How often have you celebrated closing a sale or acquiring a new customer, only to hear from them a few days later that they changed their mind?
A common oversight in the sales process is to prevent Buyer’s Remorse.
Buyer’s Remorse, Defined
A prospective customer can feel wildly elated and satisfied during and immediately following the process of making a purchase, only to start developing a growing sense of unease and dissatisfaction.
This might seem to come out of nowhere, even after a lot of work to build a positive relationship.
There are a couple specific things your sales team should be doing to mitigate this tendency to second-guess a purchasing decision.
Steps to Prevent Buyer’s Remorse
1. Set expectations
Most forms of Buyer’s Remorse originate from some form of misaligned expectations. So make sure to verbally explain and immediately put into writing what they should expect from you and your team. Do this and there’s a much lower chance that they’ll feel disappointed.
2. Schedule clear next steps
It’s always best practice to get the next step on the calendar. Whether that’s a kickoff call or a team intro call or a project check-in call, make sure to get a tangible touchpoint on the calendar at an agreed upon time.
This prevents people from ghosting you, while also providing a natural opportunity to check in with the client and make sure they have a chance to air any concerns (before those concerns snowball into full-blow Buyer’s Remorse)
3. Provide immediate post-sale value
The fastest way for someone to feel satisfied with a product or service is to quickly get clear value from it. Whether this is from the salesperson directly or the person they hand it off to, make sure you build an early, easy win into your sales and project handoff processes. Give them something great before they even really have a chance to doubt it.
Some examples might be:
- Project plan / timeline
- A quick mockup of a deliverable
- A productive, consultative call with lots of takeaways
4. Make sure they have a way to contact you and your team
Clearly outline contact info for your new customer to use if they have any questions or concerns along the way. If they are unclear who to reach out to, they often won’t raise the question or concern, meaning there is ample opportunity for it to fester into Buyer’s Remorse.
Example:
“Your project manager will be Melanie. She will reach out to you within 24 hours to schedule a call, and her email / phone is…you can also reach me if any questions or concerns come up at any point along the way at…I’ll also be checking in with you next month to see how you are doing”
5. Pass the torch
While Buyer’s Remorse can often originate from misaligned expectations on the buyer’s side, there is also a way that it can come from misaligned expectations on the provider’s side. To ensure a positive experience, there needs to be clear, established mechanisms for communicating key customer info to the delivery team. This is particularly the case for service businesses.
Create a formal passing-of-the-torch process for the handoff between your sales team and project/product delivery teams. Without this, simple miscommunications can have catastrophic effects on your customer’s satisfaction.
Examples:
- Customer receives wrong product or service
- Salesperson doesn’t pass on the promises they made to the customer
- Salesperson doesn’t pass on the customer’s strongly emphasized preferences (“why did you make this in blue?! I told Dave I hate blue and never make anything with blue!!!)
- Important dates or other requirements don’t get communicated
Make a standard template document with all the most important customer info that your project / product team needs in order to provide a positive experience for the customer. You can even create this as a form (such as with Google Forms) that your salesperson fills in each time they make a sale (which then automatically gets emailed to the project manager, for example).
Take stock of your sales processes
There you have it – 5 new ways to prevent Buyer’s Remorse in your customers. Which of these strategies have you not tried yet? Which ones will you implement first?
