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Buyer's Remorse: What is it? And How Do You Avoid It?

Guest post by: David Flannery

Article Overview: Buyer's remorse is a phenomenon that occurs more often then business owners would like. It is the cause of about 35% of all returns to a business. Buyer's remorse occurs when a customer is sold something they do not need, go home with the product, and then after a couple of days thinking about it actually feel remorse even anger that they were sold the item, and return it.

Buyer's Remorse: What is it? And How Do You Avoid It?

Buyer's remorse is a phenomenon that occurs more often then business owners would like. It is the cause of about 35% of all returns to a business.

Buyer's remorse occurs when a customer is sold something they do not need, go home with the product, and then after a couple of days thinking about it actually feel remorse even anger that they were sold the item, and return it.

It happens mostly in conjunction with the hard sell. The situation goes something like this, A customer goes into your business looking for something specific, something lets say to solve a specific problem he has, he has a budget in mind and a set of criteria to use to help him choose a product.

While looking around your business one of your salespeople approaches him and asks to help him. The customer tells your salesperson what he is looking for and his budget, and you have exactly what he is looking for and the customer is delighted, then the salesperson uses the hard sell to get that customer to spend more, and by using the main weapon of the hard sell, fear, he gets the customer to buy an item outside his original budget and outside his original buying criteria. So the customer goes home having spend more then he wanted to for an item he doesn't need.

A couple of days go by, and day by day the customer is wishing that he had never spent that much money, and he starts to resent the fact that he was strong armed into buying something he did not need, and as the days go by this can turn to anger as the customer feels that the salesperson forced him to buy.

Eventually the customer goes back and asks for a refund, also deciding never to do business with you again.

This scenario happens again and again in businesses small and large.

The way to avoid your customers getting buyer remorse, and eventually come and you for their money back , is to find out what the customer needs and never sell a customer something they don't need. Make sure your salespeople do not use hard sell techniques to make sales.

The most effective way to make sales and avoid the chance of buyers remorse is to train you sales staff in question based selling, using open ended questions to find out the customers buying criteria and try to find a product that will match that criteria as close as possible.

Now, because you and your salespeople are experts in your marketplace, you may realize that your customers buying criterion are outdated or even wrong. In this case you must educate your customer in order to bring his criteria in line with the marketplace, this happens most often in the software and computer markets where people are not as savvy to the latest releases and you and your staff will be.

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Article Tags: business owners, buyers remorse, profit growth, small business



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