Trust Between Seller and Client Must Be Mutual

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Would you like your clients to trust you? Presumably you would. And in order to trust you, they must feel that trusting you is a low-risk proposition. They must feel you are trustworthy. Most firms get that.

So, most firms go about trying to appear trustworthy. (The better ones, of course, actually try to be trustworthy, since trust is a hard thing to fake.) This often translates into things such as values statements, corporate social responsibility, efforts at transparency, and programs to enhance customer focus.

All of that is well and good, but those efforts are missing a critical element. Because if all you focus on is trustworthiness—cosmetic or real—then you are forcing your client to take all the risks. And if your client is the one always taking the risks, after a while your client will notice and say, “Wait a minute. I appreciate all of the Boy Scout virtues and so forth, but I notice you never take any risks. And that’s not fair. And so I don’t think I trust you.”

You can be trustworthy to the max, but if you never trust your client, then before too long, your client won’t trust you. And as goes their trust, so goes their business with you.

Trust Is Reciprocally Risky

“The fastest way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.” That statement is credited to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, and he expressed a powerful concept: trust is a reciprocating exercise in risk-taking. First one party takes a risk, and the other reciprocates. Then the roles reverse, and the exercise is repeated.

Take the simplest of all trust gestures: the handshake. Smiling I extend my hand to you and say hello, signifying good intentions. You almost certainly return my handshake, smile, and greeting. But you don’t have to.

You could, after all, spurn my gesture, refuse to extend your hand, frown, and turn away from me. I would feel embarrassed, upset, and dismissed. And that would be the end of our budding trust relationship. You probably wouldn’t do that, though. Instead, you would meet my risk-taking gesture with trustworthiness, and our relationship would be off to the races.

Corporate Risk Mitigation

This is not an exercise in corporate anthropology. Think about the context in which you hear “risk” in modern-day business. It is almost always in a negative sense.

Risk is seen mainly as something to be mitigated. Post 2008, financial institutions have laid off layers of employees—except in risk management. The contracting process in nearly all companies has added layers of risk indemnification to its documentation. Lawyers are on hand to ensure not just compliance, but even the appearance of anything that could be considered risky. Insurance businesses are inventing new products to mitigate risk in contracts of all sorts. The last few decades have seen the creation of risk management institutes and certificates in risk management programs.

Despite the protestation that some risk is good (think “risk appetite” or “calculated risk” in the financial world), the emphasis is overwhelmingly on the “calculated” part, not the “risk” part. And once one gets outside of the financial world, it’s hard to find examples of thinking that suggest risk is good.

Execution Risk and Dereliction Risk

The management world is obsessed with avoiding execution risk—the risk of doing the wrong thing. Unfortunately, it makes a pact with the trust devil when it embraces dereliction risk—the risk of not doing the right thing.

We want lifeguards to eschew dereliction risk. If they think someone is drowning, we don’t want them second-guessing themselves. We want them in the water immediately. In basketball, Kobe Bryant is the NBA’s leader in most missed shots. He would rather shoot 4 for 20 than 2 for 5. Another athlete, hockey great Wayne Gretzky, says you’ll never miss a shot you never take—but neither will you make any shots. In all of those cases, they understand the importance of taking execution risks and avoiding dereliction risk.

Yet in business, we are afraid of a hundred execution risks. We fear having the wrong answer, giving offense, looking ignorant, looking foolish, or speaking out of turn. So, we do nothing. And because of our penchant for avoiding execution risk, we absorb dereliction risk, which guarantees failure in the long run.

Trustworthy but Untrusting Does Not Compute

You may be proud of your organization’s record on trustworthiness. But ask yourself these questions to see if you may have some work to do on trusting:

  • Do you have onerous non-compete clauses for your employees?
  • Do your sales pitches hedge their bets or lead with strong hypotheses?
  • Do you make your subcontractors insure you against general liability with no limits?
  • Do your salespeople refuse to answer direct questions about price?
  • Do you ever admit you don’t know something when asked a straight question?
  • Do you insist on client non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) beyond your industry’s norm?
  • How many ex-employee lawsuits has your firm been involved in in the past five years?
  • Are your tardy account collections handled by accounting or by account managers?
  • Would you ever recommend a competitor to a client if the competitor were clearly the better candidate for the job?
  • Do you use lie detector tests for employees?
  • Do you encourage your salespeople to comment on their own and others’ feelings?
  • Do you share your cost information with clients?
  • Do you share your supply-chain information with suppliers or clients/customers?
  • How many paragraphs of fine print are in your client agreements? And how fine is the print?
  • Are your standard client agreements longer or shorter than your biggest competitor’s?
  • How do you handle overruns by you with your clients? How do you handle overruns by your suppliers with you? Which is more onerous?

You can be as trustworthy as a Boy Scout, but if you force your clients to take all of the risks, then before too long, they won’t trust you.

 

Selling from Inside Your Client’s Shoes

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You know the phrase, “Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” It’s short for empathy, understanding them so well you can intuit what it feels like to take a long walk—wearing their footwear, no less.

Let’s adapt that idea to selling. What if you could understand your client so well that you could intuit how it feels to be sitting in their seat in a sales meeting, sensing every nuance along the way?

Shall we give it a try?

Sales Meeting Time T-minus-10

It’s 10 minutes before meeting time. You arrive early, and the receptionist ushers you into the conference room and offers you coffee. You nervously drum your fingers on the laptop you brought to introduce yourself and your firm to Claudio and Taciana. They are CEO and COO, respectively, of the relatively new marketing automation firm C3PX. You spoke by phone with Taciana to set up this meeting. You’re optimistic, marshaling your nervous energy as you mentally rehearse your key points for the nth time.

Claudio. Meanwhile, Claudio wonders if he has time to call his 19-year-old daughter at college. Actually, whether to call her at all. Things are not well between the two of them—they haven’t been since he and his wife divorced last year. Teenage girls can be so—difficult. And it seemed like she so often took sides with her mother.

Meanwhile, C3PX is doing well—sometimes too well. Claudio just signed another line of credit extension. The good news was the firm’s credit was good. The bad news is he wants to pay down some debt, but there was always a need to invest in some new software or process. The meeting in 10 minutes may be another example—a necessary expense, but not welcome in terms of cash flow.

Claudio hopes Taciana can take the lead on this. He’s been leaning a lot on her lately. Is he holding up his end of the bargain? Or is it welcome to her—a chance to grow into the business? But what if she’s growing too fast and taking over some of Claudio’s roles as CEO?

Taciana. Taciana is running late. She’s just finished a meeting with HR, and she is concerned the experienced hire recruiting program is short of target. She wonders if she’ll need to postpone the ops team call this afternoon until tomorrow, though she did that last week as well. Is she getting a little overloaded? Does it show?

Taciana has mixed feelings about this meeting. On one hand, she genuinely liked the phone call she had with you. She felt you sounded sharp, competent, and confident. But she can’t help worrying about your service offering.

Does C3PX really need your kind of service at this point in its growth? You offer some great services, but with them comes another level of complexity. Are the benefits worth it? Should they get along for another 12 to 18 months? What if some new technology comes along and leap-frogs your offering?

Also, is this going to be yet another Taciana-solo project? “Sure, I’m the COO,” she thinks, “but that doesn’t mean I have to do everything. Am I leveraged enough? Will Claudio think I’m empire-building if I try to delegate? But if I don’t, how am I going to get time to spend with my husband? We’ve been trying to get more time together; he has a demanding job, too. I hope Claudio takes the lead in this meeting.”

Sales Meeting Time T = 0

It’s time. You take a last look at your phone just as the door opens. In walk Claudio and Taciana.

You all smile and shake hands, then pass out business cards. You each reject offers of more coffee and strategically settle into your chairs, all the while smiling and uttering meaningless phrases in non-committal tones.

The meeting commences.

Like all meetings, it commences on multiple levels. There is the overt agenda to be discussed. There are first impressions, flooding each of you as you quickly take into account the others’ appearance, sound, bearing, and manner. Are you who they expected? What’s different? What does that mean?

And are they who you expected? What did you misjudge? What did you get right? Can you afford to focus on that and pay attention to what’s being said? Do they seem a little rushed? What does that mean? Are they going to sit through your deck, or should you skip it? When should you bring up price?

You can ask them to tell you a bit about their situation, but you can’t do too much of that. These days no one has time for someone who hasn’t done their homework. Yet neither can you waste time proving you’ve done your homework. What does it mean that they placed their iPhone next to them? And so on.

Behind the Scenes

The internal dialogue is endless—and that’s just yours! What about the dialogue inside Taciana’s and Claudio’s heads? How important is this inner cacophony? And what should you do about it? Ignore it? Address it? If you choose to address it, how do you do it?

The truth is those internal dialogues are not trivial. They are important. You need to address them. Most of all this is a great opportunity cleverly disguised as an awkward social moment. You can dramatically affect the whole sale, and the whole relationship, by how you conduct yourself in the first few minutes regarding these internal dialogues.

Small Talk Isn’t Small

The idle chit-chat we engage in is a potent social ritual. The point is not to find out that you both went to Ohio State or love basketball or have kids. Those are proxies.

The real issue at stake is whether they can trust you—in a very specific sense of that word. It’s what we call “intimacy” in the trust equation. Do they feel safe being who they are in your presence? Do you laugh at the right moments—with the right kind of laugh? Do you wince at the right statements—like when Taciana mentions meeting overload? When they say, “Tell us about yourself,” do you remember that mostly they’re just being nice and then turn the conversation to them?

Do you have the emotional courage to raise your eyebrows when Claudio says, “Teenagers—am I right?” and invite further comment should he choose to go there? When one of them raises price concerns, do you respond with curiosity and say, “Tell me what’s behind that concern?” Or do you reply with a canned defense of your value-for-price? Do you have the nerve to say, “I’m sensing a little bit of stress from each of you. Is this decision a source of concern to you?”

This isn’t about your value proposition. It isn’t about proposing challenging questions or asserting your qualifications. But it’s critical. The buyer/seller interaction is many things, but it’s first and foremost human. First impressions matter, and not just about clothes and looks.

What buyers want is to feel at ease, trusting, and confident they can be authentically themselves with you and not have to look over their shoulders when dealing with you.

Buyers make up their mind about this subconsciously, and they do it very quickly. Trust in this sense doesn’t take time; it takes courage, connection, and empathy. Don’t be afraid to let your guard down. Doing so shows others that can do the same with you from the get-go.

This post first appeared on RainToday.com

When the Client Cuts Your Face Time in Half

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Are you having trouble with scheduled client meetings getting blown off?

For example: your progress update meeting with the client is scheduled for an hour, starting at 11AM. You’re hopeful it might extend to a lunch invitation.

11AM comes and goes, and the client is still in a meeting. Word comes from the client’s AA that the meeting has to move to 2PM. At 1:30, it gets kicked to 5:30 – and it’s cut to half an hour, as the client really has to leave no later than 6PM.

What do you do?

This came up in a large workshop recently; the setting was such that only a 1-minute answer was appropriate.  I gave the 1-minute answer – and I’ll include the longer answer here.

Involve the Client in Problem Resolution 

The quick answer is you start the meeting by saying something like, “Listen, it’s late in the day, and it sounds like yours has been hectic. Ending up in a review session may not be your idea of a good time. Would you rather reschedule?”

And then go with the client’s answer, whatever it is. If the client prefers to push on, then do so. And you’d better be willing to trim your presentation to 30 minutes, rather than trying to double-time it, or passive-aggressively running out of time.

The principle here is to make the client part of the problem resolution.

Involve the Client in Problem Definition

The longer answer is to make the client part of the problem definition – not just problem resolution. Why is it that a previously scheduled meeting slipped so drastically?  That it got cut in half?  That’s a discussion worth having on occasion.

Is it because the client doesn’t particularly care about an update, and it’s really your need for approval that’s driving the meeting? Are you able to specify real decisions that are needed from the client? Is this a box-ticking meeting to fulfill your internal processes? Are you trying to cover your behind? Do you know what the meeting was bumped for, and are you satisfied with the decision? Is this a meeting that neither one of you really wants, resulting in joint procrastination – and if so, what’s that about?

The answers may be perfectly innocuous, or they may uncover a deeper issue – where there’s smoke, there might be fire. The point is not about the answers – it’s about having the vulnerability and courage to re-invite the client to visit the tough questions, to define the issues jointly.

 

Can Trust Replace Contracts?

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Too often trust is thought of as a nice-to-have but vaguely soft, squishy, liberal sort of relationship thingy. Not often enough do we realize it also holds the key to reducing costs and time, and to fostering innovation and new value creation.  It also mitigates risk.

It’s true: trust is highly profitable. Consider how Warren Buffett acquired McLean Distribution from Walmart. By deciding to trust the management team at Walmart, Buffett reached an agreement in a matter of days and at minimal cost, saving months and many millions in cost.

You may be saying, ‘Fine—but who’s going to double-cross Warren Buffett? It’s different for him.”

I don’t think so. Let me add my own small lesson.

To Sign a Contract? Or to Trust?

In addition to speaking and writing, I run a seminar business. I’ve spent this week training a half dozen worldwide potential trainers, sharing with them all the training manuals, approaches, ideas and concepts that I have developed over the years.

Normal procedure would be for me to have them all sign a non-disclosure agreement to protect my intellectual property, which is, after all, the source of my livelihood. Such agreements can be more or less complex. If violated, they give me the legal right to pursue redress in courts in various countries should one of my licensees/coaches/contractors abscond with my materials or be found to be using them for their own purposes without properly getting my approval or compensating me appropriately.

I could have done that.

Instead, I explained to them that I would prefer to trust them to do the right thing. We went through a 60-second ceremony. All of us raised our hands and, looking at each other, pledged two things: to respect my intellectual property in the commonsense way they felt was right; and if there was any question about what that meant, to talk to me and the rest of our team about it.

No papers. No contracts. Nothing written. Not enforceable in any court of law.

Where’s the Enforceability in Trust?

I feel more protected by this oath than I do by any legal agreement I might have signed. Why? Certainly not because it’s enforceable in a court of law.

Rather, because it’s enforceable in a higher court; the one of their conscience. Conscience is triggered by conscious, collaborative relationships between human beings.

I have no doubt that this group of people, with whom I have worked closely over several days and for months preceding this gathering, will honor the pledge. I trust them. This is partly because of who I know them to be, and also partly because I trust them.

Trust is not something you work on directly; trust is a result. It is the result of two parties interacting: one who trusts, and the other who is trusted. You can practice both trusting and being trustworthy. Probably the fastest way to make people more trustworthy is to trust them first.

Is it risky? Of course.  But I think it is less risky than relying on the rather impersonal and tenuous threads of trademark law. My recourse to legal violations is courts, which are costly, time-consuming, and generally manufacture ill-will in the pursuit of their justice.

By contrast, trusting my business relationships itself increases their trustworthiness, which also lowers my risk–and at near-zero cost. My means of enforcement is pre-installed within them in the form of their consciences.

It’s a win-win. Except maybe for the lawyers.

And frankly I think there’s room for lawyers to gain from this too. But that’s another blog.

 

This post first appeared on TrustMatters. 

How Effective Was that Sales Training?

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If you’ve ever received a personal performance evaluation at work, there’s a decent chance you left the meeting thinking, “Well, it would’ve been good to know that about four months ago!” In other words, advice—even if valuable—has to be timely to add value. And, of course, an evaluation that doesn’t offer any recommendations at all feels even less valuable.

In the realm of personal evaluations, we all “get” the need to add value, and to do so on a timely basis. But what about when it comes to evaluating training programs, particularly sales training programs? How does your firm go about evaluating its training offerings? Would you say it adds value? And if so, how fast does that value accrue?

I also want to suggest a simple, but basic, change in how we evaluate such programs: by shifting from metrics to communications. But first, let’s explore how evaluation usually works.

Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

Does this sound familiar? Your firm hires an outside vendor to develop an addition to your portfolio of sales training programs. Your Learning and Development team works hard with the vendor to ensure the program is customized. You do a pilot, you redesign, and you finally release it.

Your firm rolls out several deliveries before the fiscal year-end. A detailed online eight-page evaluation form has been developed, and it is filled out by over half of the participants within a week after each delivery.

Thus at year’s end, the training organization can submit a lengthy data-based analysis of the extent to which each of program’s objectives were met. In consultation with the vendor, changes are made to the program, and the cycle of delivery and evaluation begins anew.

Only one question remains: how much did sales increase because of the program? And isn’t that the only question that really matters?

Of course, there are myriad reasons why it’s a hard question to answer: GDP growth declined in the same quarter, a competitor made an acquisition, you raised prices, the leadership team changed, etc. Those are perfectly valid reasons, yet the only relevant questions remain: Did the training increase sales or not? By how much? And how did it do so?

If those questions can’t be answered, then all your complicated evaluation did was to evaluate. It didn’t add any value. And, just as with your unsatisfying personal evaluation, it leaves a hollow feeling.

The Problem with Evaluations

To over-simplify, the problem with programmatic evaluations is metrics. Not the wrong metrics, but simply the metrics. Business in general overrates metrics, but this is a particularly egregious case. We are easily seduced into thinking that if some data is better than no data, then more data is always better than less.

And that’s not the only mistake. There is also the cognitive trap: believing that if we can “understand” something, we have done the hard work of change. Not when it comes to selling, we haven’t.

Finally, there’s a subtle trap unique to training: the mistaken belief that tweaking the program will directly and causally result in the desired sales behavior changes. In fact, this is largely a leap of faith.

To sum up, the metrics don’t measure what matters (sales). The metrics give a false sense of accuracy, and there’s a leap of faith between the recommended changes and the hoped-for actual results.

The Answer

Many of these problems can be solved through one relatively simple change: replacing metrics-based evaluation with a post-training program of communication between participants. Here’s how it works.

A simple platform and protocol is developed for participants to share stories with one another about their successes in applying the lessons of the training program. Some serious social engineering is required to make it very simple. We have found an online document-sharing approach with an occasional conference call works best, with some admin support to encourage and tease out stories to be effective.

This simple approach does three things:

  • It provides timely feedback—no more waiting until period-end.
  • It provides specific Example: “I ran into a prospect at the airport, and I remembered to talk about her family first rather than diving into business. It resulted in a meeting the following week.”
  • It gives very specific guidance to future training designs about what does, and doesn’t, work.

Also—and maybe the most important thing—it directly addresses the top line. Sales can be identified through the story lines and augmented by a request to participants to periodically identify particular sales and the proportion attributable to the training.

Insist that your evaluation process doesn’t just evaluate. Make sure it adds value. Do so by substituting human-to-human direct communication about what works in place of quantitative and abstract metrics. It’s a human solution to a still-human profession—sales.

This post first appeared on RainToday.com 

Integrity: What’s Up With That?

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Integrity, like trust, is something we all talk about, meaning many different things – but always assuming that everyone else means precisely the same that we do.  That leads to vagueness and confusion at best – and angered accusations at worst. Particularly in this time of elections, a careful examination of how we use the words in common language is useful.

Integrity and the Dictionary

Merriam Webster says it’s “the quality of being honest and fair,” and/or “the state of being complete or whole.”

If you’re into derivations of words (as I am), then it’s the second of these definitions that rings true. The root of “integrity” is Latin, integer.  That suggests the heart of the matter (integral), and an entirety. “Integer” also has the sense of a non-fractional number, i.e. whole, not fragmented, complete.

In manufacturing, we have the idea of “surface integrity,” the effect that a machined surface has on the performance of the product in question: integrity here means keeping a package of specified performance levels intact. Similarly, a high-integrity steel beam is one that will not break or otherwise become compromised within certain parameters of stress.

Related also to this theme of wholeness is the idea of transparency, of things being whole, complete, not hidden – in this sense, we have high integrity to the extent we appear the same way to all people. Think of the phrase “two-faced” as an example of someone without integrity. (For a somewhat different and nuanced take on this issue in cyberspace, see @danahboyd on Mark Zuckerberg and multiple online identities).

Sometimes when we say someone has integrity, we mean they act consistently, in accord with principles. We say someone has high integrity when they stick to their guns, even in the face of resistance or difficulty.

Which raises an interesting question: where’s the line between integrity and obstinacy? For that matter, can a politician who believes passionately in the art of compromise ever be considered to have high integrity?

Then there’s that other common use of integrity that has a moral overtone – honorable, honest, upright, virtuous, and decent. Some of it has to do with truth-telling; but some of it has to do with pursuing a moral code.

Yet that raises another interesting question: can a gang member or a mafioso be considered to have integrity? Can an Occupy person ever consider a Wall Streeter to have integrity? Or vice versa? There may be honor among thieves, but can there be integrity?

Integrity – Your Choice?

So which is it?  Does integrity mean you tell the truth? Does it mean you operate from values? Does it mean you always keep your word? Does it mean you live a moral life? Does it mean your life is an open book?

Let’s be clear: there is no “right” answer. Words like “integrity” mean whatever we choose to make them mean; there is no objective “meaning” that exists in a way that can be arbitrated.

But that makes it even more important that we be clear about what we do mean. It just helps in communication.

For my part, I’m going to use “integrity” mainly to mean whole, complete, transparent, evident-to-all, untainted, what-you-see-is-what-you-get.

For other common meanings of “integrity,” I’m going to stick with synonyms like credible or honest; or moral and upright; or consistent.

What do you mean when you think of integrity?

This post first appeared on TrustMatters. 

Giving Prospects the Confidence to Hire You

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When it comes to selling – many of us focus on our fears.

“Will they buy?”

“Are my services priced right?”

“What are they looking for?”

“Will they go with me?”

These questions inevitably lead to a dance that involves both buyer and seller, a delicate tip-toeing around the heart of the matter. We try to talk about needs, solutions, benefits, values.

But a buyer is not looking for those things alone. Above all else, a buyer is looking to feel confident that they made the right decision; that their business or needs are in the right hands.

Are you giving your prospects the CONFIDENCE to hire you?

——–

A western journalist visiting the old Soviet Union, so the story goes, asked a worker if he was being paid well. The worker said, “It’s all pretend. We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

Do you sell consulting? IT services? Accounting? Financial planning? Legal services? Then you too play a game of pretend – with your would-be clients. They pretend to care about your qualifications. You pretend to listen to their questions. You pretend to write a unique proposal. They pretend to read it. You pretend to sell. They pretend to buy.

All the while, behind the game of pretending, an unspoken and important vetting process is taking place.

For example, a company about to spend big on a CRM system, or make an investment in leadership training, or change its sales approach, will ask about the benefits of what’s being sold. The prospect will want to know the answer and they will pretend it matters most.

But what they really want to know is – will we have the confidence to sleep well at night given the choice we make?

And yet, this search for confidence – the thing that matters most – isn’t what’s actually discussed during the sales process.

Instead, prospective clients have been seduced by the trappings of “hard business.” They think “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” and they try to reduce decisions to metrics. That’s how we end up with clients wanting to know all about our qualifications – despite the fact that our qualifications were what already got us in the room in the first place.

And so, we all pretend that buying and selling is about talking. About words and numbers. About qualifications.

But it’s not. The fact is, clients make huge, complex, intangible decisions very much on the basis of gut, emotion, feeling, opinion, Kentucky windage, call it what you will.

As sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer says, people buy with the heart, and justify with the brain. It’s not about rational decisions, but about decisions rationalized.

The truth is this: people vastly prefer to buy what they need from people they feel good about. People they trust. People who they believe have their clients’ interests at heart, not just their own. People who make an effort to honestly listen to their clients. People who actually seem to care.

This goes beyond “people buy from people they like,” or “people buy from people similar to themselves.” It’s way more than schmoozing and finding out common interests.

It gets to the guts of the matter:

  • Do you actually seem to give a damn about me?
  • Do you act like you care about me?
  • Are you working your own agenda, or will you actually listen to mine?

Sales process designs won’t get you there. Metrics and CRM systems won’t get you there. Motivational speeches won’t get you there.

But two things will.

1. Genuine, Honest-to-Goodness Listening

That’s listening for real. Listening not to find out data, but to find out about the client. Listening not to make or confirm a hypothesis, but to understand another human being. Listening not to find out client needs, but to find out what makes a business and a person tick. Listening not so you get answers, but listening so that at the end of it, the other fellow feels heard. Listening not to provide great answers, but listening to earn the right to offer those answers later.

I’ve heard this called yellow-pad listening; no proposal or talking points in front of you, just a blank pad ready to take notes if necessary as issues come up. Whatever you call it, remember another old truism that is still true: People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.

2. Sample Selling

People don’t buy ice cream from verbal descriptions; they buy it from taste. Referrals may get people in the door, but samples sell them. We don’t use samples selling nearly enough when it comes to selling the intangible.

Give people a taste of what you do. Assume you’ve got the job, and start working it in the early stages. Don’t say how good you are at tax planning, grab hold of some business issues and show them how you do it — on their data.

If a voice in the back of your mind (or your boss in the front) says, “don’t give it away,” recognize that they are wrong. There is an inexhaustible supply of problems in this world. Giving away a few solutions doesn’t diminish your value — it earns you the right to solve more of those problems.

If a client shows a pattern of stealing ideas from you, quietly drop them. After all, that’s the kind of client you’d prefer your competitors to have. Place your focus instead on those clients who want relationships of mutual benefit.

* * *

Listening and sample selling. These are actions, not thoughts. Deeds, not qualifications. Results, not process designs. Most of all, they demonstrate your devotion to your client.

After all, would you rather buy from someone who says, “Trust me”? Or, from someone who shows you why you should?

This post first appeared on RainToday.com

New Year, New Perspective: The Dos and Don’ts of Trust-Based Networking

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To kick off the new year, we thought we’d look back at one of our more popular eBooks: The Dos and Don’ts of Trust-Based Networking.

It’s the fifth in the our Trusted Advisor Fieldbook series by Charles H. Green and Andrea P. Howe.

Each eBook provides a snapshot of content from The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook, which is jam-packed with practical, hands-on strategies to dramatically improve your results in sales, relationship management, and organizational performance.

The Dos and Don’ts of Trust-Based Networking reveals:

  • How trust-based networking is different from every-day business networking
  • Ten best practices for trust-based networking
  • Specific dos and don’ts for online networking

P.S. Did you miss out on Volumes 1 through 4 of The Fieldbook eBook series? Get them while they’re still available:

  1. 15 Ways to Build Trust…Fast!
  2. How to Sell to the C-Suite
  3. Six Risks You Should Take to Build Trust
  4. How YOU Can Raise Trust in Your Organization

Please let us know your take on this eBook below.

 

The Twelve Steps of Business Relationships

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Usually when someone hears the words “12-step program,” they’re quick to judge it as something to get out of a rut. But what if you turned that perspective on its axis? What if you saw a program – particularly one with 12 steps – as something to advance you to a new level of life, thought and, well, relationships?

Below are 12 key steps to take when looking to grow strong, trust-based business relationships. Easy? Yes. Simple? Well, see for yourself.

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Rarely will you see someone fail in business who has thoroughly followed these simple suggestions. Those who do fail are typically people who are incapable of being honest – with their colleagues, their customers and their partners.

Other problems may temporarily deflect you, but the ability to be rigorously honest will prove immeasurably beneficial in all your business relationships.

Twelve Steps of Business Relationships

Step 1. Accept that you have no power over people, that all your attempts at control have failed. Trying to get other people to do what you want them to do is doomed to failure, no matter how good your intentions, how right your cause, or how much benefit it would bring the other.

People just wanna be free. Go with it.

Step 2. Recognize that by yourself, you can’t succeed. Your success will inevitably be tied up in the success of other people. Not only are you not driving the bus, you are just another passenger.

Step 3. Resolve that you’re going to stop trying to drive the bus, that you’ll start doing things to help other people, that you’ll focus on getting the group to succeed. When things don’t go your way, remember “your way” is what got you into this mess. Repeat steps 1 and 2.

Step 4. Make a list of all the stupid, controlling, selfish things you do to others. Be specific about whom you do them to, and what harm it does to them. Stop at ten people.

Now add to the list a few good things you do. You are, after all, worthwhile.

Step 5. Go share your list with someone you trust. Listen to what they have to say about it and learn from what they have to say. Don’t waste time arguing with them.

Step 6. Get yourself ready to stop behaving in those old ways. Think about it for a while. Make a list of the new things you’ll do. Envision yourself responding in new ways; rehearse new “lines.”

Hint: your list should probably include listening. Also, listening.

Step 7. Pick a time of your own choosing to begin the change. It could be right now, it could be next week, but not next summer. Write that date in your calendar. When it comes, step out of your old ways and start working the new.

Step 8. Think about the customers, co-workers, peers and partners you might have tried to control and what you did to them. Think of what you might have done better and plan to do better next time.

Step 9. Go back to the customers, co-workers and partners you’ve tried to control, and tell them you realize what you have done. Acknowledge your responsibility in those situations, and tell them specifically how you plan to behave differently in future.

Hint: Don’t do this if it causes upset or harm to the other person. And don’t confuse this with trying to get them to forgive you – see Step 1, above.

Step 10. At each day’s end, do a mental run-through of how you did in your new approach. Note where you fell short and what you could have done better.

Then let it go and get a good night’s sleep.

Step 11. Create a little mantra for yourself, to remind you that your job is to help others, not yourself. Get out of the instance, secure in the idea that better relationships will float all transaction boats.

Step 12. Having recognized how to apply these principles to your business affairs, give it a shot at home and in the rest of your life.  You saw that one coming, right?

Is Your Lead Generation System Causing You to Lose Clients?

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Much sales literature talks about sales in terms of processes. A key process element is lead screening, or lead qualification. And that process is often described in terms of efficiency.

As one CRM article put it:

“…the process of lead qualification has been codified into the 8-4-2-1 Rule…for every eight leads that pass preliminary qualification, four will lead to sales presentations, which will produce two quotes and finally one sale.

“In other words, the sales funnel narrows sharply even once you’ve done your preliminary qualification. Obviously, considering the increasing cost, the further you move into the process, the better it is to narrow the funnel early on. If you can reduce that 8-4-2-1 to a 4-2-2-1, you’ve saved half the cost of lead handling.”

Think about that. The focus is on how to do sales cheaply, efficiently, and at least cost. This may seem an obvious and good goal until you consider what it leaves out: the impact on the 7 out of 8 who are screened out.

By focusing on sales through the twin lenses of process and efficiency, we run the twin risks of damaging client relationships and of poisoning the marketplace well. And as online social media continue to explode, that risk only increases.

How Lead Qualification Can Hurt Relationships

Imagine somewhere it’s important to make good relationships. Maybe your child is entering a new elementary school. Maybe, if you’re single, you’re entering into the dating world in a new community. If you’ve switched companies, you’re getting acclimated to your new co-workers.

In those cases, we know the importance of treating everyone decently. We have our likes and dislikes, but we don’t let them affect our etiquette. It’s a small community, and we know the value of getting along. And so we behave in polite, decent, ways.

Not so in the world of sales. The screening process drives focus on one question: can I or can I not sell to this person?

If the answer is no, we want to stop wasting time on them. If the answer is yes, we want to move as quickly as possible so as to achieve our end result—the sale.

You may personally believe in relationships and in being nice, but if you walk around with a lead-qualification model in your head, you are subconsciously driven to treat your leads as primarily means to your ends, with some taking more of your precious time than others. This attitude inevitably bleeds through into your interactions.

Lead qualification as it’s usually practiced hurts relationships because it is inherently self-oriented, aimed at the seller not the buyer.

How Lead Qualification Can Poison the Well

When services firms look at the cost of sales, they often begin by focusing on the clients they’ve won and how much it cost to win them. They forget the much-higher cost of not getting all the clients they didn’t get, thus under-estimating cost of sales.

A similar blind spot affects firms looking at their lead qualification process. It’s simple to drop someone from your target list; having dropped them, they are out of sight and out of mind. Your sight, your mind, that is.

But they have memories of you. Did you simply drop them? Did you not return the last call? Did you cancel some meeting or event? Did you give the screened-out client any indication that they had been screened out?

Most firms don’t have any particular approach to screening out prospects; they simply stop doing what they were doing. Yet the same people would never drop a social relationship.

Should your child just begin ignoring a casual new acquaintance at school? If you’re dating, should you simply not call back after a first or second date? At work, do you simply turn your back on new acquaintances?

The reason we do in sales what we wouldn’t in social situations is that we assume closed social settings, but infinite lead streams. It’s just a lead, we rationalize. We’re a tiny firm, and the market is huge. There are always more leads.

But there are not. Leads are finite. Worse yet, many prospects know each other. Word of mouth doesn’t just work among customers and ex-customers, but among leads and ex-leads, too. Your reputation is greatly affected by the way you sell, and part of that is how you treat people you screen out.

The old customer service rule of thumb was that a person would tell four or five others about a good experience, but he would tell several dozen about a bad experience. In an age of YouTube and Twitter, negative stories don’t stop at a dozen—they explode to tens of thousands, and in just a matter of days.

The Only Two Screening Decisions You Have to Make

The lead screening process and underlying mindset can make us treat prospects as if we were examining them under a microscope for incipient dollar signs in our wallets. It drives self-focus and makes objects of our prospects. It dehumanizes both of us, and it pollutes our prospect base at a frightening rate. Lead screening processes done poorly equal self-destructive marketing.

Fortunately there’s a simple answer. There are just two screening decisions you must make:

  1. Are you willing to treat this prospect as a potential client?
  2. When shall you review this decision again?

As long as the answer to question one is yes, just one goal should drive your behavior. That is to determine whether and how you can help a prospect, by talking with them.

  • If you figure out how to help them, and they agree, a sale is the natural result.
  • If you figure out how to help them and they don’t agree, you have failed to communicate; that’s your fault.
  • If you decide you cannot help them, and they agree, you should thank them for the chance to explore together, and leave on good terms.
  • If you decide you cannot help them, and they don’t yet agree, you owe them the decency of an explanation that is satisfying to them.

Screening should not be a solo and self-oriented decision about timing based on what’s in it for you. It should be a consensus-based joint decision about whether to continue the dialogue, based on what’s in it for both of parties.

Done that way, a screen-out is nearly as positive as a sale because it implies a joint decision. Screened-out prospects become good marketing. After all, such joint decision-making is how we develop responsible and mature relationships with others.

This article was first published on RainToday.com