Misconceptions about Trust-based Selling: It Doesn't Work

by Charles H. Green on Wednesday, August 20, 2008 (post #333)

This is the third in a series of three about misconceptions regarding Trust-based Selling™. The first was about naievete; the second, about time.

The third misconception is that it doesn’t make sense, it just doesn’t work.

Not unreasonable, since trust-based selling rests on some apparent paradoxes. For example:

a. managing your sales with short term metrics will drive your short term metrics down;
b. the best way to be credible is to admit where you’re not;
c. you have the most influence over customers when you stop trying to influence them;
d. the best way to improve your closure rate is to stop trying to improve your closure rate;
e. to gain control, give up control.

This shouldn’t be surprising. For an elegant statement of how this paradox plays out—nominally in golf—see Phil McGee’s post The Putt.

The thing is, buying is still a very human phenomenon—and we humans are obstinately perverse. We do not like being hustled. We do not like being told what to do by those who we don’t think understand us. And we do not buy from people we think are using us for their own ends.

That’s the heart of the paradox. A salesperson who puts his sale ahead of his customer will lose both. A salesperson who puts his customer ahead of his sale will win both. You have to care about the customer—for the sake of the customer, not for what the customer can do for you.

The language of paradox is alien to modern sales. Big corporate sales is all about linear process management: break it down into ever-finer pieces, and micro-manage each one. Fine-tune the sales pitch; tweak the yield rates by tighter lead qualification; get the close in this quarter; and measure everything by the effect it has on sale and the cost to get there.

That’s all about the sale—not the customer. The term “customer focus” itself is turned inside out when we evaluate “focus” by whether or not it produces the sale.
Trust-based Selling is not a process—it’s a set of principles consistently applied. They are:

1. customer focus—for the sake of the customer
2. an instinct for collaboration
3. a default toward transparency except where injurious or illegal
4. a medium-to-long term focus on the relationship, not a short-term focus on the transaction.

If you had to put it into one word, it would be “care.” The more complex, long, and specialized the sale, the more we buy from those who care about us more than they care about getting the sale.

Doesn’t make sense? On the contrary, it makes all the sense in the world.

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If you'd like to learn more about Trust-based Selling™, why not join me for a Webinar tomorrow, Thursday, August 21, titled How to Build Trust in Sales Conversations. It is from 2PM to 3:30PM, Eastern time. See you there.

Misconceptions about Trust-based Selling II: The Time Thing

by Charles H. Green on Monday, August 18, 2008 (post #332)

Last week I wrote about the first of three misconceptions people have regarding trust-based selling—the idea that it's naïve.

This post tackles the second misconception: that trust takes too much time, both elapsed time and in aggregate. You’ve heard this one as either:

• “trust takes time and we can’t afford to wait that long,” or
• “trust takes such a big time commitment I’m not sure it’s worth it.”
•  

It takes too long; it takes too much. Neither is true.

Let’s start with “trust takes time.” How long does it take for you to read the degree on the doctor’s wall? To notice the doctor’s white coat? To share feelings with a surprisingly interesting seatmate on a transcontinental flight?

More pointedly: in a sales conversation, how long does it take to demonstrate interest, curiosity, caring, and enough self-confidence to shift the agenda on a dime in response to client interests? All these take less time than a conventional process-driven, presentation-oriented sales meeting—and create more trust.

Now let’s consider “trust takes such a big time commitment.” Behind this statement is the belief is the first belief—that people only come to trust slowly, in incremental parts, repeated frequently over time.

But trust has many dimensions: the “trust takes time” belief is mainly focused on reliability, which by definition does take elapsed time. It misses other senses of trust—credibility, integrity, intimacy, other-focus, for example. Those can be established in an event, in a moment, with a handshake, a word, a question asked at the right time in the right tone. These take very little time. And hence they don’t take a huge investment.

Let's move away from B2B sales: consider online dating services. Do they take time? Do they require large investments of time?

Not if you consider the dating scene pre-Match.com. Think of the ability to read people’s self-descriptions, to hear about them in their own words, perhaps with video or audio, perhaps with some advance “metrics” on compatibility.

Now consider how long it took, and much invested time it took, to get to a comparable level of trust one date at a time, over days and weeks. Or consider the odds of a first date ending well in the online dating world, vs. the blind date world of not that long ago.

Rapid trust creation is not an oxymoron; if anything, it taps into something more powerful. Rather than waiting to develop trust by reputation, we can create trust by being bold, other-oriented, curious and courageous—quickly. And benefiting all.

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Note: I will be giving a webinar this Thursday, on How to Build Trust in Sales Conversations.   It's hosted by the good people at RainToday.com.  It's from 2 to 3:30PM US Eastern time.  Again, that sign-up address is here.  
 

Live Webinar on How to Build Trust in Sales Conversations -- Thursday, August 21

by Charles H. Green on Saturday, August 16, 2008 (post #331)

I don't do a lot of webinars—but I will be giving one live next week—Thursday, August 21, from 2-3:30PM Eastern Daylight Time--on the subject of Building Trust in Sales Conversations.

The session is being hosted by the good people at RainToday, a powerful site focused on marketing and business development for professional services; the cost is $90, you can sign up here at RainToday.com.

Why the topic Building Trust in Sales Conversations? Because it tackles a lot of myths and misconceptions about selling.

For one, most of us think that selling draws down on trust. Rightly done, however, sales interactions are one of the best situations in which to create trust.

For another, trust is largely created (in intangible services or complex sales) not by branding, eloquence, speeches or credentials, but by personal interactions. Conversations. Sales conversations, about what people need and want.

Finally, many people think of trust-based sales conversations as things that can happen only after a long period of time has allowed trust to develop and grow. The truth is, it is in sales conversations that the trust grows. Just like other types of human relationships, trust doesn't happen before real, honest conversations—it is created in them. Trust doesn't enable selling; selling enables trust. This means trust can be created far more rapidly than we oftne think.

Understanding how to create trust in a sales conversation is a great source of freedom; trust doesn't take time, it isn't a business process, it doesn't come about from following metrics, and it isn't a business process. It is something each of us can do, personally, far better than we think.

Join me in a conversation (well, a webinar anyway) about this exciting topic. Sign up here for How to Build Trust in Sales Conversations.

I look forward to the time together.

Enron Revisited: Commonsense from the Trade School of Capitalism

by Charles H. Green on Friday, August 15, 2008 (post #327)

Mal Salter, of the Harvard Business School, has written a new book: Innovation Corrupted: The Origins and Legacy of Enron's Collapse (Harvard University Press),

Before you say “oh no, not another Enron book,” let me suggest this is Harvard Business School at its best.

In HBS's always-provocative Working Knowledge series, Salter is interviewed by Martha Lagace in Innovation Corrupted: How Managers Can Avoid Another Enron It's clear we have here not just a take on Enron, but a take on business takes.

Salter writes about Enron not as morality play, conspiracy, tragedy, or bubble (though if you like Trust Matters you'll love Malcolm Gladwell’s indictment of “the war on talent” using Enron as the smoking gun in The Talent Myth: Are Smart People Overrated). Instead, Salter writes thoughtfully about an important phenomenon in our society—with the aim of gleaning practical lessons for improving our social future.

Salter doesn’t force upon us databases, 2x2 matrices, or even structural functionalism. There are “villains,” but they are not the stuff of fantasy—they are all too real and like us. Grotesque, maybe, but born of our own lauded institutions—including Harvard Business School. A cause for concern.

I always liked to think of Harvard Business School as Harvard’s only trade school. The other obvious candidates—law and medicine—are in thrall to the academic model, graduating professionals, not tradespeople. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The “profession” label probably fits law and medicine better anyway).

But academia breeds methodologies and specialists. Peer reviews. Tenure. Snobbery is a distinct possibility.

Yet honor doesn’t require “professionalism” or academics. There is great honor in the trades. A tradesperson takes great pride in his or her craft—and doesn’t confuse it with art or science.

I learned only one methodology at Harvard Business School—3 times a day, 5 days a week. It was simply to remember to ask, “What should Joe do? What would you do?” I think of that as a tradesman's methodology—Git 'r done, done right, and done well. For career value, it's as good as they come.

A trade is best taught not by the smart, but by the wise. Inductive reasoning is favored over deductive. Reductive models are suspect—yet reductive commonsense is prized.
Fine tradespeople don’t take themselves too seriously, though they are serious. Character is a big deal. So are some sense of worth, mission, and purpose.

Mal Salter writes that way about Enron.

He is clear and positive about the brilliant innovations Enron—particularly Skilling—introduced. He is equally clear, and just as conclusive, about Mr. Skilling’s abysmal character defects (also an HBS graduate; not, however, one who learned much from Salter).

Here is Salter’s statement of the essential problems of Enron:

* Enron's stated purpose was too general to permit disciplined and responsible decision-making in the face of difficulty.
* The lessons of Enron relate to strengthening board oversight, avoiding perverse financial incentives for executives, and instilling ethical discipline throughout business organizations.
* Directors of public companies can adapt key aspects of the private-equity governance model to ensure that they fulfill their oversight responsibilities.
* Incentive systems should reward accomplishments other than economic performance, and penalize failures.
* Companies can take steps to help senior executives avoid the two sources of leadership failure at Enron: personal opportunism and flights to utopianism.

Those are dense, content-rich, jargon-free, meaningful statements. They demand to be read carefully, else they yield up nothing. That is not the often dumbed-down “business English” of today. But neither is it fluff or jargonish. It’s dense because it packs a punch.
His aim is very much about practical conclusions—as he puts it:

I outline organizational processes that are required to reinforce the kind of discipline that was noticeably lacking at Enron.

These processes include:

1. Liberating evaluation processes by adding qualitative judgment to whatever standard quantitative measures of performance that business plans may require
2. Designing and implementing incentive systems that reward accomplishments other than economic performance, and penalize failures
3. Conducting routine, systematic audits of critical decisions by key executives where the rules of the road are clearly ambiguous
4. Helping senior executives avoid the two sources of leadership failure at Enron: personal opportunism and flights to utopianism

Too much of today’s business academia looks at statements like these and says, in deed if not in word:

• Qualitative judgment? No no, Mr. Salter, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
• Rewarding non-economic performance? And penalizing its absence? Hey I thought you were teaching capitalism!
• Routine review of decisions made in ambiguity? Don't study the decisions, Mr. Salter, bulldoze the ambiguity for Pete's sake!
• Personal opportunism and utopianism as leadership threats? What is this, Mr. Salter, a liberal arts curriculum?

Salter’s take on Enron is radical in its distance from today’s thinking. And it’s conservative in the sense of preserving the best of the past.

Writing like this is old school in the best sense of the word. Above all, he celebrates commonsense—which despite the term, isn't common at all. In this respect Salter is like, for example, Tom Peters, David Maister, Jim Heskett and Peter Drucker.

Not bad company, in my view.

Misconceptions about Trust-based Selling: Naivete

by Charles H. Green on Wednesday, August 13, 2008 (post #330)

I find people have three primary misconceptions about the idea of Trust-based Selling™.

• One is that many people are not naturally "good," and that trusting people is naïve; doing so will bring you grief, if not danger and penury.
• The second misconception is that being trusted takes a lot of time and effort; too much, by their view. “We can’t afford to spend that much time and resources to be trusted.”
• The third misconception is that it just doesn’t work. It can’t be measured, it can’t be profitable, it doesn’t make sense.

I’m going to address all three of these misconceptions in separate postings. This is the first, aimed at the “naivete” argument.

There are some lovely counter-examples; see a blogpost called “Do You Trust Your Customers” by Rebecca Morgan, at Grow Your Key Talent  about the use of honor boxes and self-assessed service guarantees.

But counter-examples usually don’t convince doubters. So let’s try logic.

I’ve noticed that the “naivete” objection to Trust-based Selling is perversely aimed at buyers, not sellers, as in, “I could get really hurt by trusting others—they might take advantage of me.”

They miss the point: they confuse trust with trusting and with being trusted.  Trust-based Selling is mainly about the buyer trusting the seller, not vice versa.  While you can’t be trusted without being willing to do a little trusting yourself (the blogpost from Rebecca Morgan is just such an example), the bulk of the risk in trust-based selling is not taken on by the seller, but by the buyer. Trusting is but one strategy for being trustworthy— not the only one, or even the most important.

If indeed it’s naïve to believe that people can trust a seller, then the right question to the seller would be, “if even only a few people are willing to trust—are those few willing to trust you? And if not, why not?”

I have never heard a seller say “the trusting-buyer segment is too small to be worth it.” Instead, most recognize a trusting buyer is a wonderful thing.

I think the naivete argument is much more about the one making the argument than about any objective behavior. “You’re naïve” is typically said by someone who feels their beliefs are being attacked; someone who is personally vested in a fear-based psychology.

They are being truthful, in their own personal way. For them, trusting others feels risky. They attribute that same perception to others, so as not to feel alone. Therefore they don’t behave in a trustworthy manner, because then someone might trust them--thus proving their self-vested worldview wrong.

It turns out counter-examples are valuable—they force us to say, “well, it is possible to trust, and be trusted, and not get burned. So why are people not trusting me? Is it because I’m not selling in a trustworthy manner?”

Trust-based selling works, because most people respond very favorably to someone who consistently behaves in a trustworthy manner.  One such behavior is, occasionally, to do some trusting of others.