You probably have a social media presence. You might even call it a social media strategy. But is it really strategic? Or is it just a lemming strategy—making you look like a thousand other firms rushing headlong together toward a cliff? There’s a chance your social selling strategy may not be very strategic at […]
Mr. Ryan, Some days as Chairman must be fun. Others, like the Oscars the other night – not so much. I recognize you, in fact, know a lot about trust. There are probably particular circumstances that make the Oscar boo-boo a unique event. You may also have taken some steps like those I suggest below. […]
I recently wrote about Selling from Inside Your Client’s Shoes. The gist of it was to drill-down into the interior dialogues that we all engage in at the outset of a sales conversation. (The subject is related to what famed sociologist Erving Goffman explored in the 20th century – we are all actors on varying […]
Being right is vastly overrated. Now, that doesn’t mean that lying is a good strategy. What it does mean is that in the business world, we all too easily conflate trust with credibility, and credibility with expertise. You don’t have to look too far to find big-name sales trainers and gurus who insist that it is […]
On the one hand, it seems the world is getting less predictable. On the other hand, looking at the successes of Big Data and AI, haven’t we all at the same time become more predictable? Isn’t that how those kids in Macedonia made thousands of dollars running fake articles on social media? Isn’t that how James Corden […]
You know the phrase, “Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” It’s short for empathy, understanding the Other 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 […]
An old business friend told me the other day that the thing he most remembers me saying was, “What problem are we trying to solve?” As he put it, “That little phrase is the key to unfreezing more off-course conversations than any other technique I know of.” I can’t claim invention. I got it from the United […]
The words “trust” and “selling” are rarely mentioned in the same sentence, and some people feel that “trust-based selling” is an oxymoron. That says something about the relationships between sellers and their clients. And it’s one reason that professional services firms don’t like the “S” word. We prefer euphemisms like “business development,” itself phrased in […]
Innovation has been much in the news for more than a few years now. Not as evident is the connection between innovation and trust. Got problems with innovation? R&D not giving you much bang for the buck? Suffering from same-old service offerings? Product un-differentiation got you down? Read on. Observation: Pessimists Don’t Innovate, Nor do they Trust In […]
This post isn’t quite as wonky as the title would suggest. Bear with me. Most of us would agree that ‘trust’ is a complex concept. But few of us, I suggest, have any idea how sloppily we think about it. The Semantics of Trust Consider some obvious grammatical usages of ’trust’: Trust as a verb, as […]