Dealing with a Difficult Customer

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Dealing with difficult clients is a fact of the sales game. It just comes with the territory. The reason a customer acts difficult may vary, but there seems to be two general categories of difficult customers.

The first is someone who is just naturally guarded. They aren’t going out of their way to be difficult. They just have a tendency to keep people at a distance. With these (potential) clients you need to realize that there may be gold in them there hills.

You have to earn their trust by differentiating yourself from your competition. Sometimes you need to show a difficult customer that all you care about is the success of their business. Once you have earned the trust of a client like this, they can become a life-long customer.

Some customers on the other hand are just plain weasels. They act like they are in a contest with you. They act like they need win all the time. And winning can mean a variety of things. Drilling you down on price. Belittling you in front of their counterparts. Or just making things miserable for you because you are the vendor.

These are the people that are not good for your business. They can kill your selling time with other clients. They can kill your profit because of the additional time your company needs to spend on them. And they can kill morale and contribute to turnover on your sales team.

Let’s face it. Nobody wants to lose a customer. But sometimes you have to wonder if you’d be better off if that customer dealt more with your competition. If you are missing opportunities elsewhere, the answer might be yes.

The sales effort needs to match the payoff. Many salespeople get trapped into thinking they need to win “the big deal with the big client”. These salespeople don’t realize what they may be missing. If the big client is difficult to deal with, the effort might not be worth it.

Sometimes paying more attention to a variety of smaller customers can generate as much revenue as one big one. Often the margin is better because there can be less headaches and the smaller customer is not expecting a “big client discount”.

There are only so many hours in the day. Make the right calls. Make the profitable calls. And you are the judge where your time is best spent. Remember, the opportunity cost of calling on one client means you can’t call on another.

Thanks for reading.

Good selling.

More perspective on dealing with a difficult customer