Question Obsession: The Silent Sales Killer
Have you counted how many questions you ask in your typical client meeting? Do you find yourself carefully crafting the "perfect" question sequence before every sales call? Are your meeting…
Establishing Trust by Mastering the Art of Listening
We often think of establishing trust in business relationships in sales-related roles. For instance, if I have a product or service, I will tell you how my industry knowledge and…
Honestly Ask (and Answer) Yourself: Do My Clients Trust Me?
Trust is complicated in many aspects of our daily lives; by comparison, trust in business seems relatively straightforward. Or is it?
While personal trust involves emotional and relational complexities, trust in business is not necessarily uncomplicated. It involves navigating ethical dilemmas, managing diverse relationships, adapting to cultural differences, and maintaining transparency—all of which require careful attention and can make trust in business equally, if not more, complex.
Why Taking Risks Creates Trust
Due to several universal experiences and observations, everyone is familiar with taking risks, whether they engage in them or not. Even those who avoid taking risks are familiar with the…
Five Misconceptions about Trust in Business: Part 3
In this blog series, we explore five of the most common misconceptions about trust that, while they are widely-held, are powerful inhibitors to creating real trust: Trust has to be…
How to Get Clients to Take Your Advice (Quickly and Willingly)
There are seemingly endless reasons our clients do not take our advice. Challenges like internal disagreements, budget constraints, and rotating decision-makers can cause countless proposals to be refused or ignored,…
Trust at the Car Dealership
I just bought a car. The last time I bought a car from a dealer was over 20 years ago, and it was a horrendous experience. Based on that experience,…
When Focus Becomes Tunnel Vision
Let’s talk about focus. Many respected authors will tell you that focus is essential to achieving success. They call it concentration, determination, single-mindedness, resolve – whatever the word, the message…
Don’t Steal Your Client’s Spotlight
A question I often ask when running leadership development programs is, “How many of you know people who are ‘gold medal’ listeners?” Usually about one-third of the people in the…
How to Accelerate Trust (or Not)
You may have heard the quote, “It takes years to build up trust, and only seconds to destroy it.” That saying, like several other truisms about trust, is far from…