Your client is sitting in front of you insisting that one of your products would fit perfectly into his situation. He is so confident about his analysis that he has even budgeted for your product and is ready to hand you a purchase order. But there is one problem. The customer is wrong. Your product will not solve his problem and you cannot sell him the product at any price.
So what do you do? How do you tell the client that they are wrong? There are several breakdowns here that need to be addressed before moving forward. One of the most obvious problems is that your marketing literature is either incomplete or incorrect in its description of your product. Before you start pointing the finger at your client, you may want to take a look at the information he was using from your company to generate his conclusion.
The other problem is that the customer did not feel compelled to contact you for clarification. That means that none of your marketing information contained any kind of warning, or even a suggestion, that the client should contact the company before assuming that the product would work. Good marketing materials are supposed to call the customer to action. The problem is that sometimes that action is the wrong one.
Now you are faced with the problem of making your company look bad if you point out the issues with the marketing materials. But is you customer wrong? It is important to remember that, as much as the marketing materials need to convince the customer to call you for more information, it is still the customer's responsibility to clarify his information before making a final decision. Some customers do not like to deal with sales people and prefer to figure things out on their own. In most cases, these customers come up with the wrong solution.
Customers that are trying to solve their own problems are not wrong, they are just misguided. Rather than lecturing the client on what you feel is the proper procedure for getting good information, you need to put yourself on the client's side and help him solve his issue. It could be that there are several details with your product that prevent it from being compatible with your client's needs. This is where you use consultative sales as your strongest weapon.
Consultative sales is when you work with customers to help them come up with solutions using your products or services. In the situation outlined above, the best solution is to offer to walk through the installation with the client and determine where any challenges may be. It is at that point that you can point out the incompatibilities of your product with the client's situation and recommend a different product.
Never assume that the client is wrong in any given situation. If a client has bad information then it could have come from your company. If the client is wrong, then the best approach is to work closely with the client to analyze their situation and find the best solution. You will also need to find out where the client got their incorrect information and make changes to your company information to avoid confusion in the future.
It is true that the client is never wrong. But that is only because the client is trying to solve a problem and he is looking to you for the answer. Some clients may want unreasonable solutions to issues such as product returns or payment issues. But as long as you are able to work with a client to find a solution to his problem, then the client is never wrong.
Kenneth Vogt is CEO of ContentCrooner.com, a content distribution service that helps you get targeted web traffic. Discover how to create content that drives targeted traffic to your website in our free report: http://www.contentcrooner.com/ebooks/Insider_Report_Article_Writing_Best_Practices.pdf
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