So there I was out in the reception area and this guy walks in and introduces himself as Merv then without skipping a beat he moves right into his boilerplate sales pitch. He did ask if I was the Manager which presumably was his qualifier for the unsolicited intrusion to my morning. Merv pulls out a tattered terry cloth that appeared to be wet and smelled as if it were saturated with citrus which also had a spot of ink prepared on it. Merv pours yet more concentrated citrus onto the ink spot and uses a brush to scrub and displace a portion of the ink. The parlor trick had its desired effect. Thing is I know better.
“Have you ever seen anything work so good, what would you have used to remove that ink stain?
There are many kinds of ink so such a demonstration is useless, but I wasn't looking for a confrontation so instead I tried to sidestep the question.
“Well, being that it's just an old rag, I would just throw it away rather than bother to remove a large ink stain from it”.
I could see that Merv was not easily deterred from trying to tear down the barriers between him and his sale. I tried to save us both some time.
“Merv, you are preaching to the choir, I actually wrote a book on the science of cleaning so I do not wish to have a lesson on cleaning agents.”
He persists: “So what products do you use?”
I am reluctant at this point to be specific, I do not wish to invite debate, but nor did I want to be rude, so I say;
“I use the correct specific cleaning agent for the surface that I am cleaning.”
Merv persists attempting to eliminate my objections. He clearly has not gotten my signal. The hardest part of business is communication: People hear what they want to hear.
Merv remains confident that he can prove that his purported superior line of cleaning products will win me over, implying that they work better than what we already have in the cabinet.
So Merv presses once again demanding me to name some of the products that I currently use.
I respond :
“Look, I have only been in North Eastern Washington for about four months. Off hand I couldn't even tell you most of the brand names of the products we are currently using. I just purchased what was available locally.”
Truthfully cleaning agents haven't changed all that much since James Gamble discovered synthesized soap in 1837. Brands are mostly differentiated by packaging ,coloring and fragrance. Those who approach cleaning from a scientific perspective, tend to gravitate toward professional grade cleaning agents since they come more concentrated. Which means that they can be diluted according to the demand of application. It's also less expensive to purchase cleaning agents that way since you aren't paying for as much water content.
The first barrier to my buying Merv's solutions was loss aversion. I didn't care to pay for a pint of what I knew is mostly water. Merv's pitch was not oriented toward my concerns, he was determined to show me that his product would work for me. There was not reduction of risk in his presentation. For many people the function of the product (if reasonably priced) would be enough motivation to procure a sale.
If Merv knocks on enough doors, sooner or later he is certain to find someone who is actually running low on cleaning supplies. Someone with a coincidental urgent need would likely find Merv's timely arrival a heaven sent. I just wasn't that guy. I really just wanted him to move on. The pitch wasn't working for me, and Merv finally seemed to sense as much and changed tactics.
He said: “How do you feel about creating jobs for urban youth?
I started to get interested maybe even a little excited:
“Are the products cooked in an urban manufacturing plant? Is the line employing urban kids? What's the deal? “ I asked.
At this point I am seriously considering possibly making a donation of some kind, but I needed to know more about how my purchase would serve that end. But Merv didn't answer my question and he didn't seem to have anything new to add either. I got the impression that Merv wanted me to take his claim of social benefit on face value.
Nothing. Merv had not verified or expounded on the social aspect of his products even when I asked directly for more information.
There didn't seem to be any tools in Merv's presentations that could frame his offering as something that would add value on it's own merit. I liked the talking point of helping urban kids, but there didn't seem to be any data to convince me that that was really the case. There simply wasn't the economy of scale I would want in purchasing cleaning products. Merv had hauled a few quarts of products into my space. I would want highly concentrated product in a volume of at least a gallon. If he had particular products in a five gallon pail that would intrigue me since larger volumes save money.
When I indicated that the products were not going to work for me, Merv did counter with some social proofs about satisfied customers, convenience of delivery and his thirty years of experience which did strengthened his credibility but not his offer in my eyes. At that point I was actually looking for some common ground where I might be able to do business with Merv. There just wasn't enoughcall to action to move me in that direction.
I would have liked to have heard more about the social impact of the program if such a thing actually existed. I was not open or willing to getting a lesson about the cleaning line because frankly I felt that I had invested too much of my life in such education already. When it comes to cleaning it has been my experience that many people tend to think they know all there is to know about the subject. Merv had completely missed my signal that I didn't want to have the conversation he was insisting on.
A quality approach is where someone is courteous and asks for a bit of my time rather than imposing their will on me. High pressure approaches simply don't work for me. Sometimes the barriers to purchasing are matter of the salesman's style. I wasn't impressed with Merv's approach from the beginning and that tended to dampen my attitude toward him. It made me more resistant and evasive with his advances than I might otherwise have been.