CHAPTER 12

Preventing the Buyer’s Reflex Resistance to Salespeople

There’s been a recurring subtheme running like an undercurrent through the previous chapters on the sales story, proactive telephone calls, and sales calls. Just in case I have been a bit subtle (not something I’m often accused of), allow me to pause here to hammer the point home.

Buyers resist salespeople. Everyone does it, even those of us selling for a living. Buyers, especially prospects, have an automatic, almost instinctive, negative reflex reaction to salespeople. You know exactly what I’m referring to because you respond the same way. Think back to your last trip to a furniture store. What thoughts immediately went through your head as the eager, clipboard-carrying salesman approached? Or how about when you received that unexpected call and the telemarketer launched into her script without pause immediately after mispronouncing your name? “Mr. Winberg, this is Amanda from Mosquitos Have Rights of Missouri. We would like to thank you for helping us out in the past, and this year you can make an enormous impact….” Shoot me now.

Some of you are thinking, “Come on, that’s a retail salesperson or telemarketer. Of course we recoil reflexively when they intrude. But buyers don’t respond the same way to me or other business-to-business sales reps, do they?” Yes, they do, and so do you. Remember that last sales guy, the one you granted an appointment and then invited your team to sit in on his presentation? That same guy who blabbered nonstop about irrelevant industry data points and subjected you to a forty-minute demo without asking one meaningful question about your business? Did you and your teammates not immediately begin resisting his message as soon as you realized it was a mistake to invite him in? Of course you did. Everyone puts up some sort of defense shield because salespeople repeatedly give us plenty of cause to do so.

It’s Not Your Fault, but It Is Your Problem

This automatic reflex resistance to salespeople is not your fault. You didn’t do anything to cause it. You inherited the situation. The waters were poisoned way before you got here. Other morons, whether from retail sales, telesales, or business-to-business sales (as described in the previous examples), messed the whole thing up for us. Unfortunately, we’re left to contend with the consequences.

Think for a minute how your friends outside of sales (or even coworkers who are anti-sales) would describe a salesperson. Here are the not-so-flattering words I hear people consistently use when talking collectively about those of us in sales:

  Self-absorbed

  Manipulative

  Verbose

  Unreliable

  High ego

  Pest

  Time waster

  Disconnected from my reality

  Poor listener

Friends, this is what we are up against. Not pretty. We may not have caused it, but it is our problem. And we certainly must deal with it if we’re going to succeed.

When was the last time you took a long look and listened to how you are coming across to prospective customers? Have you invested the energy to evaluate each aspect of your sales approach in light of how your actions and words are perceived by the buyer?

My eyes were opened to the importance of that question while working with a client’s sales team last year. This great little company had a handful of sales reps; they competed in a tough arena and the business was doing remarkably well compared to its peers. But their success was due to an effective marketing engine that was generating an abundance of leads for this relatively unpolished sales team. A large portion of the reps’ job was to sift through the leads and determine which had potential to be converted into “opportunities” they could work. There was consensus among senior management that the sales reps were fumbling the leads and converting an embarrassingly low percentage into deals.

Management’s assessment was correct, to say the least. I worked closely with a few of the less seasoned reps, listening to them on outbound calls and leaving voice mail messages. What I heard was disturbing. The reps had zero awareness of how they were coming across to the people they were calling. They cranked through lead after lead at breakneck speed. Every word out of their mouths was self-focused. There was no attempt to connect, relate, or understand. The motivation for calling was transparently selfish and anyone on the other end could smell it.

After an hour biting my tongue, I switched from nice guy observer to coach. I forced this one rookie to stop before each call to articulate his objective and review what he knew about the lead. But as hard as I tried to help him focus on the prospect, he was unable or unwilling to alter his approach. I was embarrassed even listening to him delivering his canned message on the phone. In frustration, I told the young man that he sounded like a cheesy pitchman only interested in accomplishing his own objective for the calls. So, after pushing him to consider how the prospect might perceive his sales tactics, this rookie gave me a treat. He stubbornly responded that he liked sounding like a salesperson. In fact, it was his way of qualifying the lead! He reasoned everyone understood that if you’re going to buy, you’ll need to deal with a salesperson. So be it if he turned off the prospect. That only meant they weren’t interested in buying. Needless to say, this young man failed. We set him free to succeed elsewhere, and my hope is that there’s now one less uncoachable moron out there giving sales professionals a bad name.

Shaping How the Customer Perceives You

That experience, combined with what I was observing with other clients, had a profound impact on my sales coaching. I concluded that my concern with how buyers perceived salespeople could no longer remain an undercurrent in my coaching. Rather, this topic was worthy of top billing and earned a position front and center.

Buyer’s resistance to salespeople is so strong and so prevalent that it requires us to have a second objective for every aspect of our sales attack. Right alongside our primary objective of what we’d we like to accomplish, it is imperative to ask additional questions to ensure we’re not thwarting our own sales effort and encouraging the customer to resist us:

  How will the prospect or customer feel about you and your company following this interaction?

  What message are you sending about the experience the customer will have working with you?

  How can you inform the customer that you understand this interaction is not about you?

  What can be communicated to demonstrate that you are worthy of the prospect’s time and are driven to bring maximum value to your potential customer?

We must ask these questions with an eye toward how the potential customer will perceive us. This is particularly true in today’s difficult selling environment where the lame approach of so many desperate salespeople only heightens a buyer’s sensitivity.

Preventing and Minimizing the Buyer’s Resistance

Since we agree that this automatic resistance buyers have toward salespeople is real, it’s foolish and naive to pretend it doesn’t exist. As professionals, we should expect it and prepare for it. That’s why I am adamant that we examine every aspect of our proactive new business pursuit through the filter of the buyer’s defense shield. Let’s start with an examination of the things we believe about ourselves as salespeople, how we sound, what we say, and our feelings toward our prospects.

Our Beliefs

What we believe about our job and our role as salespeople has a tremendous effect on how buyers see us. If deep down we truly believe that potential customers will be better off working with us, and we have their best interests at heart, buyers will perceive and reward our genuine intentions. We know the opposite is true as well. Buyers detect insincerity as quickly as they can smell cheap cologne. And nothing causes them to raise the defense shield faster than a bad-smelling, phony salesperson.

Representing ourselves as problem solvers who exist to bring value sets us apart from the throng of other salespeople vying for the customer’s attention. It also helps when we initiate contact with new potential customers because our motives are right. We want to call on our prospects because we truly believe we can make their job, their life, and their business better. Wise buyers are much slower to resist a salesperson whose clear motivation is to help them succeed.

Our Sound

Sometimes you can detect a salesperson just by listening to the tone and cadence of the individual’s voice. This type of salesperson can cause a prospect to react like an annoyed skunk raising its tail. That’s why it is surprising that so many salespeople actually try to sound like a salesperson, and like each other. How silly. These mimicking reps accomplish the opposite of what they intend. Instead, they clue the buyer to deploy his defenses, knowing that sales bombs are about to rain down.

As I admonished earlier in the chapter on proactive telephone calls, lose the sales voice. The moment a buyer hears that prototypical sales tone, the yellow caution flag comes out. Most salespeople are unaware they even do this, and yet it destroys their sales approach. Practice speaking in a normal, friendly, casual, confident voice. If you can master a natural demeanor, then there’s hope your prospects will actually listen rather than shut their ears at the first sound of the sales voice.

Our View of the Prospect

A client once asked me to study members of his sales organization to discover the main differences between the top and bottom performers. It was a fascinating and energizing experience because it was so different from my typical engagement. The findings were not what I expected going into the assignment. There were indeed subtle differences between those who were struggling and those producing three times the average. These subtleties had a huge impact on how the various reps viewed and approached their leads.

The reps that were struggling maintained two defeatist and destructive assumptions about their leads. The underperforming reps did not enter a dialogue with the leads believing they were serious prospects. They used descriptions like “tire-kickers” and “window-shoppers” when sharing their frustrations about lack of conversions. The second defeatest belief I uncovered revolved around the assumed motive of the buyer. This group of reps was convinced that the leads were simply price shoppers looking to get the cheapest deal possible. It’s not hard to predict how these reps came across to their leads, and the results proved it. If you were the buyer, how would you respond to a salesperson who telegraphed his perceptions that you were not a serious prospective customer and your only interest was getting a low-ball price?

In contrast, the top performers at this company had a different view of their leads. They entered the initial conversation with the new lead assuming that it was a legitimate opportunity to make a sale. Leads weren’t simply price shopping; they were likely reaching out because they were stuck and looking for help with their situation. Imagine, for a moment, how differently these top reps came across to the leads compared to those who were struggling.

Our Feelings Toward the Prospect

Another difference between high-performing and underachieving sales reps is their own feelings toward the prospect heading into the initial conversation. The successful reps were not only optimistic about their chances of winning the business, they also had warm, positive emotions about the potential customer. One rep went as far as saying, “I love these leads.”

Not surprisingly, the reps who were struggling had quite a different set of feelings. Frustrated from their lack of success, the reps in this group often harbored anger toward prospects, even before speaking with them. It was almost as if they were prejudging the leads and projecting their anger and frustration onto innocent potential customers they had yet to engage. It’s hard to blame a buyer for resisting the approach of an angry salesperson.

It’s safe to say that most salespeople are not great poker players, because we tend not to hide our emotions very well. In all likelihood, we telegraph the emotions we have toward prospects, allowing them to sense our feelings. And when that view is not a positive one, it follows that our prospects would resist our approach to sell to them.

Our Words

Here’s one more reminder that buyers couldn’t care less about how smart we are or how wonderful we think our company is. Understandably, they are only concerned with what’s in it for them. From the first few sentences emanating from our lips, the buyer is determining if we “get it.” The conversation is supposed to be about them, not about us. Buyers screen every word we say through this filter. The moment they discern that your focus is on yourself and what you sell, the resistance goes up and you’re lumped in the pile with every other self-focused salesperson they try to avoid.

The absolute best way to slow or prevent the buyer’s typical reflex resistance is to lead with client issues whenever we communicate. As reviewed in Chapter 8, the power in our sales story comes from that first section of the power statement where we share the reasons that customers turn to us. Buyer will not resist sales messaging that begins with items and issues that are top of mind for them. We must become comfortable and conversant speaking about the pains we remove, problems we solve, and results we achieve for customers. Connecting with prospects in that manner causes them to replace their mental “no soliciting” sign with a bright neon welcome sign.

Buyers have a reflexive resistance to salespeople. We may not have caused that condition, but we are certainly selling against that reality every day. It is up to us to do everything possible to minimize a buyer’s indifference or negative predisposition to a sales approach. We can slow or even prevent that resistance by viewing ourselves and the prospect differently, and consciously working to choose words that would cause the buyer to welcome instead of resist us.