The Street-Smart Salesman: How Growing Up Poor Helped Make Me Rich

Chapter 19

Flag on the Play! Reading a Customer

You can observe a lot just by watching.

—Yogi Berra

 

A few years ago, I drove four hours in one direction to accompany a new rep in her first face-to-face meeting with a big-fish prospect. I wanted to see my rookie in action. She was feeling confident, certain her potential customer was hyper–price-conscious and equally certain that if she were aggressive in her pricing, we would land the account. Aggressive pricing was the only candy she was holding—not much of a game plan in the city playgrounds of my youth. I've lived long enough to know that when a customer says, “It's all about price,” he's lying, plain and simple. “It” is never all about price; people are too multidimensional for that to be the case. If a self-described price-conscious customer is, furthermore, also unwilling to share any information with you about his business, as this one was, he is not ready to do business. In any event, I never head into a meeting in which my supposed strength is my willingness to take less money than I want.

Salespeople tend to think of undercutting the competition on price as a fifth ace, an almost surefire way of getting to “Yes.” I know otherwise because I have my own surefire ways of getting to “Yes.” I also know that it's easier to accurately remember what happened than to accurately remember what you were told, so I make it a habit to let my reps learn for themselves, that price is the weakest of sales differentiators. I always ask ...