How to Deal with Difficult Customers

SOB Summary for Chapter 5: How to Face and Finesse the SOB “Quadruple Threat”!

“Dave has done it again! The application of the 10 key strategies in this book will help every sales professional learn how to deal with the truly difficult and how to avoid creating unnecessary difficulties. It is written with the same wit, humor, and inspiration that have made Dave’s prior books so effective.”

—Margaret Callihan, President, Chairman, and CEO of Sun Trust Bank, Southwest Florida

“Dave Anderson knocks another one out of the park with How to Deal with Difficult Customers! The problem is real; Dave’s solutions make sense; and, as always, he makes you laugh in the process.”

“I could not put this book down. It is a salesperson’s bible offering clear and concise how-to advice. If you are in the selling profession and want to sell more, you should read this book . . . twice.”

“An individual executing the ideals within this book will change their own life and their organization. No one has the gift like Dave Anderson to articulate the importance that character plays in maximizing potential.”

“Throw out all your other sales manuals. Dave Anderson’s new book will change the way you look at customers, the way your salespeople look at themselves, and quite frankly, the way you look at the sales process.”

“What are you waiting for? We all have difficult customers. If you are tired of leaving money on the table because you can’t handle them, read this book. If your good customers are turning into difficult customers, read this book. If you want to deliver results year-in and year-out, read, re-read, and apply the lessons of this book.”

—Randy Pennington, author, Results Rule! Build a Culture that Blows the Competition Away!

“Dave Anderson does it again! Implementing the ideas in this book will add up to higher sales, margins, and profits.”

“This is not a book about selling theories; rather, it’s a ‘how-to’ manual on proven sales techniques. Dave Anderson writes with authority because he really has been there . . . and succeeded! It will be required reading for everyone on my sales team!”

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How to deal with difficult customers : 10 simple strategies for selling to the stubborn, obnoxious, and belligerent / Dave Anderson.

This book is dedicated to the many SOBs (stubborn, obnoxious, and belligerent customers) I’ve had the privilege of selling and teaching others to sell over the years. Thank you for forcing us to get better at what we do. Unfortunately for you, your gig is up. You’re not that tough. In fact, from this day forward, we’re going to earn even more of your money—and make you like the process in spite of yourself.

Since time is money for everyone in sales, I’m not going to waste it rambling on through the preface and introduction explaining why I wrote this book. In short, How to Deal With Difficult Customers is written for every salesperson on the planet who wants to start making the sales he or she regularly loses to stubborn, obnoxious, and belligerent customers. I can say this with utmost confidence because, regardless of where you sell, what you sell, or how you sell, if you’re in the sales profession for more than a few hours you’ll encounter a stubborn, obnoxious, or belligerent (from hereon out referred to affectionately as SOBs) customer and have an opportunity to earn his or her business. This book will teach you to sell them more easily, more quickly, and for higher profits.

What inspired this book? Frustration and disgust. Let me explain. I’ve sold everything from car wax to insurance to carpet cleaning services to automobiles, and it seems that every sales class I ever attended skirted the real-world issue of how to sell to a jerk. Their rationale was, since the vast majority of customers were respectful, pleasant, and professional, why expend time learning to sell someone you may encounter on only 5–10% of your sales calls? Frankly, I needed that 5–10% of the business I was missing as a result of being unprepared. Over a lifetime, we’re talking about a ton of money, and I got sick and tired of wimpy trainers, authors, and managers who didn’t seem to think that this segment of the populace was worth learning how to sell or, if the truth be known, didn’t know how to sell them. I knew that someone was selling these people and that it should be me. In addition, I wearied of dreading SOBs. They made my life miserable even when I wasn’t dealing with them; just anticipating them drained me! What’s worse is that I never knew that my own deficient sales skills turned otherwise nice, normal folks into SOBs! In fact, one of the key premises of this book that every salesperson must grasp is that most SOB customers are made, not born, and they’re “made” by sales mistakes that can be prevented by applying the strategies in this book.

Over time, I developed a strategy for both preventing normal prospects from turning into SOBs and for selling to genuine SOBs that built my confidence, increased my sales, and made my income skyrocket. Here’s a quick sneak preview of what you can expect to find in each of the book’s 10 chapters:

Chapter 1: Understand the Ten Truths About SOBs!

Sales professionals must understand some background on what an SOB is and is not if they expect to develop a successful strategy for selling to them. It’s also vital to avoid the sales errors that turn Dr. Jekylls into Mr. Hydes. These 10 points set the stage for fully leveraging the other nine strategies.

Chapter 2: Toughen up; Sharpen up; Grow up & Go up!

You cannot grow your career or income bigger on the outside than you are growing on the inside. To sell more SOBs you’ve got to become mentally tough and drastically improve your skill level. In other words, you must look in the mirror first.

Chapter 3: Don’t Just Be Better, Be Different!

If you’re no different than most other products or other salespeople your only closing tool will be to have the cheapest price. This is a lousy strategy for anyone making their living on commission. You’ll learn how to become not only better than your competition but successfully differentiate yourself from them as well in order to sell SOBs.

Chapter 4: Take the Fight Out of the Sales Process!

Some SOBs want to fight. Others don’t want to fight but expect one anyhow because they’ve become so accustomed to dealing with amateur salespeople. There are key words, phrases, and actions you must use—and avoid using—if you want to remove the fight from the sales process and create a more profitable, amicable closing scenario.

Chapter 5: How to Face and Finesse the SOB “Quadruple Threat”!

There are four common threats posed by SOBs that we’ll acknowledge and strategize on how to overcome. These are real world sales inhibitors that aren’t going away so you must arm yourself to deal with them effectively and turn them to your advantage.

Chapter 6: Shovel the Piles While They’re Small!

When something goes wrong during the sales process or after the sale is made, you need to deal with it quickly, professionally, and humbly. This retains your current customers and brings in referrals as it preserves your own passion and self-esteem. Even when things get totally out of hand and you are assaulted by the most obnoxious of SOBs, this chapter has tools to help you face them down and win.

Chapter 7: Create a Cult!

A key objective of every sales professional should be to become less dependent on fresh customers over time and, instead, build a following of repeat and referral customers that can make you rich. This won’t happen by accident. You need to be disciplined, creative, and consistent. By selling more “old friends” you’ll have fewer SOBs to deal with.

Chapter 8: Create Urgency to Buy Today!

Your prospects are doing more research than ever before prior to buying a product or service. This means that by the time you see them they are ready to make a decision and to do so quickly. You must leverage this state and create urgency to buy today rather than buying into the nonsense that “people take longer to purchase today” because it’s not true. If you get intimidated by an educated customer and don’t create urgency for the SOB to buy today, your competitor will.

Chapter 9: Learn to Read an SOB’s Mind!

You’re going to be much more successful in selling to SOBs if you can learn how they think and pick up on signals they give you, both verbally and nonverbally, throughout the sales process. This chapter covers three aspects of reading your prospects like a book, regardless of the words they’re saying.

Chapter 10: Be Prepared to Walk Away!

If you want the deal too bad you probably won’t get it—or you’ll get it and won’t make much money. One of the greatest paradoxes of selling is that to get more deals you can’t want them that much. This takes fine technique, a tough mindset, and a poker face. This chapter covers seven powerful closes for selling SOBs and outlines seven steps to take if you lose a sale.

After decades of using these techniques and teaching others to do the same I’m going to share these 10 simple strategies for selling to SOBs with you in the coming chapters, and I’m going to do it with straight talk, real examples, and, when necessary, tough love. Don’t expect to find silver bullets or one-size-fits-all sales cures for the challenges SOBs present. Selling to SOBs takes plenty of preparation and hard work, and nothing you can do will prove effective every time. Besides, some customers aren’t worth having because they bring a negative value to your business (more about that in Chapter 10). But you will find common sense strategies and disciplines that, once applied and internalized into your selling psyche, will make you a calm, confident, closing machine—even in the face of SOBs who make Donald Trump look like Donald Duck.

Each chapter will conclude with an SOB Summary that outlines the key takeaways from each of the 10 chapter topics. Think of these summaries as a type of Cliff Notes that focuses your thinking on what matters most. The summaries also will make it easier to review what you learned.

We’re also going to have some fun along the way. Selling should be fun and so should writing about it and learning about it. We’ll poke fun at prospects, other salespeople, and ourselves. Incidentally, if you’re always uptight, overly sensitive, and stuck up, you’re going to hate the selling profession if you don’t already. Loosen up and open your mind and you just might learn something that will change your life, your lifestyle, and the lives of those you serve in sales.

Most of the true sales pros I’ve met over the years are down-to-earth, uncomplicated, real people and that is precisely who I’m writing this book for. So if you’re the academic type, full of yourself, or prone to spend more time whining about why something won’t work than giving it a shot, you should have chosen law as your profession and not sales. Nonetheless, my bet is that there is hope even for you if you’ll just take a minute or two to get over yourself and adapt the lessons in this book.

I’d like to spend a few lines acknowledging that I won’t be spending much time on acknowledgments but would be remiss in failing to acknowledge those worthy of being acknowledged. If you’re still with me, let’s get on with it: I’d like to thank the hundreds of thousands of purchasers of my previous books, cassettes, and CDs because without you this book would not be possible. After all, a publisher is not going to continue letting an author write works that don’t sell. In regards to publishers, I’d like to salute editor Matt Holt and John Wiley & Sons for the collaborative spirit, flexibility, and firm support they’ve offered in the books I’ve written with them in the past.

Dave Anderson is president of LearnToLead, an international sales and leadership training organization. Dave’s last “real job” was to oversee the operations of a $300 million retail sales organization, which he left in 1999 to found LearnToLead. His Web site, www.learntolead.com, has tens of thousands of subscribers in more than 40 countries and provides more than 400 free training articles covering a variety of business topics. Dave gives 150 business presentations annually and has spoken in 10 countries. He authors a leadership column for two national magazines and has been the guest on more than 100 business talk radio shows. His interviews and articles have appeared in hundreds of publications, including The Wall Street Journal and Investors Daily. Dave has authored four earlier books: Selling Above the Crowd (1999), No-Nonsense Leadership (2001), Up Your Business (2003), and If You Don’t Make Waves You’ll Drown (2005). Dave spent many wonderful years living in Texas, but his love of ideal weather and great beaches brought him to Southern California, where his outspoken conservative ideals ensure that he and his wife Rhonda have plenty of time to enjoy these things alone.

What makes someone a stubborn, obnoxious, or belligerent customer? In this book, we shall count the ways. But first, in defense of these customers, I should reiterate my assertion from the preface that most SOB customers are not born, they are made. Sadly, many salespeople have become quite proficient at conversions: transforming normal customers into SOBs. It’s a form of reverse-evangelism. As a new salesperson, I was no exception. In fact, in the following paragraphs, I’m going to give you an example of how, early in my career, I learned a lesson about these types of sales conversions. Even though it happened decades ago, I can recall clearly how, in the span of 10 minutes, I transformed a nice, elderly, country couple who really seemed to like me into classic SOBs who not-so-politely asked if they could please work with a salesman other than me.

I had just started my job selling cars for Parnell Chrysler—Plymouth—Jeep—Eagle in Wichita Falls, Texas. While stopping by my wife’s office to have lunch with her, I noticed an elderly couple hunched over the hood of their old car in the parking lot fiddling with wires in an attempt to start it up. Both Audrey and James wore sweaty cowboy hats, worn-out jeans, and dirty boots and were as country as fried green tomatoes. My sales antenna went up, and in just a few moments after going out to introduce myself, they made it clear that they were sick and tired of their clunker and ready to buy something else. I quickly loaded them up in my car and drove them to the dealership. Audrey and James couldn’t thank me enough for offering to help out and were genuinely grateful I had been in the right place at the right time to help them. They confided that they never bought new cars because they didn’t like the depreciation but would be interested in looking at a reliable used model. I just knew that I was in store for an easy sale.

After arriving at the dealership, I walked them over to a line of used cars and began opening up the doors, popping the hoods one after the other and telling them what I knew about each one: miles, equipment, remaining warranty, price, etc. After about 20 minutes standing in the Texas heat and listening to my used-car speeches, these kind, old country folks looked oddly at one another and then James spoke up and asked tersely with his finger pointed at my chest, “Is there an experienced salesperson here that we can talk to? We ain’t gonna waste time looking at stuff we don’t want.” I was crushed at their change of heart toward me. I sure had misjudged these people. They were just a couple of belligerent old codgers who obviously enjoyed pushing younger people around. Embarrassed and angry, I asked them to hold on while I went to get Bobby Laird, a veteran salesman who had been the sole team member to introduce himself after I had started working at the dealership a few days before.

Bobby came out, introduced himself, invited James and Audrey inside for coffee, made what I thought was far too much small talk, finally got around to asking what kind of car they had in mind, took them back out into the Texas stickiness and in less than 30 minutes sold them a car that was twice the price of the cars I had shown them. I looked on in shock as these two “hillbillies” wrote a check for the entire purchase.

I was exposed to some valuable lessons that day, although it would take me much longer to actually learn them: The first one being that many SOBs don’t start out that way; it takes an unskilled salesperson to bring them down to that level.

As you learn more about how to sell to difficult people throughout this book, it’s important to understand why customers are or become stubborn, obnoxious, and/or belligerent. Once we know the “why” we can learn to sell them with a different “how.” Here are seven of the top reasons that I’ll introduce here and build on throughout the book:

1. They have low expectations about the salesperson and the sales process. Customers have been treated indifferently and unprofessionally in so many instances and for so long that many of them have a bad attitude toward you and the sales process before you even say your first few words. They expect the worst, and, as a profession, salespeople oftentimes live down to their expectations. My guess is that when you are on the purchasing side of a product or service you experience this yourself far more often than you like. Poor or indifferent treatment you receive when you try to spend your money with someone can turn you into a monster—especially if it happens when you’re already having a bad day.

2. They have high expectations from the salesperson and company. Unlike point No. 1 above, many customers have a very high set of expectations when they buy. This is created by corporate marketing and advertising that over promises to prospects, almost ensuring that they are let down when they actually come face-to-face with the reality of dealing with the misrepresented organization. This makes people feel deceived and even cheated, which creates a very unpleasant sales experience indeed.

3. They have less time to waste buying a product or service. While more information is available to consumers today and many will spend additional time researching a product or service before purchasing it, they are less likely to want to then waste extra time trying to buy it as they deal with salespeople who turn the sales process into “amateur hour,” much like I did with James and Audrey. In fact, because customers who do more research are more certain of what they want they expect to spend less time having to buy it and can turn ugly when this proves not to be the case.

4. Unskilled salespeople who waste their time. Many customers have no intention of being stubborn, obnoxious, or belligerent but are reduced to these attitudes when confronted with an unskilled salesperson who doesn’t know how to build rapport, investigate wants and needs, present or demonstrate a product effectively, address objections, close the sale, or competently and expeditiously complete the paperwork involved. Again wasted time will frustrate a customer who, in today’s world, is wearing more hats in his or her personal and professional life and is being stretched like Gumby in a dozen directions simultaneously by friends, family, coworkers and his or her own customers.

5. Unknowledgeable salespeople who waste their time. Many salespeople are skilled in selling but lack product knowledge and cannot adequately or correctly answer a prospect’s questions. When prospects feel they are dealing with someone who doesn’t know what he is talking about or who is trying to bluff his way through serious concerns and questions, they can’t help but feel a bit ornery and respond with impatience or even anger.

6. Unmotivated salespeople who turn the sales process into a drag. Some salespeople are both highly skilled and knowledgeable about what they sell but have so little passion or enthusiasm that trying to buy from them is like making a date with the walking dead. The mere proximity of these zombies suck the energy out of a room and out of a sales encounter. This is especially true when a prospect is making a large or emotional purchase. In this case, they’d like to see their excitement shared by the salesperson. When the salesperson doesn’t deliver, it slows the customer down and can turn a sure-fire buyer into a stubborn looker who will plunk down his or her dollars into the hands of the next fired-up salesperson they meet—even if the product was not the buyer’s first choice or costs a bit more than he or she had in mind.

7. Some people are just plain miserable. Nothing and no one makes them happy. These SOBs are to be pitied. Somewhere in their life they started making some bad choices: to trust no one, to never be happy, to see the problem in every opportunity and the list goes on. These people don’t necessarily dislike or hate you personally; they dislike and hate much about life, period! Yet, they still must buy and someone’s going to sell them. The best revenge against this brood, this fellowship of the miserable, is to make the sale and take their money.