What Part of No Don't You Understand?

I have no idea who first snapped off the classic response to pests of all sorts, “What part of no don’t you understand?” But I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was aimed at a salesperson, probably a graduate of Alec Baldwin's training class at Glengarry Glen Ross University.

I’ve always thought that the correct response to the rhetorical barb was to beat an immediate and hasty retreat. However, I may be wrong about that when it comes to sales.

In their book, When Buyers Say No: Essential Strategies for Keeping a Sales Moving Forward, sales consultants Tom Hopkins and Ben Katt parsed “no” and found that it can have a variety of meanings. It might indicate that the buyer has unanswered questions and concerns about the offering, or might not be sure how it compares to the alternatives in the marketplace. Maybe the buyer isn't clear about the benefits of the offering or doesn’t like the logistics or timing or terms of the deal. Or maybe the buyer just doesn’t like the salesperson—a big factor in any sales arena that requires an ongoing relationship.

The upshot of all this, write Hopkins and Katt, is that if you’re a sales professional, you better figure out exactly what the prospective buyer means by “no” before you head for the door. To steal a line from John Belushi's inspiring rallying call in National Lampoon's Animal House, the sale isn't over until you decide it is.

The challenge is how you manage the buyer's “no.” If you treat it like an objection and try to overcome it, chances are good you’ll get handed your hat. Being asked to make a decision at the end of the close creates discomfort in the buyer, and too often, salespeople compound that discomfort by becoming unlikeable in response to a negative answer.

“How do salespeople become unlikeable after the close?” ask Hopkins and Katt. “They become tense. Their facial expressions reflect unhappy feelings of disappointment or impatience. Even worse, they become subtly belittling, implying with their nonverbal communication that anyone with commonsense would have said yes by now.”

This jives with something I read in another good book, Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust, by the late Judith E. Glaser. “Most people assume meaning is embedded in the words they speak,” wrote the executive coach and organizational anthropologist. “But according to forensic linguists, meaning is far more vaporous, teased into existence through vocalized puffs of air, hand gestures, body tilts, dancing eyebrows, and nuanced nostril flares.”

Glaser accompanied reps at a drug company on their sales calls. She found that when doctors raised objections about the products they were being sold, the salespeople usually communicated their displeasure with nonverbal cues, such as stiffened bodies, pained facial expressions, and tense tones of voice. The doctors, in turn, responded by stiffening up themselves and trying to end the sales calls. Unsurprisingly, reports Glaser, the company where these reps worked was ranked 39th among 40 pharmaceutical firms in terms of sales effectiveness.

Interestingly, the authors of both books offer similar solutions to negative buyer responses. Hopkins and Katt say that you should run through their “The Circle of Persuasion” again. That’s their generic four-step sales process: establishing rapport, identifying needs, presenting solutions, and closing questions. So, the first step after hearing “no” is to reestablish rapport by letting the buyer “know that it is okay that he didn’t immediately say yes.” In Glaser’s case, she taught the pharmaceutical salespeople to reframe buyer resistance as “simple requests for more information.” This shifted the focus of the call “to relationship before task” and significantly bolstered sales.

The bottom line: When it comes to sales, the way you respond can go a long way to determining whether the question, "What part of no don't you understand?" is a dead end or an invitation to a mutually beneficial engagement.

[An earlier version of this article was published in strategy+business. ? 2014 PwC. All rights reserved.]