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Sometimes Customers Lie
Written by: Bob JanetArticle Overview: What should you do when the customers lie? 1. Make sure you are correct in your point of view or claim. 2. Ask the customer in a professional manner to prove his claim. 3. Make sure you never offer something you cannot deliver. 4. Sell the benefits the customer receives from your product / service
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Sometimes Customers Lie
I was 14 years old and helping my father in our tire store one Saturday afternoon during one of our most successful sales promotions. It was one of those sales where Dad advertised “We beat all advertised prices.” While I was showing a customer a set of tires the customer said, “I can get the tire for one half of what you are selling them for.” His statement kind of shook me because no one had ever said that. My father always made sure we had the lowest prices during these promotions. I retreated back behind the counter and told my father what the customer had said. Without a pause my father walked over to the customer and said, “I am 99% sure no other dealer has a lower advertised price, but if they do please show me their advertisement and I will give you four tires free.” The customer looked away from my father and said, “Well I don’t have the time to go get the ad. When can you put the tires on my car?” When the customer left the showroom to pull his car into the tire changing bay my father smiled at me and said, “Customers Lie.”
What should you do when the customers lie?
1. Make sure you are correct in your point of view or claim.
Remember the top sales producers believe there is only one point of view. The customer’s.
The Customer is never wrong.
2. Ask the customer in a professional manner to prove his claim.
Ask him how you can obtain information to prove his claim. Do not ask him to do the work.
3. Make sure you never offer something you cannot deliver.
If you do not deliver what you promise you will lose many customers.
4. Sell the benefits the customer receives from your product / service
The features are the product and the components they are made up of.
People buy benefits. The things they receive from the features of the product / service.
Remember, your objective is to sell the customer your products and services at a profit.
People will pay the price you ask when they feel they are receiving the value they desire and there chance of loss from purchasing from you is diminished.
You can diminish their feeling of taking a chance of loss by having and using a warranty.
In the 1980’s we were faced with ever increasing competition in our retread tire business.
With the big boxes selling tires and all of our competition, who did not sell retread tires, constantly degrading retread tires as unsafe and telling customer’s retread tires failed and fell apart.
The facts were:
New tires failure rate was 5%
Our retread failure rate was less than 1/2 of 1%
So doing the math I realized with producing 200 tires a day for 360 days a year we would have only 360 failed tires.
I got very aggressive and offered a 100% replacement guarantee for the life of the tire. Our competitions guarantee was a pro-rated guarantee (the customer paid for the amount of tread wore off and it was calculated on a list price, not a the lower original selling price).
With this guarantee in place our sale volumes were only limited by our production capabilities.
If you are selling a quality product and service. Guarantee them better than the competition. Your sales will increase!
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Article Tags: advertisement, dad, lower advertised price, lowest prices, objective, one saturday, point of view, producers, professional manner, sales promotions, saturday afternoon, successful sales, tire store, tires
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About the Author: Bob Janet RSS for Bob's articles - Visit Bob's website  Click here to visit Bob's website   Convenience wins in the end Turn incoming calls into sales profits It was going to be a cold winter Dont get down in the mud with the pigs Use What You Got |
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