6.4 Park & Sort – Embracing the Tension Copy

6.4 Park & Sort – Embracing the Tension

What’s your intuitive response when a customer tells you “no”?

You may feel that the dialogue is going poorly, that you’ve gone too far, and begin to feel your body physically reacting to the stress. 

The ability to effectively handle these objections requires a different approach, one that circumnavigates your intuitive response by staying in the tension, in a low-key way, until you discover the customer’s concerns.

To further bring this concept to light, here’s a story:

Vermeer, the Dutch painter, from the book/movie “Girl with the Pearl Earring” was very talented, but very poor, because he was often not paid for the work he completed for wealthy patrons.  

As a portrait painter, he would have to paint the same portrait 30 or 40 times because patrons were never satisfied – the nose was too big, or the hands too small, or the eye color was off, etc. He found himself in an endless round of revisions.

It took some time, but he learned to leave things to be done, or made intentional mistakes (like a hairy hand), and then discussed the painting with the buyer. The patron would inevitably object to the “mistake”. 

Vermeer would acknowledge the error, and then gain their commitment to purchase the painting when the error was corrected. In essence, he got them to agree that there were no other reasons why the purchase would not be made.

The idea with “Getting to No” is to continue to question the customer until you gain agreement that “all issues have been resolved” and the buyer is ready to take action. 

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