Who is your greatest competitor? Throughout the history of selling, sales professionals have always faced great adversaries that compete for their highly coveted piece of business. Is yours the large multi-national company or the boutique that somehow seems to call on your best customers? No, the most formidable competitor that has haunted salespeople for decades is the invisible competitor, the unseen attitude of customer indifference.

Why is indifference such a challenging competitor? Psychologically, indifference is rooted in our belief system. Its endemic, an attitude, a viewpoint held by your customers that you must change in order to close your sales. In addition, while you are more than able to compete head on against the visible products of your toughest competitor, the balance of power shifts when you are forced to compete against the invisible competitor of the human mind.

Indifference is not based in logic, but lies embedded in your client’s perception. Many factors can contribute to client indifference, including familiarity with an existing product, or "may be" false satisfaction with a competitor's product, or the failure of the buyer to notice additional needs, or their failure to recognize the unique benefits value of your product/service. However, the most prevalent factor by far is simply complacently, the age-old adage, "but that’s what we’ve always bought." Indifference comes from the client’s opinion that what you are selling is a commodity-like product with relatively no distinction nor value over their existing product/service.

How do successful salespeople confront the competition of indifference? You attack the issue strategically, armed with a thorough evaluation of a potential client’s current business practices. Indifference is overcome when a salesperson maps out a plan to resolve areas of customers’ hidden frustrations by uncovering previously unidentified needs. In approaching indifference, the sales professional must understand the psychological considerations that are tied to changing an attitude. Your client needs to be motivated to change.

To combat indifference, you need to acknowledge that indifference affects your customer, gaining permission to ask probing questions that increases your understanding of the customer’s specific needs. By having a questioning strategy, you help the customer gain an awareness of the needs and problems your product can solve. Probing questions permit you to explore problems that may have been lying dormant, and/or hidden; buried for years under by the initial adoption of poor business practices. Analytical probing allows you to understand the customers’ core business; including new business strategies the client is planning, and to define the competitive pressures within a market niche or segment with the goal of helping the customer realize problems or needs of which they were previously unaware.

Having a questioning strategy designed to overcome indifference permits you to discover who the other suppliers are that are currently doing business with your prospective customer. By evaluating how satisfied the customer is with the current suppliers, you uncover business needs they would like to improve. Additionally, strategic questioning provides an opportunity to investigate the customer's strategies and goals, allowing you to align your product/service with the achievement of their business objectives. Once a customer's business objective is in the open, you can determine how your product can assist your customer in meeting their stated business goals.

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