Charles H. Green

Charles H. Green is a speaker and executive educator on trust-based relationships and Trust-based Selling in complex businesses. He is author of Trust-based Selling (McGraw-Hill, 2005), and co-author of The Trusted Advisor (with David Maister and Rob Galford, Free Press, October 2000).

Charles has spoken before a variety of industry and functional groups. An engaging and content-rich speaker, he has taught in executive education programs for the Kellogg Graduate School of Business at Northwestern, and for Columbia University Graduate School of Business, as well as through his own firm, Trusted Advisor Associates. His work centers on improving trust-based relationship and business development skills for businesses with complex service offerings.

Charles is a graduate of Columbia College (BA Philosophy, 1972) and of the Harvard Business School (MBA, 1976). He spent the first twenty years of his career with the MAC Group and its successor, Gemini Consulting, where his roles included strategy consulting (in Europe and the United States), VP Strategic Planning, and a variety of other firm leadership positions.

Charles' clientele includes technology businesses, professional services firms, financial services organizations, businesses selling complex services, and organizations with internal consultative functions like IT, legal, consulting and human resources .

In addition to his books, he has published articles in Harvard Business Review, Directorship Magazine, Management Consulting News, CPA Journal, American Lawyer and Commercial Lending Review, is an occasional featured blogger at The Huffington Post, and a contributing editor at RainToday.com.

Point of View: Trust in Business Today

Based on our experience with sales and advisory organizations, five statements seem true:

1. The single greatest factor affecting sales and business success is the level of trust in the customer relationship.
2. The level of trust between businesses and customers is very low these days.
3. Business focused too much on competition—and not enough on customers.
4. Business has gotten very good at faking trust—which is cynical, and inevitably destroys trust.
5. Genuine trust-based relationships are based on a desire to see the customer succeed—not on a desire to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

These are timely themes. Yankelovich, as of June 2004, says that consumer trust in business is at an all-time low. In the B2B arena, customers are driving salespeople to purchasing departments and insisting on RFPs. The American Customer Satisfaction index in mid-2004 stands below its opening levels of 10 years ago. The idea of "customer focus" in business strategy and marketing has been cynically applied, as merely another tool to augment sellers' bottom lines.

The paradox of trust is that the greatest economic success is a byproduct of putting customers' success first. To make customer needs fulfillment merely a tool to improving seller profitability is not just cynical—it is a recipe for low profitability.

True trust-based relationships have four characteristics:

• they start with the perspective of the customer
• they have a long-term perspective
• they are collaborative
• they are based on transparency

These insights are not radically new. Many distinguished business writers have touched on the subject Trust is also not the only sensible approach to be taken. But trust integrates a great number of business issues—and lets us address them with a consistent, comprehensible set of mindsets and skills which can be learned.