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How to make persistence pay off

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THERE comes a point in every protracted sale where the salesperson must make a choice. He has done everything in his power to get the customer to commit - meetings, proposals, product demonstrations, follow-up calls - but the customer remains undecided.

Should the salesperson keep plugging away at the customer, risking more of his time and energy on what may be a hopeless cause? Or should he cut his losses and move on to something else? With rare exceptions, I will always choose to keep plugging away - because in the long run people cannot resist someone who tries so hard to please them. It is only human nature. People are mimics. The more you try, the more they have to respond in kind.

I see this sort of mimicking all the time on the tennis court, when one player starts hitting the ball with a lot of pace and the other player instinctively returns the shot with equal pace (even when he knows it is bad for his game).

I also see it constantly in sales situations.

A few years ago we were very interested in representing the literary and broadcast interests of a retired public figure. But we were having a tough time convincing him he needed an agent. No matter how eloquently we outlined all the wonderful things we could do for him around the world, he still resisted us.

This unrequited courtship went on for months until one day he mentioned he was planning a trip to Japan. I quickly put our Tokyo office at his disposal. No longer would we be telling him how good we were. This was a chance to show him.

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