Salespeople love to pontificate about the “great relationships” they have with prospects and clients, but to keep our funnel consistently full, trust beats relationships.
If “trust” and “relationships” sound like the same thing, that’s fair; however, we can trust someone we don’t have a relationship with, but we can’t have a relationship without trust.
There’s a reason that “stranger danger” exists as a cliché today. Our brain is wired to keep us safe and one of the ways it recognizes “safety” is “consistency.” When we feel safe with another person, we trust them even if we don’t have a relationship with them.
For example, we want a bit of sales tech to support our salespeople with nurturing leads. We do our research, read reviews and book a demo. At the beginning of the demo there is no trust and no relationship because we have expectations of what an interaction with a salesperson is like.
During the demo the salesperson makes us feel safe, largely because they didn’t violate our expectations, and we select their product. There’s still no relationship, in fact we will likely be flipped to an implementor before being flipped again to an account manager, but there is trust.
Even for long-term clients, “relationship” isn’t included in the cliché “people buy from people they know, like and trust.” Our long-term clients trust that because we have delivered in the past we will deliver again. If/when we don’t then trust is damaged if not broken entirely.
The best place to start for coaching our salespeople to create trust with prospects and clients is consistency and clarity.
When our salespeople regularly do what they say they will do by when they say they will do it they demonstrate consistency to their client, which prompts their client to trust them more because consistency ties directly to safety.
By creating clarity with their prospects our salespeople reduce an individual’s natural fear reaction to new or different experiences, which again increases that prospect’s level of trust with our salesperson. Clarity could come from sharing the next steps in our sales process or confirming a date by which our salesperson would provide additional information to their prospect.
A quick metric for determining trust, especially with clients, is how often a client asks one of our salespeople for guidance on a topic that is completely unrelated to our business.
Next time a salesperson talks about a “great relationship” with a client ask them, “when was the last time that client asked you for advice on a problem you couldn’t sell them something to solve?” If that salesperson gapes like a fish out of water the “relationship” may only exist in their head.
Until next time…. go lead.
You might also be interested in:
