You’ve doubtless experienced it at some time in your life and it’s miserable. You’ve just completed the purchase of some big-ticket item like a car, or a home, or a timeshare vacation, or a boat. All of a sudden all the good reasons you made the purchase are gone and all that remain are doubts and fears. You think you must have been crazy to make the deal and are positive you will never be able to pay for it. You’ll do darn near anything to roll back time and get out of the mess you’ve gotten yourself in.
As a salesperson on the other end of the transaction, it’s even more miserable. Your hard-earned deal is going down the dumper and often the buyer is so distraught they don’t even want to talk to you. Through no apparent fault of yours, the buyer has come down with a big case of remorse and it’s looking like your deal is going to blow up. What to do?
There are some factors in the sales process that aggravate remorse and should be avoided. Other factors ameliorate remorse and should be embraced.
One of the bigger factors in creating remorse is “power closing” and other salesperson tricks. Any time a buyer feels like he’s been “closed,” he feels that he’s given up some control over his destiny. Wanting to control one’s own world is a very basic human need and giving it up will make a person feel manipulated and he will doubt the wisdom of his decision.
Anything the salesperson does during the sale period that will damage trust is to be avoided. The making of outlandish claims, the overstating of benefits, the obfuscation of material facts will all destroy trust and bring about remorse.
The straighter we play the game, the more comfortable and less remorseful our buyers will be. But there are still some buyers that will “come unstuck” at the least provocation. For them, a little preventive maintenance will go a long way.
It’s impossible to accurately predict just who will be stricken by remorse but we can make some generalizations. Young people are more prone to attack than geezers. Submissive folks are more susceptible than more dominant types. If a person really has a tough time making the buying decision, they may be readily swayed away from that decision by the negative inputs of family and/or friends.
If, for whatever reason, you think your buyer might be ripe for a remorse attack, it is a good investment of time to spend a few minutes discussing it before they leave.
“But won’t that plant negative thoughts in her mind?” you might well ask.
I suppose that‘s possible, but I think you’re a lot better off discussing it than having it rare up to bite you after she has left you. It doesn’t need to be a big deal, just a few short sentences. As example:
“Y’know a funny thing sometimes happens to us when we’ve made a good decision about a major purpose. It’s called ‘Buyer’s Remorse.’ Have you ever gotten it?”
If she says, “Yes,” you can ask her how she dealt with it before and build in resistance to it this time. If she says, “No,” we might go on.
“Sometimes, after a major purchase, our mind plays tricks on us. We can no longer remember all the good reasons and benefits we considered in making the good decision, but are assailed by doubts and negative thoughts. If this happens to you, I’d like you to remember that nothing has changed about the purchase. The only thing that has changed is your thinking and that can certainly change again. If you find yourself feeling terrible in the middle of the night, take two of these pills and call me first thing in the morning.”
Then give her a small bottle of “Remorse Pills.”
My good friend, George Quinn, reminded me last week that we used Remorse Pills in residential real estate in the early seventies. We had some pill bottles full of red-hot cinnamon candies and they were labeled “Remorse Pills.”
People seem to find this amusing and it takes the terror out of the situation by treating it lightly and with humor. When a person would call back with remorse, our first question was, “Did you take your pills?” Quite often we’d get a little giggle and the tension would be broken. We could then approach the problem on a whole different basis than had the buyer been filled with feelings of fear and loathing they didn’t understand.
