Everyone wants a customer to say YES.
I want a customer to say NO.
A salesperson wants affirmation from a customer. He goes into a meeting to pitch: look at our amazing product with amazing features; how it can help your use cases; how it can change your life.
The customer smiles: “Very interesting! Definitely something I’d consider. Keep me updated.”
The salesperson is pleased, thinking that the customer loves it and he’ll close the deal soon.
But it will never happen.
The reason it never happens is because it’s not a real YES. It was a fake YES by the customer to escape.
We are taught to be polite. It’s considered bad manners to bluntly reject someone who’s eager to please, even a salesperson. We learnt not to burn bridges, just in case one day we may change our mind.
So we reject pitches by giving people seemingly positive feedback and approval. Not too much, just enough to end the conversation.
We kick the can down the road. We want to soften the blow.
When I meet a customer, I look for a NO.
I notice that people often know what they don’t want far better than what they want. They articulate NO much more clearly than YES. A NO is always concrete.
I met a client recently with my salesperson. His pitch was energetic and convincing, covering all the bases from data quality, different asset classes to templates for option strategies.
The client was nodding and smiling. He said he would love to try it if he had more time.
I could see that this was not a real YES. I wanted to get from him a concrete NO.
I said: “Even with all these tools, it’s not easy to research option strategies, is it?”
His eyes lit up: “It’s so hard. We have to focus on ideas that make money. I don’t know the option space that well.”
I got it. I admired his courage to admit that the bottleneck wasn’t necessarily the product, but his own expertise.
I offered a suggestion: “We recently launched an AI agent that can read the description of a trade idea in English and automatically implement it in Python. Will this help you test more ideas?”
His body language softened and he asked: “How do you price it?”
In my experience, the only reliable sign of a real YES is when a client asks about the price.
People love saying NO because it makes them feel safe and grounded.
Often we just need to encourage them to voice NO in order to dig deeper into specific issues and topics.
That may be the only way to get to a real YES.
* A powerful black rhiNO in the Kruger National Park, South Africa, 2018