I recently heard Roger Kemper use the statement “Disarmingly honest,” and it has spawned a lot of thoughts regarding the brilliance of this simple statement. Too often salespeople have a tendency to get defensive when our products or services are criticized by clients. It’s hard to take criticism, however the last thing an unhappy customer wants to hear is excuses, justifications, or worst yet, that it’s their fault. These are sure ways to lose a customer forever. I once worked for a very smart engineer who developed great products and was great with customers until they were unhappy, then things got weird. On one occasion we had a new product returned because it broke while being assembled. When my employer found out about it, he wrote this client a letter blaming him and even using such language that the customer “hanked” on the unit causing it to break. Needless to say the customer was infuriated and threatened to never do business again. I then got involved and admitted there was a flaw in the design, fixed it, and apologized; after all this he agreed to continue doing business with us.

The moment we admit, acknowledge, and own a problem any animosity goes away and solutions can be found. People do not want adversarial relationships; we all have enough of those. If our hope is to become a partner with a client, they must be able to communicate with us, openly and honestly without a fear of bad feelings. The object is not first to be right, but rather defuse the situation, and being disarmingly honest may be the best way to accomplish this.