The What is The Point Thread

This thread is to rant in when people waste your time.

You know the type, they ask you lots of questions that would lead up to a sale and you sit there for an hour or more answering all their questions and then they still don't buy. ARRGGGGHHH!!

Or even worse, they ask you if you will sell for a certain price and then when you say okay they don't reply anymore. WHAT IS THE POINT IN ASKING THEN!!!?

Yeah, you know who you are. What is wrong with you people??

Stop wasting people's time!

Thank you.

 

"Tire kickers" are the bane of salespeople. Not too long ago, I had an amazing, super-experienced sales rep working for me and his comment about this subject was:

"My second favorite answer from a prospect is NO. YES is my first choice, but I hate MAYBE because it often wastes too much of my time."

The sad fact is that it can be very hard to distinguish a tire kicker from a qualified prospect, but one of the best books there is on dealing with that was written about ten years ago by Jacques Werth. It is called "High Probability Selling" and his process constantly qualifies and rejects prospects throughout the sales process until only the best (the highest probability prospects) are left to spend the bulk of your efforts on. Disclaimer: I have had a few conversations about sales/marketing with Jacques over the years so he is a slight acquaintance of mine.

Here are my thoughts on some potential motivations for tire kickers:

1. It is a deliberate plan to learn something and there never was any intention to purchase. Could be a competitor, an interested investor or any of dozens of other such people with angles.

2. The person likes to pretend to have a certain amount of authority and gets his/her kicks from having sellers at their beck and call. They don't pull the trigger because they never had authority or budget to do so in the first place. A variation of this is the individual who likes to pretend to be a wealthy businessperson when there are only limited or no funds.

3. Speculators are another category. These folks look into a lot of potential purchasing options in the hopes that they can then make it happen with whomever holds the purse strings. They will often bring 3 or 4 or more deals to a pre-close position and then see if they can get traction with any of them. They leave the majority of the vendors at the altar, of course.

I am sure that there are more types of tire kickers, but it is also true that, sometimes, things happen and situations unexpectedly change. I recall one time when I had been working with a potentially significant prospect. Everything was pretty much worked out and we were down to niggling paperwork to get the deal done. Then he got fired by the company that he was buying for. I was close to the situation, so I knew what transpired, but if he had just left and gone silent, I would have been left scratching my head in wonder and anger.

 

Yep i completely feel your pain. nothing worse than people wasting your time and you get nothing from it. OR when people drag things out un-nessasarly when your in a rush.

 

I don't have to deal with those types of people face to face (fortunately), but I do have to deal with quite a few of emails from them. I used to go overboard, replying 3-4 times to each person, until I realized I was wasting my time. Today, I have formal/predefined answers to this or that question, I reply once and then I just wait. Interestingly enough, I get more sales/conversions that way.

 

Yes indeed. Tire kickers is what they are. But some good points to think about made by jrbiz. Thanks for that it helps to put things into perspective.

It's business and all part of making a buck at the end of the day but I seem to have had a few people do this lately. Or people that no longer respond to you despite leading you into the belief they are interested. That's what I can't understand. I can accept that people have questions and can do that to you for a multitude of reasons. But the people that wind me up the most are those that don't reply to any of YOUR follow up questions. It's just plain rude to be honest. If I gave you all my time. Why can't you give me a little bit of yours by replying and putting the matter to bed with a little closure. I mean if you're not interested, your not interested. That is fine. It doesn't make you a bad person and nobody is going to judge you for it. It's your decision and I respect that. But don't ask me if I'll sell for x price and then go awol or permanently AFK when I say I will and then follow you up with it after. Don't get me wrong. I send a couple messages leaving it with them, leave them alone and let them decide and get back to me in their own time. Sometimes depending on how offended I was by them, if they message me back I'll just ignore them instead. But mostly I'd probably still reply courteously and risk going through that whole possible waste of time scenario again because that's business and how you pay the bills.

That said, usually when potential clients contact you again there are less questions and more selling. But if they did that to me twice then I'm not sure about the 3rd time. This has happened on occasions and I have probably lost out on a sale/client and money because of it. I am sure overall this must add up to Billions of dollars per yer in potential revenue loss for businesses and clients which only in turn has a knock on effect for other buyers/clients as it pushes the prices up for things to try and recover that loss.

Yes tire kickers. There is some food for thought for you. Your time wasting is pushing the prices up for everyone. Time is money. The more time you waste asking questions the more you pay in the long run can I get an Amen?

Sure everyone's time is limited. I get that. Sure you're not interested or you changed your mind for x reason. That's fine. Just SAY THAT. It's called common courtesy. That is the problem with the world today IMHO. People don't have the same common courtesy like they used to. It's harder to find real genuine decent people today that know that in order to get respect you have to earn it. That know that you treat people HOW you want to be treated.

Wow I guess I feel more strongly about it than I thought. Feel better for saying it though.

Cheers and two beers.

 

A clear and outright NO is always fine by me. I'm not hurt by that. Well, frankly, I'm sometimes (LOL ) but that's only my instantaneous or first reaction. I quite understand why a prospect might not be interested in discussing the offer further – they might have found a cheaper or better seller, their funds are not accessible immediately for some random reason, some other more important business comes up suddenly etc. But when they are NOT interested and very clear about it, I expect them to tell it to me SQUARE. What drives me nuts perhaps more than anything else is people who keep things hanging. 'Oh yeah, I'm still thinking over your offer', 'Well, I'll have to talk things with my partner and then get back', 'You see, I'm still in the process of arranging funds for the purchase (- Why in the first place did you waste my time when you clearly knew you didn't have the necessary funds?? )' etc. are replies I hate badly, for one.

@jrbiz, thanks for the perspective. Next time I deal with a tire-kicker, I'll probably be less annoyed.

 

you reply because its worth replying still. it helps hone your sales skills anyway

 

I feel you OP. LOL But then, we are obliged to answer these questions (no matter how obvious the answers are ) and keep the conversation going. It's not like we can filter the sure sales from the ones that are not.

 

Yeah, I'm going to start billing them for the time my time they have wasted that I could have otherwise put into something else.

I reckon $50 an hour ought to do it. At least, that's what I'm going to start telling people now before I get into a long and winding conversation with them that leads nowhere.

Perhaps that might make people think twice. What do you reckon?

 

If only it was that simple. Unfortunately, you'd probably just lose many serious buyers.

 

if by chance you are serious about this, do let us know the outcome. I might do the same thing but on a lesser price Kidding!!

Anyway, just like what @pianogirl said, you may also lose a lot of serious buyers as well. Some buyers are just so wise that they want to know even the tiniest detail prior to making the purchase.

 

Therein lies the rub; if they could be quickly identified as unqualified buyers, they would not have the opportunity to kick the tires, at length, because the seller could "fire" them. The problem is that you just never know. Let me provide an example from many years ago when I ran sales/marketing for a company and my direct mail campaign was 1 million snail mail pieces annually (about 90K per month.) Back then (looooong time ago) you could consistently get a 2% response rate in B2B mailings. Anyway, it would result in about 2,000 leads per month. Once my secretaries (had a fleet of them as the salespeople did not have computers at their desks, just phones and file cabinets) had finished processing the leads for entering in the database, assigning them to the appropriate rep, etc., I had them leave the reply postcards on my desk so I could quickly peruse them every day. Since this was our primary lead generation method, I was very interested to get a flavor for what we were bringing in as raw material for the sales reps. Of course, I would spot a particularly good looking lead and occasionally would even follow up with the sales rep or his/her manager to comment how good it looked. Likewise, I would see one that looked particularly bad and commiserate with the assigned parties. More times than I care to admit, I was dead wrong with these first impressions. What I learned over the years is that you simply CANNOT pick the best prospects based upon initial impressions and/or early interactions. You have to assume that all of them are legit for an initial period of discovery because you never know...

 

…. which only gives tire-kickers more opportunity to play the waiting game, sadly.

 

Which is what makes tire kickers such a scourge on the marketplace.

 

I guess the trouble can be somewhat reduced when you're dealing with tire-kickers online. At least you can set up a webpage that has FAQs and their answers - so that for every potential customer, you don't need to waste your time answering the same questions over and over. As you go on encountering more and more inquiries down the line, you can update the FAQ so that it becomes more comprehensive and detailed. Additionally, a questionnaire or survey will make the process more interactive and enable you to understand the prospect's needs better.
Not really sure how much it'll help to weed out tire-kickers, but I hope it should positively as not every tire-kicker will have the patience to read through till the end. A serious buyer, on the other hand, will take the time to go through all the info that's put up and will probably contact you directly and in-person only when they're interested.

Another idea that just occurred to me – how about appointing a separate person/rep, team or department to handle all these inquiries? You, as the business owner, will then have to deal only or mostly with the conversion part.

 

Because then you'd have to pay somebody else to do that for you, and some people just don't have the budget for that.

 

Thanks for all the responses, feedback and support guys! It really helps to get a perspective and insight how to handle/deal with such people. I thought at first I might have got a little bit chewed out for posting something like this but it seems as though I speak for many other people too who also feel the same way about me of such time wasters/tire kickers etc.

I guess it would be rather hasty to tell people that I will bill them for my time if they use up more than an hour in asking questions. I think I might just send them here to read this thread instead. But then I suspect some people will just drag it out for the sake of it as they simply have nothing better to do anyway. These are the worst kind of people, people with too much time on their hands!

That said, I feel a name and shame thread on here might work to our advantage possibly. I am sure nobody here would want to be in that thread marked down as a time waster. But then that could work to our disadvantage too as if someone really was genuine and see you posted their name in it they might get upset by that.

Idk, I guess there really isn't nothing you can do about it and it's just one of them things with business. You have to "roll with the punches" and "take it on the chin" if you are to survive.

 

I agree that budget can be a constraint for many, esp. for SMBs and people looking to operate their business individually, but if that is managed somehow (- as by acquiring a loan or getting an investor to invest some money where your proposal is grounded on a promising and convincing business plan), the enablement to focus only or mostly on conversions and cracking deals will much likely compensate for the risk that will be incurred.

 

I've had 2 more people do this to me recently and they are both from here. One person posted loads of crap in my auction and asked me some questions. When I answered them they didn't reply. Another person said "sorry I didnt get the email there was a message" but then still hasn't replied back to me. Someone else asks me lot of questions then when I answer them they go AWOL. It's driving me insane. Where has the common courtesy gone? Is it too much to reply with a thank you, I'll get back to you if interested further? Am I asking too much? Why deface someone's auction with stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with the auction and then not even reply to a message sent to you? I'm sorry but I would never do that. It's disgusting the attitude that people have towards each other on here and you're not helping to make it a better place!

 

You can report such spam on DP. There should be a "Report" button under every post and you can click it to send the post to the Moderators who are pretty good at removing them.