You are a Senior Technical Specialist and the Key Account Manager of one of your company’s most
important accounts asks you to join her for a very important sales meeting with the key decision-makers regarding a major new opportunity to develop and then deploy a new solution that could have a decade’s worth of revenues that are in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
You have prepared and have done everything possible to be able to present a portfolio of great solutions that can be executed and will give the customer the solution they need that is safe, of high quality, and sets everyone up for success.
You are in the middle of sharing your ideas with the decision-making team and you notice the body language of the key decision-maker is all wrong. He is not paying attention to what you are saying and has basically tuned you out. Slightly shaken, because you don’t know what’s happening, you finish your presentation. Instead of joyous appreciation and a movement toward closing the deal, the decision-maker looks at you and says, “Thanks for that, it was interesting. But we have been giving this a lot of thought and our internal team believes the best solution is different than what you have presented. We want to add more features and change things around to be very different than what you have presented.” You look over to your Key Account Manager and she gives you a shrug implying she doesn’t know what’s happening either.
As the key decision-maker goes on and shares the vision of the solution they want, you think to yourself, “This is all wrong. This is not the best solution for them. They are making a big mistake by going this route. It increases the risk of failure and there would be a very good chance it will not work. And doing it this way will dramatically increase the costs which the customer doesn’t seem to care about but will probably eat into your own margins.”
After the key decision-maker has finished, you know you need to do something. But what?
What do you do when you know the customer is wrong?
This is a situation that occurs thousands of times a day around the world.
The first thing you should do is think about the continuum of choices you have before you. You can choose to:
- Go along with the customer. “The customer is always right” and just suck it up.
- Do some self-reflection and challenge your own beliefs. Maybe your approach is wrong.
- Challenge the customer with data, analysis, and your point of view to try to change their mind.
- Meet with the account team after the meeting to develop a new strategy to challenge the customer to make a different decision.
Each of the four choices presents a reasonable approach. What would you do? What are the best practices?
In my opinion, the best choice is D, regroup and try to reposition the customer to make a better choice.
Based on years of experience designing, developing, and delivering Strategic Business Selling training, I share there are 5 best practices that could be used in the thought process of this scenario:
Be humble and not confrontational – You are the expert, and you may know better, but coming across as arrogant and confrontational will only alienate the decision-maker and further reduce your chances of getting them to change their minds.
Acknowledge you heard and ask clarifying questions – The next best practice is to acknowledge that you heard the customer’s perspectives and then ask clarifying questions so you better understand. It could be that the customer actually does have good insights, and their approach could actually be a better solution. At the very least, you have more knowledge about where their approach is coming from.
Share stories of similar success and failure – Lift up success stories that you have had as well as stories of failure that you have seen where the solution the customer wants didn’t work.
Be bold and re-recommend your solution – After you have acknowledged, listened, and shared, come back as re-recommend your solution saying that you really believe your solution is best and support it with data and other sources of support.
Add something extra – Maybe the decision-maker needs an enticement. This is not a price negotiation, but there are things you can trade to make the customer perhaps change their mind. Shorten the length of time until delivery. Add more of your value to the solution. There must be things that might help change the customer’s mind.
In summary, we all know that there is an art to selling and it is not easy. Especially when you think the customer is wrong. The secret to success in this situation is to use your skills to change the customer perspectives to the best of your abilities.
