The customer is always wrong: the salesperson as a wannabe lawyer

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There are two kinds of salespeople in the world. One knows that the customer is just trying to get some questions answered, and does what he can to answer those questions. The other sees the customer's questions as "objections" to be overcome - obstacles to his making the sale and getting a commission.

In other words, in the first case, the customer is right - right to be making sure the product will meet his needs. Right to ask questions. Rightfully entitled to getting honest answers to those questions until he has enough information to make a good decision.

In the second case, the salesperson behaves as if the customer is just plain wrong. During the conversation with the customer he is, by turns, evasive, dismissive, and downright rude as he spits out answers. He is combative during the question-asking process. He interrupts the customer, argues with the customer, and treats the customer like an idiot.

A recent experience with such a salesperson convinced me that these salespeople end up in sales because they love to argue but they're not smart enough (or industrious enough) to get through law school. They are wanna-be lawyers.

Meet Mr. Overcome Their Objections

My husband and I were at a tradeshow recently - the Newport Boat Show. We were comparing boat instrumentation systems made by two different manufacturers, B&G and NKE. We went to the B&G booth first.

The salesperson came up and started to "help" us. No matter which question he asked, his basic mantra was, "You're wrong. Let me tell you how it really is."

Here are the mistakes the salesperson made. He was a perfect example of the "you're wrong, I'm right," approach.

1) He didn't bother to figure out who we were, what we knew, or where we were in our buying process. My husband and I have spent years understanding, buying, using, trouble-shooting, and repairing electronic devices. More than once, the salesperson spoke to us as if we couldn't change the batteries in a flashlight.

 

If he had asked a simple question or two, he could have pegged us, and avoided the "digital for dummies" lecture. Ditto for things like the difference between "true wind" direction (the direction the wind is coming from) and "apparent wind" direction (the direction the wind appears to be coming from when you add the wind generated by the boat's directional progress to the true wind). Several times, in order to get the real answer to our real question, we had to make it clear that we didn't need a lecture on the basics; we just needed a specific question answered.

2) He said things that were ridiculous, and didn't laugh when we all realized they were ridiculous. As we stood in the booth, we were trying to compare two different B&G systems. One of them was about twice the price of the other. It became obvious, based on what he was telling us, that the higher-priced system was higher-priced because the company believed that someone paying more for a boat would also automatically want to pay more for a navigational system, even though the lower-priced system would do the price equally well, and the underlying electronics were the same. The price of the system was set by the thickness of your wallet, in other words. He refused to acknowledge the absurdity of it. A good salesperson would have chuckled, at least.

3) He became increasingly irritated about specific questions. At one point in the increasingly uncomfortable discussion, he said that the wind direction sensor had to be reset each time the boat was tacked (each time you changed direction as you were going up towards the wind). This was disturbing, because you don't want to have to reset your instruments while you're busy dealing with tacking every few minutes in a narrow channel.

I asked him about it, but he kept interrupting me before I could finish asking my question. "I know, I know, I know what you are saying," he said. So, I said, "OK, if you know what I'm saying, go ahead and answer the question." His answer was one of those non-answers that salespeople give when they really don't want you to know the real answer, or they don't know the answer themselves and start resorting to SBS (salesperson BS). What he should have said is you only have to calibrate the instrument one time to account for the specifics of your boat, and after that you can rely on the numbers the instrument is displaying, because it resets automatically with each tack.

4) As he was talking to me, he was unselling my husband. This happens frequently when two people are talking to a salesperson. As my husband watched this guy operate, he was thinking: The B&G system and the NKE system are basically comparable. The basics are covered by both systems; most of these systems suffer from feature bloat anyway. They all do the job and are fairly reasonable to use. What really makes the difference is what happens when something goes wrong - and something always goes wrong with electronics sooner or later - and you have to deal with the company's people. This guy is probably the US importer for B&G, and he's being a jerk. I've already talked to the importer for NKE, and he's a pretty reasonable guy.

So while the salesperson thought he was "winning the argument," and "overcoming her objections," the other customer watching it all decided that when we were somewhere far from home, and something went wrong, he wanted to deal with a company that said, "No problem, it's probably just the [whatever], and we'll ship it out to you today," instead of the company that said, "You'll have to ship the whole unit back to us and we'll see what's wrong with it, and you'll have to pay for shipping in and out, it will probably take about 6 weeks." Or, worse, "You're wrong. Those units never have that kind of failure. Are you sure it's plugged in?"

Argumentative salespeople behave as if they are the smartest guy, selling to someone stupid. Innate intelligence aside, the argumentative salesperson is missing the whole point. Today's customers can spend literally hours researching a product before they ever talk to a salesperson, becoming quite knowledgeable about a product. By the time they do talk to a salesperson, they know quite a bit about it, often even more than the salesperson - and they have very specific questions.

Marketing and sales should be working together to answer those questions. Salespeople should be taught that the customer's questions and concerns are valid and deserve a complete and accurate answer.

The customer knows what he knows. He is almost ready to buy, and only has a few questions. Too bad the I-wanna-be-an-attorney salespeople are determined to argue, even at this late stage in the buying process.

When we visited the NKE booth, we had a very pleasant experience there. The salesperson was gracious and helpful, speaking as one veteran sailor to another. He listened. He understood who we were and where we are in our buying process, with just a couple of questions. If he didn't know about something, he said so, and we looked up the answer in the detailed literature in the booth. He answered all our questions. He treated us as if we were trying to make an intelligent decision, and he helped us make that decision.

There is no doubt in our minds which vendor's system is going to end up on our boat.

The customer is always right about one thing: He has the right to take his money elsewhere. And, given "you're wrong" treatment, he probably will.