Earlier this week in the 3X Appointments skills training and coaching program, one of the participants posed this question: “Wendy, is it true that all buyers are liars?”
I thought this was a great question that some of you might also be asking yourselves, so I decided to share my response with my Opening Doors & Closing Sales readers:
Many sales professionals certainly believe this statement to be true. By simple logic, however, the statement, “All buyers are liars,” cannot possibly be true. While it can be true that some buyers might be liars they cannot all be liars.
More importantly, the mindset that every prospect with whom you speak is lying to you is not a mindset that supports you. And, it is not a belief that will help you become successful. Instead, the mindset that every prospect is lying to you is depressing and demoralizing and keeps you from asking the questions you might otherwise ask to dig deeply and clarify the needs of that prospect. If they are all lying to you, why bother?
A prospecting call is an interruption. Sadly, our prospects are not all sitting by the phone waiting for our calls… They are all doing something else when that phone rings. In addition, a prospecting call is an introduction. Once you introduce yourself to a new prospect it takes some time to build trust and to build a relationship. At the beginning of your relationship, your prospect may not tell you everything – this is a very natural and a very human response.
My recommendation to the participants in the Prospecting Mastery program was to remain neutral – no jumping to conclusions, no mind-reading, and no assumptions about what the prospect is “really thinking”…. Instead, I recommended that they listen to what the prospect has to say and then ask relevant questions. Buyers are not liars, they are simply human beings.
