A one-day workshop
Wouldn’t sales be a ‘walk in the park’ without challenging customers? Why is it that some customers are so difficult to please, so quick to call ‘foul’ at the slightest blip and so mean with their gratitude after we’ve bent over backwards to accommodate them? Whether we are looking at prospective or existing customers, there is a toolkit for dealing with the most challenging of them and by learning and deploying these skills you and your team can:
Take orders from people that your competition shy away from
Take customers into an ‘adult’ behaviour state by skilful questioning and listening
Build trust and credibility with people who are reluctant to trust salespeople
- Use broad open questions to give the customer a platform for their opinions or issues
- Improve listening skills to really understand what’s behind the customer’s challenging style
- Probe specific phrases to show listening and earn deeper disclosure
- Use silence to let challenging customers ‘blow off steam’
- Understand the negative impact of certain phrases on a challenging customer
- Summarise effectively and reassure the customer of our understanding of their needs
- Recognise the ‘behaviour cycle’ and avoid emotional escalation
- Understand ‘transactional analysis’ and how to bring people from ‘child’ to ‘adult’ state
- Create loyalty in customers who are slow to give trust
Expert trainer
Alun is a very experienced and entertaining deliverer of sales training. After sixteen years of sales and sales management – ten of which were in a telephone environment – he became a professional actor, attending Drama School in 2000/2001. Since 2002 he has become a highly skilled corporate role-player and for the last seven years or so has focused on sales training, using his role-playing experience to make training highly interactive and, above all, fun.
Session outline
1. What makes a customer ‘challenging’?
- Why customers challenge us – understanding their drivers
- ‘Wearing their shoes’ – seeing things from their perspective
- Understanding our own personality style
- How to flex with a style that is different from our own
- Ways to quickly recognise a customer’s style
- The benefits of flexing with a challenging customer’s style
2. Practical exercise – forum theatre
- Participants take it in turns to deal with the trainer (who plays the role of the challenging customer)
- Observers stop the action when they hear or see something they deem wrong
- The participant in the seat gets a chance to use a suggested alternative line
- The participant who makes the suggestion has the chance to occupy the seat and deliver it themselves
- Frequent feedback from the trainer as to how the participant’s words are making him feel
- Opportunities to rewind the action if an ill-advised line is suggested and delivered
- Flipchart for capturing what worked, what didn’t work and why
- Mehrabian principle – the importance of body language and tone over words used
3. Questioning and listening skills
- How to use open questions to get the customer talking
- What questions to avoid and why
- The use of pauses and silence to reduce tension and build trust
- What listening is and what it isn’t
- Question funnelling – how to earn deeper disclosure through probing
- The power of summary
4. Transactional analysis explained
- What is transactional analysis (TA)?
- Exploring the TA states and why people behave in that way under pressure
- How to bring challenging customers to ‘adult’ state to reduce tension
- How ‘parent’ or ‘child’ behaviours can be inadvertently triggered
- Understanding the ‘behavioural cycle’ and how to break it
- Mini-role play ‘vignettes’ to demonstrate real time impact of ill-chosen words
5. How to build trust with challenging customers
- Techniques for placating current challenging customers
- Methods that the participants have already used effectively – understanding why those methods worked and how other participants can model them
- Participants’ experiences of trust having been lost – understanding why those experiences had that negative outcome
- How to ‘go the extra mile’ with challenging customers
6. Bringing a ‘real’ challenging customer to life
- Participants give the trainer a brief profile of a specific challenging customer of theirs
- 5-10 minute roleplay in which the trainer brings that individual to life
- Observing participants – without interrupting – make notes on what is and isn’t working
- Trainer stops the action half-way through to give feedback on how he is feeling
- Participant goes back into the roleplay having recalibrated their approach based on feedback
- Observers give feedback on what did and didn’t work
- Trainer comes out of character to explain the impact of the participant’s words and behaviours
7. Wrap-up
- Key learnings from each participant
- Individual action planning – steps that can and will be implemented in the workplace
