the conceptual groundwork down first. Then we’ll know just what details we still need to fill in.”

This answer responds to fact gatherers’ need for details, yet keeps things moving, Geibel explains. “I went on a strategic alliance pitch with one of my clients to make a presentation to a major player in his industry. In the planning stages, he would get so bogged down in detail that I had to say almost every five minutes, ‘Let’s remember this is a conceptual sale. Let’s make the conceptual sale first, or we won’t be making any sale at all.’

“And sometimes it’s necessary to ask your prospect, ‘Can we upscale this conversation?’ It’s a bit blunt, but it gets the point across.”

Fact gatherers, says Hattal, are generally analytical, linear thinkers who want things to be precise. “The best way to work with this type of person,” he says, “is to be on the same plane. Forget your own way of looking at things. That customer wants a lot of details up front, before you get to any generalities or philosophical statements. Bring all the data and be sure it’s all accurate.”

Sanow recalls an incident that illustrates this last point all too well: “I was making a sales presentation on Long Island. A woman came up before we got started to point out a misspelled word in one of my handouts and expressed her subsequent misgivings about the seminar itself. Obviously, I can’t change her personality, but I’d better be more accurate if I want to sell someone who is concerned with a typo.”

Criticizers

The criticizers are “second cousins to fact gatherers,” Sanow explains. “They are people who like to take your story apart. When such clients take aim at me, I suggest they check with my last hundred clients as evidence that my ideas work, and I immediately offer their phone numbers. Not just two or three, but a hundred, literally. They can’t all be my friends, I point out. That, of course, also shows my wide capability range.

“For example: When Promar International, an Alexandria, Virginia-based company of marketing consultants in the agriculture field, was searching for a sales trainer last year, the executive in charge of the search not only criticized my proposal, he also told me, ‘You don’t seem to have done any training for companies like ours.’

“Instead of arguing the point, I sent him a list of my last 100 clients and their phone numbers. It sold him. Later, when I asked him what he had learned about me, he confessed that he had never got around to calling them. ‘Anyone who’s willing to give me the names and numbers of a hundred clients,’ he said, ‘had to know what he was doing.’”

While they may appear to be nitpickers, “criticizers don’t want to dwell on the details the way fact gatherers do,” Gary Hattal points out. “They’re very aggressive, hoping to find fault with your proposal. Whereas fact gatherers are introverted and want to work by themselves to solve their problems, the criticizers, who really are a driver type, will use the opportunity to knock you down a peg.”

So how should salespeople handle criticizers without antagonizing them? “You deal with that type in one of two ways,” says Hattal. “If their criticisms are valid, you own up to them immediately and say, ‘I see what you’re saying and you’re right. Let me try to be more accurate and give you the information I have that I know is accurate, and let’s see if we can answer your questions that way.’

“When they’re not right and it’s something factual, not subjective, and you can demonstrate it conclusively, I would thank them for their perspective and, especially if they seem emotional about the matter, say something like, ‘I understand you feel strongly about that. Let me offer another perspective.’ Not ‘my’ perspective, not the ‘right’ perspective, but ‘another’ perspective. Your objective here is to enable those people to come to terms with their errors by themselves.”

Consensus Blockers

The most difficult type of prospect to influence may be the consensus blocker, especially if that person has a hidden agenda. When the decision to buy rests with more than one person, says Hattal, decisions sometimes are made through a consensus process. “That means a lot of discussion and give-and-take to resolve conflicts within the group,” he explains. “Sometimes a single member can block the decision to buy for personal reasons. So if the group regards homogeneity as vital, your challenge is to discern the blocker’s real motive before you can develop a strategy to persuade the entire group.”

With these people, Geibel says, “the offer has to be framed in terms of their particular thought process or aligned with their way of thinking, needs and ‘pain.’ Otherwise, it’s a waste of time. But a preliminary meeting should emphasize that need for common ground.”

Determine the group dynamics to plan your next step. “If you’re speaking to a group – a small group of three to five individuals – rather than one-on-one, that group very often comes in with its own culture,” says Hattal. “Remember, a group is always doing two things simultaneously: getting a job done and managing its decision-making process.

“You might actually hope for some conflict there, some difference of opinion, because you often get the best decisions when the group members are not restricted by their leader or by one member who is blocking. You may have sold everyone else, but that one person blocks the consensus, sometimes for reasons you may never know.”

At the same time, when making a presentation to a group, don’t lose the sale by accidentally creating a blocker. “I was present at a meeting last year at which two salespeople were trying to sell a woman executive who was about to join a client company of mine,” Sanow recalls. “She had one of her assistants, a man, at the meeting. They had a product that interested her and they presented it well. But those two sellers, unaware for some reason that the man was subordinate, foolishly directed their presentation to him, presumably because he was a man. They were courteous to her but addressed themselves primarily to the man, both with their eye contact and body language. His boss was pleasant, didn’t say a word, and neither signaled the mistake. But those two fools turned her into a blocker. Not surprisingly, she told me later, ‘I will never deal with them again.’”

Distraction Tolerators

People who take phone calls or allow trivial interruptions during a sales presentation are similar to blockers. Again, it helps to establish ground rules for the meeting. Are you meeting in the best place to avoid such interruptions? There’s not much you can do if it’s in the prospect’s office except to ask, in a pointed way, for that person’s full attention. “If you anticipate the problem,” Geibel says, “suggest meeting on neutral territory – a hotel lobby or its coffee shop. I make it a point to take out my cell phone and suggest we both turn ours off, along with our pagers. That usually works.”

When necessary, says Hattal, “draw up an agenda and suggest that you both become incommunicado for 10 to 15 minutes.”

Note Takers

Don’t be fooled by a busy pencil. If you see someone taking voluminous notes, don’t assume that person is fascinated by your spiel. It can be just the opposite. Note takers are first cousins to attention fakers. They can be wide-eyed and mind dead. They might even take down every word you say, or they might be just doodling, waiting for you to run down.

“With such persons,” Gary Hattal suggests, “you may need to put reason aside momentarily and mount a barrage on their emotions with attention-getting statements. At the proper time, you might then narrow your presentation by focusing on only two or three points you’d like them to take away from your discussion. You could also reverse the procedure by asking them to tell you exactly what they want to discuss.”

Geibel takes another tack: “Tell prospects you’ll send them an email or follow-up letter with an outline of what was discussed, so they don’t need to take notes.”

Mental Rehearsers

These people constantly plan their remarks – while you’re still speaking. Consequently they are among the most difficult kinds to communicate with because their minds are in a broadcast mode, rather than receiving. To get through to these tough customers, you need to break through their mind-set with compelling dialogue to keep the exchange spontaneous.

That’s where your selling skills can make a difference. “If you can engage their minds, if you ask good questions, they have to think about their response,” says Geibel. “It can’t be canned. A real-time answer doesn’t allow for a rehearsal.”

You can blame the mental-rehearser syndrome on the short attention span so prevalent these days, says Sanow. “It’s only eight seconds for adults, according to a recent Wall Street Journal story – about the same amount of time they give to a billboard as they drive by.”

That doesn’t mean that these difficult prospects won’t listen to you at all, Sanow admits, “But you need to be interactive, with open-ended questions from the start. If you fail to get their attention right away, if you don’t excite them and keep them enthusiastic about your message, their minds change direction. They no longer hear you.”

Remember, you’re not the only salesperson these customers see, so they have programmed responses. To break through the barrier, throw them a verbal curveball. “Let’s say you’re one of several salespeople that prospect will be talking with today,” says Hattal. “Company policy or personal preference may require asking each one the same questions. Unless you ignite customers’ minds with engaging dialogue, all you’ll get is the canned speech. They’ll tell you what they think their needs are, not what they really are. To break through, you first have to recognize what type of individual you’re addressing.”

In fact, knowing the type of individual you are presenting to will allow you to see where you must focus to get their attention. Inside all attention fakers and note takers are people with real appetites who have developed individual mental defenses and filters to help them achieve their goals. Identifying types is just one part of the job. Knowing how to deal with them is another and can make the difference between winning or losing a sale.