How can you tell when a sales person is lying? You know the punch line: When their lips are moving.

Bad joke, good reason

That bad joke still gets told for a good reason. It’s how many people still experience sales people. They (not you, of course) would say anything to make a sale. 

And that’s fantastic news for the rest of you, if you know how to leverage it. 

Buyers also lie

The selling cycle for high value products and services can be painfully long – months, or more likely, years. Too often, the bulk of time is consumed by creating trust - getting the decision makers to trust you. Customers may tell you it’s about proving your product’s technical prowess, but their lips are moving.

Trust is driven more by gut and emotion than by rational thinking. “Do I trust you?” has a lot to do with overcoming the buyer’s fear of making a bad decision, which comes at a high cost for the company and for the buyer’s career trajectory. Once you’ve established trust, the rest of the selling process can go by relatively quickly.

Accelerated Selling, hidden in plain sight

If you understand how trust gets built, you can accelerate it. When you greatly reduce the longest phase of the process, the sales cycle is shorter. We’ve seen the entire sales cycle reduced to one third of its original length.

Building trust has several elements, but the one that trips most sales people is so obvious it gets ignored daily. We call it proving “mutual concern.” To prove mutual concern you must convince me that my concerns and needs are as important to you as your own. If I feel that your concerns are more important than mine, you fail the mutual concern test. This kills sales.

You may not deserve it, but because of your buyers’ histories with other sales people – those who lie when their lips move – they assume that all sales people, including you, are the same. 

No, really. You look AWESOME in that car!

In fact, you may feel the same way.  Haven’t you had a commission-based sales person tell you that you look GREAT in that new car, suit, dress, or house, even when you thought it looked terrible? You knew to discount what they were saying because they didn’t have mutual concern.  They had “me concern.” Your buyers assume you also have me concern, until you prove you’re different.

Many experienced professional sales people are blind to the need to prove mutual concern. They’re willing to fudge the truth to make a sale, even if it’s not good for the customer. And that’s why people still tell the joke.  If buyers were stupid, it would work. But "me concern" loses more sales than it wins.

Prove you’ve got my back

There's a simple, three-step approach for proving mutual concern and accelerating trust building. If you sell with a team, you must enroll your entire team in this approach before employing it. Many sales people start to twitch, especially at the second point, because it goes against their basic sales instincts. But they become believers as it starts to work.

1. Be willing to walk away from a sale if it really isn’t in the best interest of the customer
2. Tell your customer, up front, that you’ll walk way from the sale if it’s not a fit
3. Actually walk away if there isn’t a fit

The moment you say you’re willing to walk away and mean it, you have just created a mental and emotional speed bump for your buyers. They can no longer place you in the same box as every other sales person they’ve met. They must pause and reconsider you. Other sales people may say these things, but their actions eventually prove them wrong. When you prove your mutual concern, your customer’s guard drops. The long process of building trust just became shorter. You make your sale more quickly leaving more time for everyone to invest in the next valuable opportunity.

Get more step-by-step tips for winning in sales in this sales ebook: