This is the number one reason people do not buy from you. If you are not developing it, then you are drastically lowering your odds of success – Trust.
The Importance of Trust in Selling
In today’s society, because of the pervasiveness of the internet, social media and the like, we are guilty until proven innocent making sales more challenging. I have been on the phone with a prospect and I can hear them typing in the background. What are they doing? They’re checking our website to see if what I am saying is true. So our message better be consistent with what I am saying. The prospect is determining if they can trust me.
I have entered into the trust curve. So what is it? The prospect begins in a state of anxiety. They are typically skeptical and are unsure and unwilling to speak with me. I have to earn their trust and earn the right to move with them through the sales cycle. As I do, they will trust me more, and when they trust me more than they doubt me, they will purchase from me. This is the Trust curve.
The steps we use to move the prospect through this curve are simply a series of sales conversations. Each conversation establishes your credibility, earns their trust, and moves you closer to the sale. Finally, when they trust in the value that you offer, you close the sale. This is how you progress through the trust curve to a sale.
Developing trust
Our first rule in sales is:
You can’t sell something to anyone until they give you permission to sell to them!
Permission is the first key to building trust. So how do you get permission from the prospect? You have to have a message that makes them curious about what you have to offer. So how do you do that? Well, you must condense your entire business into a single, concise, phrase that presents your value in 10 seconds or less. This phrase will create curiosity.
This is a basic principle of conversation, any conversation. People, in general, will not engage with you in a conversation, unless they are curious about what you have to say. The way to create curosity is to provide them “Glimpses of Value” that are specific to them. These glimpses come from a simple 10 second statement that condenses the business value – your MESSAGE. The “value” is presented as sales triggers in your statement and these triggers create curiosity. The result – conversation.
Our goal is to continue the conversation with the prospect and keep their interest. The only way to do this is to provide value by asking relevant questions that illustrate we know what we’re talking about. Each relevant question makes us more credible and the prospect moves closer to the sale. There is obviously a few more complexities to the sale, but in its basic form, this is all there is to it.
The Trust Mindset
There is a nuance to establishing trust with the prospect. They have to want to trust you which means they have to feel you have their best interest at heart. The “Trust Mindset” is simply a sincere, honest, approach to helping the prospect. A willingness to walk away if you can’t help them. In other words, good sales people do not have tricks. They are not manipulative. They are truly customer focused, and want to help. How else would you earn a prospects trust?
Remember the old sales adage, “People buy from people they trust”. Creating trust is really not that difficult if you have the right mindset. If you get good at creating curiosity and start asking the right questions, you will build trust. Once you have that… Let the buying begin.
