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Making any buyer believe you care about them and not just their money is one of the most difficult things to do in business. However, if you can manage this, you are well on your way to developing a beautiful working relationship.
So why is it that buyers have such a hard time trusting salespeople? Because for many years, salespeople were trained to only stay cool and wear their game face day in and day out. According to Linda Richardson’s new book, Changing the Sales Conversation, there is nothing wrong with wearing your heart on your sleeve in business, and it can actually be an advantage.
Read an excerpt of the book here to understand why:
Trust can be earned after you have delivered the business outcome. But how can you build trust earlier in the sales process? Your clients spend a lot of time considering how they feel about things—just as you do. And although they are using metrics and analytics to carefully evaluate their options, their feelings about you are also busily at work from the first conversation through to the point where they make a decision. Your emotions are busy too, and you must recognize and channel them to focus on not only the opportunity, but also what is happening in the relationship. Emotional reactions are strong, and you must be aware of them and take measures to manage them.
Salespeople learn how to stay cool and wear a game face, but no time is spent talking about developing a warm heart. No time is spent talking about the vulnerability needed to have open and honest dialogues that register positively on clients’ trust meters. Daniel Pink’s book To Sell Is Human looks at selling from a human point of view. He understands the “heart” part of selling and gave this advice to his readers: “Make it personal and make it purposeful.”
How much heart is in your selling? Beyond asking yourself about what you do, it’s important to ask how you do it. Do you sell with the heart of a seller (closer)? Do you sell with the heart of a teacher (helper)? Can you sell with both? We all know how critical drive is to sales success. No one disputes that—and rightly so. But how important is it to sell with heart too? David Kelley, founder of IDEO (which fashioned Apple’s mouse and P&G’s Swiffer) feels the most important thing in business is to be human-centered. Being human-centered is quite different from being client or customer-centered. When you sell with heart, you don’t treat clients like transactions. Of course you deliver for them, but they know you care about them. It is the combination of competence and caring that builds trust.
What is buying if it is not a gesture of trust? Trust has always been hard earned in business, but recent conditions have made clients more cynical. You are the representative of trust for your organization. When clients trust you, they open up to you, they listen to you, they partner with you, and they are more apt to buy from you. Trust makes perceived risks acceptable. But when there is no trust, soon there is no relationship.
A Fortune 500 client ended a 12-year, million-dollar-plus annual contract, despite being very satisfied with the technical product and implementation team. When she called the president of the company that had been providing the service to tell him the company was not renewing its contract, she asked the company’s president, “Isn’t a million-dollar-a-year relationship big enough to warrant someone who cares?” She explained that the salesperson had gotten complacent but more importantly “didn’t fit in.” After some probing the president learned that in a meeting with an executive the salesperson tried to bluff her way when it was clear she wasn’t prepared and didn’t have the answer—a mistake that was antithetical to the client’s culture. The client said, “The question wasn’t important. But we need someone we can trust.”
The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed that between 2011 and 2012, trust plummeted from the previous low of 43% to 38% for CEOs, and a low of 34% to 29% for government. This may not surprise you. But what may be surprising is that while academics and technical experts continued to get the highest rating for trust, with academics at 78% (teachers and researchers) and technical experts at 68% (subject matter experts), the highest group to gain on the trust meter were regular employees, gaining 16% for a total of 66%.
Statistics such as this reinforce how key your role is. They point to the need to demonstrate expertise and approach clients with as much a teacher hat as a sales hat, if you want them to trust your recommendations. Even the most sophisticated clients are looking for advice—but only from sources they trust. For example, in 2012 investment bank advisory fees were up 15% despite merger deals nearly being at an all-time low. But a leading investment bank’s advisory fees fell 26% over the same period of time, due to an erosion of client trust caused by day-after-day reporting alleging violations.
Linda Richardson is a New York Times bestselling author, educator, sales leader, and the founder of the Richardson consulting firm. She has dedicated herself to helping organizations around the world improve sales performance, process, and effectiveness. Richardson began her career as a teacher and firmly believes that great selling is great teaching—collaborative, relevant, and results driven. Find her on LinkedIn.
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