Perfect Your Salesmanship for Perfectionists

Perfectionist shoppers are a nuisance for retailers. They consume an abundance of your time to conclude a sale and then might return an item or resist paying for a service because their unrealistic expectations were not fulfilled.
     I’m hearing more tales from retailers about needing to deal with perfectionist shoppers. Why might there be an increase?

• The growing abundance of choices in the marketplace tempts consumers to believe they can have it all. 
• Perfectionism is a way to grasp for control when the economy around feels uncertain. 

     Research reported this year by Michigan State University psychologists finds a large genetic component in perfectionism. A person’s environment—the strictness of a parent’s standards, the reactions of bosses to errors on the job—shape the personality trait. But a larger determination comes from what you’re born with. This means perfectionism is challenging to change.
     It can be done, however, at least for the duration of the consumer’s time in your store. Let’s aim for what psychologist/economist Herbert Simon coined “satisficing” to refer to his finding that many successful people accept less-than-perfect alternatives so they can move on to the next choices they want to make.
      Swarthmore College researchers determined that satisficers have higher life satisfaction, happiness, optimism, and self-esteem than do people who hold out for perfection. Therefore, we’ll be aiding the mental health of true perfectionists if we can have them satisfice for their time with us.

• Start by determining if this shopper is, in fact, a true perfectionist rather than somebody who wants to fulfill a fantasy of having you as a slave to their whims. Is the shopper spiraling in toward a defined goal, even though that purchase goal is unattainable? A yes answer indicates you’re dealing with a perfectionist. But if the demands change willy-nilly, and no matter what you do, you can’t move even a smidgen toward a sale, terminate the harassment. 
• Identify areas important to the shopper for which you can satisfy their specifications completely or very close to completely. When other areas of concern keep coming up, evaluate how vital these would be for a non-perfectionist to receive full value from the transaction with you. It’s likely you’ll conclude it’s fine for the shopper to satisfice. Then say how close you can come to what the perfectionist is asking you and bring the discussion back to the areas where you can indeed give perfection. 

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Plan for Customers to Satisfice