92 What do you do when the customer doesn’t turn up?

Last week one of the members of my distance learning website, www.salescoachingworx.com asked a question about a customer who wasn’t there for a prearranged meeting.

This is a tough one and without knowing more background it is hard to give a definitive answer. In principle, if a person isn’t there having confirmed an appointment, he is rude and it is down to him to apologise and make sure you are happy. In the real world however, this is not likely to happen. Sales people will tell you it happens all the time.

Presuming there wasn’t an accident or some other unavoidable delay, when a customer is not there for a meeting that was previously arranged, he is saying that we are not important to him. We can say this is his fault but it may be more beneficial to accept that maybe it is our fault. Perhaps we didn’t get across the importance of the meeting, our product or the benefits he will be getting once he has purchased.

Maybe we didn’t uncover his problems and give him confidence that we are the right people to solve them for him.

This is not to say that the customer has a right to be rude. Sometimes customers ignore you to make you feel small. They figure that if they are important and you are not, they will get a better deal. If a customer keeps me waiting for a meeting that I was on time for, I will always thank him for giving me more time to prepare. This will take away any advantage he may have gained by keeping me waiting

Sometimes a customer will ignore you when come into their office for a meeting. They keep their head down with some apparently important paperwork and make you wait. In this case again, this is just a trick. It is natural for people to look up when you walk in and takes some effort just to stay looking at the apparently important document they are engrossed in.

When this has happened to me in the past I haven’t waited politely, I wander around their office picking up things to look at or straightening their pictures. This will usually get their attention.

In the case of your customer that wasn’t there, I would just make contact again, tell him that you were pleased to have the extra time in your busy day and set another appointment. Telling him how rude he was may make you feel better but is not likely to get you another customer. I would also recommend that you make sure the customer is looking forward to the meeting by letting him know how he will benefit by it.

This article is written and published by Richard Mulvey who can be contacted on www.richardmulvey.com, or www.salescoachingworx.com. You may re-publish this article in any media as long as it is not altered in any way and it contains this final paragraph