28
Do I Trust and Believe You?
When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.
—Stephen R. Covey
Despite the perception that salespeople will say or do anything to get the deal, I rarely meet salespeople who harbor ill intentions. Most sales professionals
- Do the right thing,
- Keep their promises,
- Tell the truth, and
- Believe in what they are selling.
The trap average salespeople fall into is the false belief that good intentions are enough. Stakeholders are not judging your trustworthiness based on your intentions. Instead they judge you based on their own intentions.
Stakeholders are scrutinizing you. They are looking for congruency in your words, nonverbal communication, and actions. Listening, demonstrating confidence, keeping promises, showing up to meetings on time, being prepared, meeting deadlines, following up, following through, keeping sales material pristine, managing your message, and so on connect words, intent, and actions.
In our hypercompetitive global market place, dominated by disruptive change, buying a new product or service or switching vendors carries real risk for stakeholders. Today, organizations have very little patience for failure and the penalty for making mistakes is severe.
When stakeholders rely on you to deliver on promises, they put themselves in a vulnerable position. Buying from you can mean putting their reputation or career on the line. Likewise, in high-end business-to-consumer (B2C) sales, customers may be putting their family finances and reputation with their spouse or other family members at risk. Should you fail to perform, the impact on their business, company, career, or family could be extreme.
In this stress-filled atmosphere you'd think that stakeholders would rely strictly on empirical evidence and data when choosing vendors; that they would act in their best interest, putting emotions aside and doing only what is most logical. But we know this is not how people make decisions.
Humans almost always act on emotion first and subsequently justify those actions with logic. This by the way, is why making no change—sticking with the status quo—is often the emotionally safe choice, even when staying put is illogical or even dysfunctional.
Emotional Baggage
According to a recent Associated Press/GfK poll that asked, “Can most people be trusted?” 70 percent of the U.S. population believes that most people can't be trusted.1 Imagine the response if the question were changed to, “Can most salespeople be trusted?”
Stakeholders bring into sales conversations the emotional baggage accumulated over a lifetime of dealing with salespeople. Those experiences are amplified by the negative perceptions about salespeople that have been drilled into them through movies, TV, stereotypes, and the media. They are suspicious of your motivations from the get-go.
Most stakeholders, though, given enough consistent evidence that you'll listen, care, seek to understand, keep your word, and do the right thing will trust you. The paradox of vulnerability is that deep inside we want to trust others. Distrust creates painful dissonance. Suspicion and skepticism are uncomfortable feelings. Trust is stability—a state of well-being and equilibrium we seek.
Stephen R. Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, compares the process of building trust to making deposits in an “emotional bank account.” Using this metaphor, Covey explains that you build trust by making regular deposits (consistent evidence that you are trustworthy) in another person's emotional bank account.
As you make deposits, like listening, being prepared for meetings, keeping commitments, and delivering on promises, the balance in the trust account grows. When you fail to honor commitments, renege on promises, make the other person feel unimportant or unappreciated, behave in an unlikable or inconsistent way, you make withdrawals.
As with any bank account, when you make too many withdrawals and allow your account balance to become overdrawn, there are penalties. You lose trust, placing the relationship and deal in jeopardy.
You Are Always on Stage
Imagine standing on a stage in an auditorium. In the audience are your stakeholders, clients, your boss, and your peers. Every behavior is being watched. You are being observed to see if your actions are congruent with your words.
Perhaps you are polite to some people, but not others. Perhaps you become agitated at a minor inconvenience. Maybe you were late to a meeting and did not call in advance. Could be you didn't return an e-mail or voice mail in a timely manner.
You may have missed a key piece of information in discovery because you weren't paying attention. Maybe your presentation material or samples were not in pristine condition. You weren't prepared for the demo. Your business card had coffee stains on it. You told a little white lie and got caught.
Judgments are being made about how much to trust you. In sales you are always on stage, and it is essential that you control the behaviors you allow others to observe. You must exert a tremendous amount of self-control and discipline to manage every behavior, promise, and action while in front of stakeholders.
Failure to return phone calls, disorganization, spelling and grammatical errors on written documents, being unprepared for meetings, inaccurate facts, inconsiderate behavior, distracted listening, and failure to follow up, all seem very small. However, the human brain gravitates toward the negative.
Negative messages, thoughts, and images grab and hold our attention. We are attuned to what's wrong about someone rather than what is right. Over time, these small negative perceptions add up, building the case that you cannot be trusted.
When it comes to trust, little things make a big difference. Although there are situations in which one big lapse in judgment injures trust to such an extent that there is no going back, these events are rare. Losing trust is more often the culmination of many small breaches that weaken or destroy the foundation of trust.
One Brick at a Time
You are not entitled to trust, you must earn it with consistent and ongoing evidence that you are trustworthy. This is where our journey loops full circle back to the alignment of the three processes of sales.
You can't show up day one and start challenging stakeholders, telling them what they are doing or getting wrong. You can't expect to walk in the door or jump on a call, throw insight and information at stakeholders and expect that they will believe you or view you as an expert. You must earn that right.
You'll never enter the buying process in the late stages, skipping the crucial Connecting and Discovery steps and build an adequate foundation of trust on which to challenge the status quo and close the sale. It doesn't work this way.
Building trust is a step by step process. Every action, decision, and behavior links to and directly affects trust—positively or negatively. It is part of the seller and stakeholder emotional journey within the ever-shifting corridors of the sales, buying, and decision processes. Trust cannot be rushed. You must patiently lay the foundation, one brick at a time.
In sales, trust is everything. Without trust relationships collapse and win probabilities crash. Without trust stakeholders erect emotional walls, discovery is shallow, next steps are denied, objections become immovable obstacles, and deals stall. Without trust, you have nothing.