You’re less likely to win over prospects if you don’t take the lead on sharing information.
There’s almost no more frustrating feeling in sales than encountering a buyer who won’t share basic information.
Take this question for example: What’s your budget?
There’s nothing more elemental to the buyer-seller relationship than both having an understanding of the money at stake. Yet in my experience, when asked about their budget, roughly 90% of buyers will give you some version of the following answer: “I’m not going to tell you that.”
Did buyers get this way because of sellers? Or is it the opposite?
Honestly, the answer doesn’t really matter. Distrust between the two parties does more to compromise a deal, or even tear them apart, when transparency could reveal that they both have the same interests.
And that’s the solution here.
Sellers love to gripe about buyers who won’t share basic details, including information on competitors. I should know – in my weaker moments, I’m sometimes one of those gripers. But I also know there’s only one way out: demonstrating transparency yourself.
It may sting. It may make you feel vulnerable. But it may also advance your career, in addition to a proposed sale that’s causing you so much heartburn.
If a customer is concerned that sharing their budget means you’ll just use that as a new benchmark for your price, tell them that’s fair. Then tell them the truth. In my case, it’s that I rigidly use the same corporate price book every time. If I must negotiate the price, I ask to modify the scope of the project. My objective, rather than fleecing a prospect for every possible dollar, is to simply see if a match is possible.
Maybe their budget is way too low and there’s no point in investing time for either of us. Maybe their budget is far higher than what I would have anticipated. In such a case, we have to solve a mystery together about expectations for the scope of the project and why the numbers are initially so far off.
Either way, there is no faster shortcut to showing a buyer that transparency is in their best interest and yours than demonstrating it first yourself.
It doesn’t matter who is most responsible for the development of dysfunctional buyer-seller relationships. All you can do as a seller is recognize the root cause – a lack of trust stemming from a lack of transparency – and attack it with something that looks and feels radically different.
Transparency may be in everyone’s best interest. That doesn’t mean a buyer wary of being lied to is going to act first. That burden rests on you.
The upshot is what happens next. Where if you do what you say you were going to do, for the price you said you’d do it for, you don’t just momentarily solve the biggest problem in a potentially dysfunctional relationship. You also create the possibility of one that isn’t and lasts a very long time, while leading to referrals to even more new customers.
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