Overcoming Customer Skepticism

With the Thanksgiving holiday just around the corner, most of us have much to be thankful for. The short list may include family, friends, customers, and the camaraderie of fellow employees, just to name a few.

Personally, I am thankful for new ideas, especially the ones that can give our clients an unfair advantage in their respective marketplaces. Perhaps that’s why Question Based Selling has continued to evolve, from it’s early beginnings as a questioning strategy, to a fully vetted methodology for engaging more prospects in more productive sales conversations.

One of the things that continues to change is the level of customer skepticism toward vendors. Perhaps this should be of no surprise for those of us in sales and marketing, particularly as we head into 2013. After all, how long does it take you to identify a credit card solicitation you receive by mail and throw it in the trash?

Overcoming the customer’s natural skepticism can be risky business. One approach you could try is to push harder and harder, except that this usually causes prospects and customers to push back (even harder). You can also try to gravel and beg for the business, which generally puts you in a weak negotiating position down the road.

In Question Based Selling, we specifically don’t try to “overcome” the customer’s natural skepticism. Instead, we embrace this skepticism as a way to cull out many of the pretenders who would otherwise be competitors. Allowing the competition to be held at arm’s length is a great strategy if you can get and “in” with otherwise standoffish customers. How can you give yourself a strategic advantage? Great question!

Since I first developed QBS in the mid-1990’s, I’ve spent a great deal of time on the idea of leveraging curiosity. The question for salespeople is simple: “What are you doing to leverage curiosity in the sales process?” The most common answer I hear back when asking this question is, “Huh?”

Isn’t that strange? Curiosity is the genesis of each and every sale, yet it continues to be the least talked about subject in traditional sales training courses. Let me put it this way. I would assert that if a prospect or customer isn’t the least bit curious about who you are or what you can do for them, then they won’t want to spend time with you. Agreed? Fortunately, the opposite is true. As prospects become more and more curious about you and your offerings, you get more mindshare with key people in important target accounts.

So, what are you doing to leverage curiosity in the sales process?