Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Why don't sales people listen?

I just got off the phone with a sales person from Webex. We are considering switching from our current provider of web conferencing technology to Webex because of a few advanced features that Webex has, but I had to sit through 30 minutes of demos and explanations before the salesperson would give me pricing.

I know it's an established sales strategy to first show how cool your product is before offering pricing information, but why can't some sales people just listen to their potential customers? In this case, I already knew that Webex is better than what we have now. I told this to the salesperson. The bottom line is that it came down to price because what we have now is good enough. It's not great, but it works. The deciding factor for switching at this point is price, but the salesperson wouldn't give it to me without wasting 30 minutes of my time (and his!)

Bottom line: listen to your customer and give them what they ask for.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If we listened we wouldn't make the sale. Duh.