"Selling Your House?"

Eleven Negative Assumptions Most Buyers Have about You and the Sales Process

1. Buyers believe their time is more valuable than your time. They'll feel put out having to fit you into their busy schedule, and show little regard for yours.

2. Buyers believe that its ok not to answer your unsolicited phone call or to delay returning it.  After all, they don't know you from Adam or Eve, may be loyal to another supplier, and may not care to invest energy and time in cultivation a new business relationship.

3. Buyers believe that canceling an appointment with you may cause an inconvenience, but is not wrong.  Again, they are very busy.  You can always reschedule.  They feel that you're the one who stands to make money on the deal, so you should tolerate any inconvenience rescheduling might create.

4. Buyers believe its ok to misleed you.  They might schedule an appointment to get you off their back with no intention of honoring it. They might lie about current suppliers.  They might mislead you about whether and how much money has been allocated to solving their problems. They may claim wrongly to have the power to make a decision.

5. Buyers believe most salespeople are trained to manipulate and use psychological "games".  Have you listened to dozens of psychological tapes, attended day s of training in the manipulation of others, and mastered a complete repertoire of negotiation tricks?  Buyers believe you have.  They see you entering their offices with an arsenal of selling deceptions that they must defend against.

6.  Buyers expect to feel pressured.  they expect you to back them into a orner and try to push them into a hasty decision.

7.  Buyers feel that strong resistance is their only defense.  Given their expectations of impending pressure and manipulatioin, buyers feel justified in being inflexible, stubborn, and resolute.  If they start to like you and the product, their internal alarm may cause them to "come to their senses" and conclude that their positive response must be irrational and foolhardy.  This often happens just when you begin to think you've made the sale.

8.  Buyers feel that giving in too early is losing the game.  In a game each side makes "moves."  Buyers often judge that buying at the first sales call is giving in too early and is therefore the "wrong move."  Thus, they feel no remorse in calling you back a second or third time before giving in.

9. Buyers believe that even though you may look like a nice person your job forces you to compromise your ethics and integrity. In surveys measuring the most trusted occupations in America, salespeople never score in the upper ranks.  Parents rarely brag about their son or daughter the salesperson.

10.  Buyers believe its ok to get free consulting from you.  They see nothing wrong with using your ezpertise to help them make a good decision with your competitors.  After all, you called them, they didn't call you, and you're on their territiory, not vice versa.  Be ready with strategies to keep from giving away your knowledge without mpayment for what its worth.

11.  Buyers believe that stalling and delaying are right and necessary.  They believe that the more they control in the negotiation the greater their psychological security.  Their ultimate control is deciding whether or not to place the order.  The longer they delay that decision, the greater thei security.  

Remedies for Dissenting Shareholders and the Deadlocked Corporation

Dissenting shareholders in a publicly-traded corporation may sell or otherwise dispose of their shares and seek as damages any lessening of value of the shares prior to the sale resulting from the matter causing the dissension. However, shareholders in a closely held corporation may not have a reasonable way to dispose of their shares and avoid dissension. Deadlocks among shareholders or directors of closely held corporations thus may result more often in litigation than such conflicts within publicly held corporations.

Judicial tests for resolving issues of shareholder dissension vary among the states. For example, a court in Massachusetts devised an equal opportunity doctrine to require that in a buy-out of a corporation, a minority group must be given the same relative price for its shares as the price being given a control group. A Delaware court ruled that if treatment of minority shareholders is fair under all the circumstances, it need not necessarily be equal to the treatment obtained by majority shareholders. A New York court held that before ordering the ultimate remedy of dissolution of a corporation, it would first consider whether less drastic remedies were available that would maintain a balance between preserving reasonable expectations of minority shareholders while not requiring that majority shareholders guarantee results for the minority.

State corporation statutes often have provisions designed to resolve potential conflicts among minority and majority shareholders of closely-held corporations. Such statutes may also provide for dissolution proceedings in various circumstances. For example, many states have adopted provisions allowing the board of directors to recommend dissolution of the corporation and providing for a shareholder vote on the dissolution proposal.

Additional statutory provisions may allow a shareholder to seek judicial dissolution of a corporation with a deadlocked board of directors or deadlocked shareholders. Such dissolution proceedings may also be authorized to deal with claims that the assets of the corporation are being wasted or that controlling shareholders or directors are acting illegally or fraudulently. Another remedy for the dissenting shareholder may be the appointment of a custodian either to oversee the dissolution of the corporation or to oversee the operation of the corporation's business while dissension is resolved.

Forward-looking shareholders may agree upon the formation of a closely-held corporation on how dissension or deadlock will be treated should it occur. Such agreements may cover not only what would be considered a deadlock but also what remedies, ranging from buyouts to dissolution, will be available to resolve a full range of potential disputes, including deadlock.