Working in B2B sales is all about building relationships with customers, aligning your solutions with the customer’s needs, and gradually discovering and uncovering the customer’s business challenges so you can recommend a solution that is the right fit to help them achieve their goals. However, sometimes a customer is not “the right fit” for you and your organization. The problem is, it’s not always possible to figure out which customers are the wrong ones until it’s too late. Sales people tend to be natural optimists, with a strong inclination toward trying to make things work and close the deal. But if you get the wrong customer, that sale might end up being more trouble than it’s worth.
Here are a few warning signs of a troublesome customer:
1. Aggressive Skepticism
It’s natural for customers to be a bit skeptical when talking to sales people; after all, they need to be protective of their time and their budgets, and they might have had bad experiences with other sales people in the past. However, ideally, a customer should at least trust you enough to be willing to hear what you have to say without interrupting you, and without acting like they’re the only expert involved in the conversation. Good customers will engage with sales people as equals and peers, and will give you the chance to build trust and deepen the conversation. If customers start out on the wrong foot and sound distrustful and closed-minded toward you, 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.
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