1. The Trust-Based Selling™Program
Objectives:
- Increase level of comfort with personal selling
- Offer a framework for selling professionally
- Offer specific tools for flexibly addressing various personal selling issues
Details:
- Participants: 10-25
- Length: 8-16 hours
Trust-Based Selling™ is a 1-2 day program for anyone who must sell complex products or services in a relationship context. That has included financial advisors, commercial bankers, lawyers, automotive parts manufacturers, reinsurance brokers, management consultants, software producers, architects, accountants, private bankers, actuaries, and HR and IT professionals. The program is customized for each firm; this is not an open-enrollment course. It applies practical models of trust to realistic—and to real-life—client situations.
Contents
We build Trust-Based Selling™ from the foundation of four core principles—a perspective of client focus, a habit of collaboration, a timeframe of relationship not transaction, and a willingness to be transparent . Topics include applying the trust model to the business development process, why clients really buy, how clients make decisions, selling by doing as opposed to selling by telling, adding value in the sales conversation, managing the sales conversation, avoiding pitfalls in sales conversation, handling price, making closing a non-issue, issue clarification, clarifying implications and benefits cases, cross-selling, handling issues outside your area of expertise, specific client types and how to interact with them, integrating trust, profit and business development consistent with client service.
Approach
Becoming a Trusted Advisor requires more than mastering a few behavioral tricks; it demands new mindsets as well as skillsets. To get at both, we use:
- intellectually challenging models, paradoxes and stories
- role-playing—both realistic and real examples
- customized caselets about relationship management
Attendees bring their toughest real-life situations with them to the program, and we work them in real-time through both role-plays and discussions. We purposely use live client examples, for three reasons:
- pedagogically it's more exciting
- educationally it's bound to be more relevant
- solving real problems in the program leads to fast payoff
Will Trust-Based Selling™ Fit My Organization?
Trust-Based Selling™ can co-exist with most existing selling processes, e.g. Miller-Heiman, SPIN. Trust-Based Selling™ is not a sales management process per se, but rather a structured approach to crafting trust-based sales conversations at all stages of a sales process. Unless your existing sales process is inherently manipulative, Trust-Based Selling™ should not only fit, but also energize your existing approach.
