What the Hell Does Your 'Sales Training' Comprise, Mercury Management?

This afternoon I was subjected to the WORST door-to-door salesmanship I've ever experienced.

A very polite and softly-spoken 30-something man came to my door, and - while I could barely understand a thing he said because of the thickness of his accent and the incredible speed at which he spoke - I perceived (from his livery) that he was endeavoring to get me to switch power companies.

Now, I have a soft spot for salespeople who carve out their living by selling on commission. Probably because I detest laziness in all its forms - and I can barely comprehend the degree of courage, tenacity, energy and sheer hard yakka it must take to perform such a role, let alone to succeed at it.

But the problem with door-to-door selling is this:

Good salesmanship starts at identifying the objective of the buyer. Even if they don't yet know they're a buyer, and they don't yet know, therefore, that they even have an objective.

BUT . . . with door-to-door selling, the visiting salesperson essentially has to push a narrow, pre-determined offering on the buyer - at best, convincing the buyer that the salesperson's objective should also be the buyer's objective.

Thus, it makes the process of handling objections (a Sales 101 process) extra challenging, because - generally - the offering can't be customised or even tweaked to suit any specifics relating to the customer's own circumstances.

However, the fact remains that buyer objections will always - naturally - exist in almost any situation in which the buyer is approached in a cold-call manner with an offer. Maybe they can be surmounted within the narrow, pre-determined mass-market offer . . . or maybe they can't.

BUT . . . the one thing NO salesperson should EVER do is refuse to listen to, completely disregard, cut off, or have a customer feel silly, unreasonable, or unintelligent, for their objection/s.

The only circumstances in which a salesperson will be successful with a potential customer, if he or she does that, are those in which the target is:

(a) just a total pushover;

(b) just wants rid of the salesperson and for the sake of achieving that, will buy, and/or

(c)  through completely coincidental timing, is experiencing a motivating moment of dissatisfaction with their current supplier or service provider.

Of course, there is a (d), and that's where the company that the roving salesperson is representing, is dropping their pants on price. Really dropping their pants on price. But householders are increasingly waking up to the fact that the dropped-pants-pricing will escalate significantly at some point after they've got you stitched up and transferred (and that they'll get you somehow, even if the sales pitch includes promising that you'll "lock in this special pricing" for two years . . . or whatever).

Anyway. Back to the story.

So I'm giving this door-to-door salesman for Mercury Energy the time of day for two reasons: 

The first, as mentioned, is my soft-heartedness (believe it or not) - and his uber-politeness certainly helped in that regard. 

Secondly, because when he started rolling a phone service into his breakneck-speed verbal data download, he did get me at a potentially opportune moment.

In terms of the power supplier part of whatever his deal was, I have a distinct loyalty to Nova Energy. That is because they are the only company that didn't treat me like an infected wart when I was trying to get a "smart" meter changed out for something that wouldn't irradiate me when I bought a new property that had one of these radiation devices strapped to the porch. 

And I did (past tense) have a totally unjustified loyalty to the small, Hastings-based landline and broadband provider, Now Broadband. But after more than a year of attempting to draw the attention of anyone there who cares, to the incredible contempt to which I've been increasingly subjected regarding a completely bullshit critical supplementary subscription service that was actually the sole reason I switched from Spark . . . well, I'm ripe for the discussion.

But again, back to the story.

So, I needed to convey to the Mercury Energy salesperson, certain aspects of the above reasons that I'm currently with those two service providers.

But he didn't want to know. I mean, he was not in the least impolite . . . he continued his soft-spoken pitch in his unbroken smile, but here were the problems. . . . and they were numerous:

1)  I absolutely couldn't understand him. His accent was simply too thick and his rate of speech way too rapid. And I couldn't get this across to him.

2)  I also couldn't understand the content of his attempted communication. He was firing bits, bytes, data, fibre somethings, plans, and all manner of even more techie terms at me. I tried to get him to understand that I couldn't understand, but he seemed not to want to understand that I didn't understand.

3)  Some way into the download, I interrupted him to tell him that I was having real difficulty trying to absorb such an unrelenting torrent of information. Let alone such a lot of technical information. And let alone delivered at such speed. But it didn't change anything. It's like he thought if he started all over again, I'd somehow get it.

4)  Notwithstanding that I couldn't understand a thing he was saying and that I couldn't get him to understand that I couldn't understand a thing he was saying, I decided to try to tell him the reasons I didn't really want to replace my current supplier situation.

In doing so (or attempting to do so), I wasn't actually closing off the possibility that I would do business with him. (I even followed his request to supply him with my current electricity bill and went inside, printed it out, and brought it back to him. I also gave him my Chief Reviewer card for The Customer NZ.)

Thus, if he'd have recognised it, we had just entered into the "objection" part of the sales process. (Which is sort of, if it's not a 'No', it's a 'Yes' . . . but you've still got to work out what the customer needs to have happen for you to turn the 'still no at this point' into an 'almost yes' and then - finally - into an actual "yes". Of course, you can experience drop out all the way along this transmission line - but that's just sales.)

But this guy hadn't been schooled in handling objections. So he decided - yet again - to take his presentation from the top. He began, all over again, downloading his data at me, maintaining his breakneck verbal speed.

At that point, my patience finally did run out. 

Here is what I told him:

"I cannot do business with you. You are not in the least interested in what I, as the customer, want.

"Yet that is what a good and professional salesperson does:  they LISTEN to the CUSTOMER'S objective, and then they see if they, as the salesperson, can marry THEIR objective, with the CUSTOMER'S objective.

"But you don't give a STUFF about my objective. You just want to push YOUR objective on me.

"So we can't do business."  (Which is a shame, because I actually would have liked the thought of him adding another commission to his day's tally, because of me.)

And I went inside - marveling at how professionally NEGLIGENT and IRRESPONSIBLE Mercury Energy's sales management is, to have let this polite but completely cloth-eared, unseasoned "salesman" loose on householders.