The Trust Matters Blog: Posts by Charles H. Green
How Neuroscience Over-reaches in Business
Every age has its fads and fashions. Some of them hold up over time – competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, quality circles. Applying neuroscience to business, I suggest, will not be one of them. In Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn, there is a passage where Huck tries to explain to Jim that French people speak a different language. Jim [...]
Read MoreKnow Yourself. Wait, what does that even mean?
In college, I majored in philosophy. I underlined all the important parts in my texbooks – the hard, the empirical, the deductive, the categorical. I underlined about half of each book. What I skipped over were the soft and squishy parts: know thyself, be virtuous, metaphysics, that kind of thing. Years later I deigned to [...]
Read MoreSo You Don’t Have Time to Be a Trusted Advisor?
One of the more frequent comments I get in talking about being a trusted advisor is this: “We’d love to practice all the things you talk about, Charlie, we agree with them all. But, we just don’t have the luxury of the kind of time it takes to get there. There are too many other [...]
Read MoreThe Twin Sins of Trust
You’ve probably heard “sins of commission, and sins of omission.” It is usually linked to Christian theology, particularly some of the New Testament gospels and Paul’s epistles , but it also has been used by writers like Moliere, and in discussions of Aristotle. Anyway, it’s a simple enough idea to be broadly useful. A “sin of commission” is doing [...]
Read MoreTrust-based Selling, the Advanced Course
I had lunch the other day with Jack S., a client from 5 years ago. At the time, Jack managed a sales organization in the reinsurance business. (If you think insurance is complicated, try understanding reinsurance!). Since then, the industry has consolidated; Jack works for one of the top three reinsurance brokerage firms. His job [...]
Read MoreWhen You Can’t Get No Respect
Some will recall comic Rodney Dangerfield’s catch phrase. Others may remember Aretha Franklin’s iconic spelling, R-E-S-P-E-C-T. When you respect someone, it’s a verb. When you get respect, it’s a noun. Either way, it has positive connotations. But what’s the connection between respecting someone, and receiving respect from them? Is it a chicken-egg thing? Does one cause the other? [...]
Read MoreWhen Being Trustworthy Isn’t Enough to be Trusted
In sales, you sometimes hear, “They were pursuing an aggressive strategy – aggressively waiting for the phone to ring.” In other words, sometimes you’ve got to take action. Much the same is true of trust. If you want to be trusted, sometimes it’s not enough just to be trustworthy. Sometimes you’ve got to take action. [...]
Read MoreWhat Sales Winners Do Differently: Q&A with Mike Schultz
For many years now I have been a contributing editor at RainToday.com, the premier online resource for professional services sales and marketing. Besides a ton of articles, books, special programs, and online learning forums, they occasionally do some seriously good sales research. They have just yesterday come out with their latest, a report called What [...]
Read MoreBoston Trust
Last week, trust was destroyed. Then it was rebuilt. At least, that’s the party line in all the media and the social buzz channels. But it’s not the whole story. The whole story is, unfortunately, not so good. Particularized Trust and Generalized Trust Dr. Eric Uslaner, arguably the world’s leading academic on the subject of trust, [...]
Read MoreHalf of What You’ve Learned About Sales is Wrong
Maybe you’ve heard the old line, “Half of advertising dollars are wasted – you just don’t know which half.” Something like that is true in sales – except that you’ve got a much better chance of telling which part to keep. (Many thanks to Chris Downing and Anthony Iannarino for helping develop this thought). The Challenge [...]
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