281: Handling Post Purchase Mistakes

<p>Even the best laid plans go astray.  The sale has been completed, the funds have been paid and we get busy in our sales job moving on to help other clients.  Another department may be tasked with handling the next steps with the client.  It doesn’t matter who is doing the delivery of the solution, because if something goes wrong, the buyer expects us to fix it and to take accountability.  In Japan we are their <em>tanto</em>, the designated person to handle this account and there are strong expectations about how we play that role.  Being busy with other clients is of no interest to this client, because they expect us to be at their beck and call 24 by 7.  If there has been some problems, minor or catastrophic, we have to get busy fixing them.  So what should we do?  Here are seven steps to handling post purchase problems for the buyer.</p> <p> </p> <ol> <li><strong>Listen:</strong></li> </ol> <p> </p> <p>We have to shut down all the noise going on in our brain and just concentrate on listening to them, when they tell us what they are unhappy about. Don’t react, argue, justify or cut the buyer off when they are talking. Just shut up and listen to what they are telling us, watch their body language and think about what they are not telling us.</p> <p> </p> <p>Don’t try and escape responsibility.  Nothing annoys buyers more than when sellers try to avoid responsibility by shifting the blame to someone else.  The buyer doesn’t care about that.  As far as they are concerned “you are the firm”.</p> <p> </p> <p>Expect that the buyer can become quite emotional and upset. We can never know what is going on in the buyer’s firm.  We may have done something which is burning their precious clients.  We can’t be sure of what financial and political pressures they are under, how safe is their job, what grief they are getting from their boss, what is driving their emotional reaction.  What we can do is stay calm in the full frontal gale of invective that is coming our way.</p> <p> </p> <ol start="2"> <li><strong>Question:</s