Working in B2B sales focuses on building relationships with customers, matching your solutions to their needs, and gradually identifying their business challenges so you can suggest a suitable solution to help them reach their goals. However, sometimes a customer may not be the right match for you or your company. The issue is that it’s not always easy to tell which customers are not a good fit until it’s too late. Salespeople are usually optimistic, often eager to make things work and close the deal. But if you take on the wrong customer, that sale could turn out to be more hassle than it’s worth.
Here are a few warning signs of a troublesome customer:
1. Aggressive Skepticism
It’s normal for customers to feel a bit wary when speaking with salespeople; after all, they want to protect their time and money, and they may have had negative experiences with salespeople before. Ideally, a customer should at least trust you enough to listen to what you have to say without interrupting or acting like they know everything. Good customers will treat salespeople as equals and will allow you to build trust and have a deeper conversation. If customers start off on the wrong foot and seem suspicious and closed off, that’s a bad sign.
2. Micromanagement
Another sign of a bad customer is when they act high-maintenance and make excessive demands on your time from early in the sales process. Of course, as the sales person, it’s your job to provide great service. But if a customer is acting like they are entitled to all of your attention, like they are your biggest source of revenue – before they’ve even closed the deal – this is a bad sign. A good customer should treat you like a respected colleague who deserves to be listened to; not like a doormat.
3. Excessive Eagerness
You’ve started the sales process and the customer is excited to move forward – they’re already asking for price quotes and implementation timetables, and they’re fully on board to close the deal. This is good news, right? Well…not necessarily. Sometimes an excited, eager-to-close customer can turn out to be the wrong fit for your business. Sometimes this excessive eagerness is a sign that the customer doesn’t fully know what they’re getting into; maybe they have unrealistic expectations or maybe they’re not really prepared to implement your solution. Sometimes when customers are eager to close a deal with you, that’s a sign that they’re hiding something or they’re not fully aware of what they need – sometimes eagerness is false confidence.
Maybe the customer is eager to close the deal because they already got internal budgetary approval to make the purchase, but there are bigger political considerations brewing beneath the surface that are going to derail your deal. Maybe the customer has badly underestimated how much work will be involved with merging their existing workflows into your new system. Either way, you might discover that an over-eager customer is ultimately a cause for concern, not for celebration. To avoid this problem, be prepared to go slowly. Schedule an additional conference call to make sure everyone is on the same page. Try to talk with multiple stakeholders within the buyer’s organization to make sure all affected parts of the company are on board. It pays to slow down and make sure your sale is really the right fit, rather than rush into something that turns out to be a huge headache.
B2B sales is not just about closing deals, it’s about finding customers and deals that are really the right fit for what you sell. By finding the right customers and avoiding red flags, you’ll be able to avoid unexpected problems and focus on making sales that deliver the biggest long-term upsides to your company.