Recently, at the beginning of a buyer persona workshop, a sales representative mentioned, “I really can’t see a way of narrowing down the characteristics for a type of buyer. Our buyers are a highly diverse group with all different personality types.”
In essence, his company is choosing to sell to anyone who knocks on their door: the difficult and demanding buyers as well as the delightful and realistic ones.
I asked, “Today, you may indeed work with a wide variety of personality types, but it may not be good for your business. Have you ever wished you could walk away from a difficult customer?”
He replied, “No.”
Around the table, the people who had to work directly with the difficult and demanding customers were shaking their heads in the affirmative.
The truth is that we all sell to buyers (and customers) who may not be good for our business. Often, during a buyer’s time in our sales process, their behaviors and actions clearly indicate that they will be the type of customer we will want to fire. But we sell to them anyways.
I like to illustrate my point with a story from my days at IBM and Sun. At both companies, I had the opportunity to work with the same customer (same buyer, same users). This customer was a very high profile company and the sales team had worked extra long and hard to jump through the buyer's hoops to land the sale. To be honest, the sale wasn’t very large monetarily, but we expected the prestige of landing this customer to help us attract other buyers in the same industry.
Because this was a high profile customer, they were given carte blanche access to our developers and support engineers. High level executives met with them regularly and promised them new features and adjusted the delivery to the customer’s timeframe. Everyone hoped that they would turn into a great reference for us.
But in the back hallways, this customer was driving everyone crazy. They were mean, demanding, and relentless. They constantly used the threat of escalating whatever little problem they were having to the CEO as a way to ensure they got immediate satisfaction. They required features that other customers wouldn’t use. They disrupted work days, weekend days, and product schedules. They burnt out developers, customer service reps, and line managers. They were never happy. And this went on month after month, year after year.
This one customer cost both companies much more than they ever paid in license and support fees. But neither company ever realized this. The customer never served as a reference. Even after everyone jumped through their hoops, they were never satisfied. As for the influence their corporate name would bring, I never saw that realized as a contributing factor in other sales in that industry.
Not all customers are good for us. And we can usually tell who they are as we are selling to them. The traits are evident – disrespectful, demeaning, demanding, insincerity, dishonesty, etc. As you work out your buyer personas, don’t forget to use the opportunity and evaluate which buyer personas you should be doing business with.
Comments