Thoughtful Thursdays – It’s hurry up and wait, again
A customer calls and tells you that they must have price and delivery for a particular product or service right away. As a responsive and diligent sales person you drop everything and work on getting the answers. Fortunately for you the warehouse has stock or the plant has all the raw materials to make the products and can schedule production. You call back your customer, provide the information, receive their thanks and they say they will get back to you as soon as they hear from their customer. You ask for the order, but they defer to their customer.
Then you wait a day or two and there is no call from your customer. Maybe it was not as urgent as you were led to believe.
Urgent requests are often the result of knee jerk reactions to a perceived problems that have not been fully investigated. Your contact may be under pressure from their manager who may be under pressure from higher up the chain of command. People rush around needlessly and then the situation calms down when the situation is properly assessed.
Assumptions are made, no one asks “Why?” and the sense of urgency escalates without anyone thinking too much about it.
A situation becomes urgent when something happens without sufficient notice to the stakeholders. Your car doesn’t start and you have scheduled appointments to make, or there is an apparent inventory level error that creates a raw material shortage for production.
The professional sales person will determine the level of urgency and respond accordingly. Do not question the customers sense of need, because it is real to them. Empathize with them and talk about what might have happened to make the situation so urgent. Fully understanding the situation may buy yourself some time that would not have been otherwise available.
Sales is often a hurry up and wait game, that is not in your control. However, there are things you can do to minimize the frequency of it happening to you.
Good selling,
Richard
Have a question about sales? Contact Sakanashi and Associates Inc. and I will respond.
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