Here's an incomplete list of excuses salespeople make when a deal goes sideways because of "new" information from a prospect.
I thought that they had...
They should've told me
How was I suppose to
It's not fair
We had so many great conversations
Let's reverse roles for a moment. When we're buying we probably don't tell the whole truth to a salesperson. Whether that's we want to talk the purchase over with our spouse/partner, are looking for a discount because we don't have enough set aside to pay the advertised price or we're in information gathering mode because we don't actually want what the salesperson's selling for some time, we've learned that sharing information with a salesperson doesn't payoff for us.
While "buyer empathy" is a quick path to a bloated funnel, remembering that our prospect has likely had many terrible interactions with salespeople keeps us present and qualifying instead of attempting to push to a future (close) that our prospect might not want to get to.
To avoid learning through scar tissue, we can use some of all of the following in our conversations with prospects to reveal and remove the roadblocks that we would otherwise run into later.
Trust, but verify - I want to believe *this* prospect is telling me the truth, but I have too much scar tissue. When a prospect shares information related to their problems, their budget or their decision process we circle back with something like, " so if I hear you correctly... is that accurate?" or "usually when someone says they 'make the call' they often have a couple of people they bounce the idea off first. Who might those people be for you?" to test our hypothesis that our prospect is telling the truth.
Share and stick to our process - real prospects will adapted their buying behavior to our process if we share it at the beginning of our conversations and don't unintentionally lengthen our sales cycle when our prospect is ready to buy. A prospect who isn't willing to adapt to our process and/or follow the next steps we lay out for buying from us isn't good business.
Shift the conversation into the future - humans are great with the past (when "everything was better than today"), okay with the present and terrible with the future. Let's say we're talking to a prospect who we suspect is part of the buying team, but isn't the ultimate decision maker. At some point in our conversation we might say, "so let's fast forward. When we get to the end of our time today and both of us want to move forward, what happens?" Our prospect's present self thinks, "oh that's happening in the future. I can tell this salesperson about the future because it won't happen to me." We then gather a bunch of new information about our prospect's internal process in the present so when we get to the end of our conversation, which is now the present, we can say, "so I heard that you need to take our conversation to the Super Secret Committee who meets once per quarter under the full moon and that sometimes they invite outside guests. How might we get in front of them to carry on this conversation?" Our prospect's present self thinks, "yeah, I said that in the past. I guess I should stay true to what I said." Now we have a chance to stay in control of our sale by visiting the Super Secret Committee instead of our prospect saying, "well, thank you for that information. I'll think about it and get back to you."
Tell a story - by telling a story we take the pressure off us and our prospect and put it on the story. Might start like, "probably not the case here, but I had a similar situation with a prospect last year and <insert bad outcome.> How do we avoid that happening?" "How" is a word that causes our prospect to think for a moment as opposed to using "can" as in "can we avoid that happening?" Our prospect will say "sure," which may or may not be true because it's a reflexive instead of a considered response.
None of those are magic bullets that will work every time. We will eventually encounter a prospect who, despite our best efforts, will obfuscate or outright lie to us. Those bad encounters become stories for our playbook or boxes to check in our process.
We can't stop our prospects from lying, but we can start using tools to sort suspects from real prospects.
Until next time... go sell something.
