I made my presentation and the customer said, “I hear you.” What I didn’t know at the time was that was a nice way for my customer to say “no.”
Most of us are coming into budget time for 2014, and when you boil it all down, it’s a sales process. You present what you want and need for the club, and “they” decide whether or not to give it to you through budget approval. This is about the things that you will hear after presenting your case, and what to do about it.
Early in my sales career, I would make a sales trip and come back and tell my bosses: “It was a great trip, and I think we are on our way to getting the business.” When my superiors would dig a little deeper into what I meant, I would say that I made my presentation and the customer said, “I hear you.” What I didn’t know at the time was that was a nice way for my customer to say “no.”
I bring this up because I am writing this during the disastrous Affordable Care Act rollout. With all the insurance cancellations (and trust me, they are coming to you sooner or later), panic quickly set in among our elected elites, and something had to be done. Of course, all of this was predictable, had any of those who crafted the law ever taken and passed an Economics 201 class. But Washington began to scramble, and then the President had a press conference to announce that “he had heard the American people” and something would be done.
This set off an alarm from my early sales days, and it meant nothing would really be done. See, when someone whose mind you are trying to change says after your presentation “I hear you,” what he or she is really saying is that a) they respect you, b) they paid attention to your arguments, and c) they will change nothing. It is simply a polite way of saying “no.”
Sure enough, when the President announced that he would let you “keep your insurance and doctor” by executive order, it is interesting to notice what he didn’t say. He didn’t say the law would change, he didn’t say the decision was really up to the state insurance commissioners over which he had no control—he was simply trying to make you feel better about your distress.
How does this relate to our club activities? There will be things on our budget requests that may run counter to Board or ownership preferences. If you make your case passionately and they say, “I hear you,” you are being told no.
The tactic to deal with this is when told that you have been heard, immediately say, “Does this mean you will approve the request?” and see what the answer is. It will almost always be no, but at least you will know where you stand. If it’s really important to you and the club, you can begin to craft further arguments in your favor. Otherwise, you may think you made the sale—but in fact, most of the time you didn’t.
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