It’s Hard to Win Over A Frustrated Client

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been involved in a conversation in which your objective was to either identify a solution to a problem or obtain a recommendation for the best way to go about something.

In this particular instance, you found the conversation frustrating, because your conversation partner – the party with the solution or the required knowledge – kept cutting you short in your attempts to articulate the problem and/or your associated objectives.

Keep your hand raised if you’ve ever had this type of frustrating experience with a salesperson.

And keep it there if, in the context of your professional role, you’ve had this type of scenario play out with the representative of a product supplier or service provider.

Quite a few hands remain in the air, I’m guessing.

Incredibly frustrating, isn’t it?

They keep interrupting, hurrying you along (because they think they already know where you’re going), or paraphrasing you incorrectly (because they’re thinking about what they want to say, instead of what you’re trying to get said).

No-one Wants to Work That Hard to Be Heard

Depending upon your patience thresh-hold and communication style, you’ll have your own way of ensuring you finally get to complete your explanation or deliver the full brief.

But, chances are, if “being heard” and getting to the end of any necessary explanation each time you communicate with this person remains challenging, you’ll be very open to any approach by a less cloth-eared competitor. It’s a drain having to continually work that hard in a conversation. Besides, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the accuracy of what is likely to end up being proposed / delivered as a result of all the pre-sale time invested.

While you’re nodding furiously (because we have all experienced this, the only thing that will have differed is our associated tolerance levels), now would be a good time to ask you if there is any slight possibility that any member/s of your own customer/client-facing teams have this unfortunate unwillingness to exercise the required degree of listening skill.

If any names that spring to mind happen to be members of your Business Development team, it’s my bet that the quality and comprehensiveness of information about his or her prospective customer or client organisations is less than it could be.

Here’s where it gets worrisome in the context of high-value bids:

To whatever extent your bid strategies to win those accounts or contracts rely on savvy, insightful intelligence gleaned from pre-bid engagement meetings and phone calls . . . then, Houston, we have a problem.

Your bid teams are likely going to be developing those guiding strategies based on, at best, non-optimised information, or at worst, assumptions based on incomplete data, and the hastily-formed opinions of the frontline personnel in question.

That’s dangerous in its own right. But you risk looking particularly assumptive, ill-informed and bereft of the full picture if your proposal sits on the evaluation table next to that of a competitor with the ability and humility to ask quality questions, and with the strong listening skills to absorb and work strategically with the answers.

What to do? It’s not a simple fix, but an easy, immediate starting point would be to avail yourself of a copy of my book, ‘THINK & WIN BIDS: Winning High-Value, High-Stakes Bids through Superior Questioning, Listening and Thinking Skills’.