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It happens most overtly in a sales presentation: “So tell us, Mr. Jones, why should we choose you?”

Words vary. You may recognize:

• What makes you folks different, what sets you apart? Or,

• Why should we believe you’re different from all the others?

When a client or customer asks that question, many things are going on.

On the emotional front, “Why should we choose you?” is almost always spoken as a challenge—an aggressive act, an invitation to spar and to prove your worth. Which in turn means the presumed relationship is combative or competitive.

On a purely logical level, the question is about differentiation. Furthermore, it presumes that the answer can be given verbally, in a few sentences.

And finally, it’s a sucker’s game. Think honestly now: when was the last time you heard a seller answer that question so well that the customer sat back and said, “wow, that really is great! I guess you’ve got the job!” The truth is, people don’t buy because of differentiation—they buy because you can solve their problem.

So—what do you do with a combative partner who’s challenging you to a duel using weapons of his choice, and that he will disavow no matter how well you play?

The answer is, opt out of the game. Don’t meet fear with fear; don’t engage in a competition; don’t accept that one-liners and differentiation are the real agenda. Instead, respond with direct truth and client focus.

Here’s what it sounds like.

“Why should you choose us? At this stage, I don’t know why; it would be arrogant of me to claim I do know. In fact, it’s even possible that you shouldn’t choose us. It depends on some key questions, which I’ve brought along to discuss with you.

“But first, to answer the spirit of your question, 74% of our customers tell us they chose us for one of two reasons. 53% said it was because of our after-sales service. The other 21% cited ease of integration. Those were the main reasons our customers gave.

“Your reasons may or may not map those of our other customers—your situation is unique. One big driver seems to be the level of first-line customer interaction our customers have. Perhaps if we talk about your level of first-line customer interaction, it will become clear to all of us what is and isn’t attractive to you about our solutions.”

In responding this way, you first acknowledge an obvious truth—any blather about why a brand new customer should buy from you is nothing but BS anyway, and even if it were true, would be utterly unconvincing. So—tell the truth.

By answering the customer’s question literally—what are the reasons they should buy from you?—you show respect.

By offering actual answers to the actual question, you validate the customer’s question, and show you have real data to answer it. (BTW—I hope it goes without saying you actually do need real data).

By offering to engage in discussion, you indirectly state the only way customers make serious decisions—by engaging in dialogue. So—tell the truth and start the dialogue.

Finally, by seriously entertaining the proposition that your service may actually not fit 100% of the customers out there, you get points for speaking the truth, and save both you and the customer and lot of cost and pain trying to pretend otherwise.

When asked, “Why should we buy from you?”—tell the truth.

Some years ago I got some great coaching from Patricia Fripp about introducing a speech.

“Don’t start with ‘hello, glad to be here’ and all that,” she said. “Instead, start by standing motionless at mid-stage for what will seem like an eternity.”

“Stand still, and wait—until every eye is upon you, wondering whether you’ve gone catatonic from stage-fright. Then launch directly into the first line of your opening story—‘there I was…’ for example.”

I couldn’t imagine doing it.  It felt way too contrived, hokey.  But I had an upcoming speech outside my home country and industry.  I figured, nobody will know me here, time to try it!

The emcee introduced me.  I walked to center stage.  And stood.  And stood.  For an eternity (3 seconds).  The room went silent.  And as the first three words finally came out of my mouth, I realized instantly Fripp was right.

The 3-second rule works in public speaking because it compels our attention. We are fascinated by a speaker who is silent—a bit like the painted statue mimes in tourist cities.

We watch intently to catch the statue-mime in the act of moving.  We listen intently to hear what the silent speaker will say.  3 seconds about does it.

But the 3-second rule is not jus for speaking.  It works in conversations, when you want to draw the other person out, establish dialogue, forge a legitimate connection.

You already know to allow pregnant pauses, let them fill the empty space, don’t give in to your desire to talk. But you feel dumb sitting silently after your client has said something. So, after what you think is a long time, you puncture the discomfort by saying something.  But it wasn’t long enough

Are you really practicing the idea?  Here, “fake it ‘til you make it’ applies.

Try timing someone else in that situation. I find they cave in after about 2 seconds, and begin through body language or direct speaking to puncture the discomfort of silence.

See if you can live in the silence for that last second.  Without moving.  Staring straight at the client.  Not lost in thought, your eyes cast upward, but looking directly into the client’s eyes, awaiting curiously—for real—to hear what they are going to say.

Quietly count, “one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand,” while you mentally send a message to the client, “Yes, and please tell me more about that?”

Give it the full 3-count. They’re worth that extra second, aren’t they?

I took my son, a flute player, to see Sir James Galway, arguably the best flautist in the world.

He and his wife spoke informally before the concert.  They said the US under-achieves in international competitions relative to its raw talent. Why? The competitive emphasis we put on technical virtuosity.

The fundamentals are forgotten, they said.  To be great, you need to work on scales and tone.  His concert included two “simple” pieces amidst the virtuoso pieces—to lead the students in the house by example.

His website speaks to his generosity—financial and spiritual.  He talks about the fundamentals of music, and of being human.  It says, "My scales are my prayers; my concerts are the answers."

    Years ago, I took a week’s solo lesson with arguably the world’s greatest pedal steel guitar player (and surely the best teacher), the late Jeff Newman—in a little A frame house at the top of the hill on Jeff’s land 20 miles east of Nashville.

We spent the first half-day tuning.  Tuning.

Once we spent an hour with him leaning back in a chair, strumming 3 guitar chords while I played three steel notes over and over.  He’d grimace at some notes, smile at a few. “If you cain’t make me cry with just three notes, Charlie,” he’d say, “what the hell good are all the rest?”

Once I got frustrated with technique on the volume pedal.  “Charlie, you got to stomp that sucker,” he said. “Either you’re going make that hunk of metal sing for you, or it’s gonna kick your butt. Which is it gonna be?”

Between songs, he’d tell stories.  Like the time Jimmy Day finally played Steel Guitar Rag dead flat perfect, looked up and realized the joint only had 23 people in it—all drunk, and not one who gave a damn.  “You don’t play for perfection,” he said, “you practice, then you play for love—perfection’s just a little gift you get once in a while.”  Jimmy Day, he said, had a cable linking his foot and his soul.

Or the day John Hughey, Conway Twitty’s old steel player, put away his steel for good after Conway retired, despairing of ever again getting gigs for his old-style of playing. Only to get a call later that day from Vince Gill, who featured him in the front of the band, and started a whole new career for Hughey.

Occasionally Jeff would sit at my instrument and just noodle.  Incredible sounds, blending jazz chords and pipe organ tones with Bach-like complexity.  “Why don’t you record some of that, Jeff, that’s absolutely gorgeous, unique,” I’d say.

“Why don’t I record it? I’ll tell you why.  Only four reasons to do it.  One, for the money—I don’t need it.  Two, for my students; but it’d just intimidate them, not help them.  Three, for my ego—again, I don’t need it.  And four, for your ego—but that’s your damn problem, not mine!  I ain’t doin’ it.”

The best in the world often sound like this. They are self-assured but not arrogant. They are technically great, but see technique as a means, not an end.

Their emphasis is on the basics, and on the result. Technique in service.

What are the basics in business?  I suppose quality, integrity, customer focus.  Commitment.  Willingness to give to others. Trust.  Stuff like that.

What are the business analogues to musical flash and technique that  get in the way of tone and soulfulness?  Perhaps systems and measurements; esoteric strategies; clever incentive schemes; complex financing; sophisticated diagnostics and skillsets?

We all need technique.  And complexity is a fact of life.  But the ends are still supposed to be the reason for the means; the means aren’t self-justifying.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

I’ll write another time about "why trust matters." This posting is about why this blog is called ‘Trust Matters.’

Some of you may visit this blog to find a sales tip. Others, because you find something about relationships that touches you. Still others, hopefully, enjoy a different take on issues of business and society.

Trust runs through them all.

If there is any single dominant feature about the economy and the world that is emerging around us, it is connectivity. Whether you’re reading The World is Flat, or Wikinomics, or How We Compete , the message is clear: the world is more and more linked. We’re not just interdependent, we’re all over each other.

1. In the realm of the Trusted Advisor this has always been clear. The relationships that grow up between those who have deep specialized knowledge and those who need it are, of necessity, trust-based.

As someone said, there are no products anymore, everything is a service; and a complex service at that. So the trusted advisor paradigm is increasingly relevant.

2. In the realm of sales, the role of trust is accelerating more rapidly. Selling—always the lowbrow, bastard stepchild of marketing—is about to emerge as a critical function.

As services get more complex, the seller-buyer relationship—call it the “commercial” relationship—is taking over in importance from the seller-competitor relationship. Commerce, not competition, is key in a connected world. And the one place where producer meets consumer is—in the sale and the sales process.

Trust plays a huge role here because, as Jeff Thull says, solutions are now so complex that buyers often can’t articulate what they need. They need a trusted seller to engage with them as equals. Enter Trust-based Selling®.

3. In the realm of leadership development and organizational behavior, trust is becoming the most critical of all. The tolerance for divisional silos, not-invented-here syndromes, or office politics is declining. The business can no longer afford people whose competency at trusting and being trusted are low.

The “soft” skills have “hard” payoffs in a connected world.

They are what permit alignment of organizations, faster go-to-market processes, successful strategic alliances, project teams, creativity, globalization, effective negotiation, people and customer attraction and retention, and execution. Businesses mired solely in the old-think of competitive positioning, behavioral measures-and-rewards, and business processes will find themselves behind the curve.

Through these three portholes—trusted advisor, Trust-based Selling, and leading with trust—we see the same core themes.

Getting along, collaborating, interacting, synergizing, decreasing friction, transparency, plug-and-play people, anger-processing, other-focusing, rapid trust creating, empathizing, fast team-building, relationships-over-transactions, constructive conflict engagement, responsibility-taking, emotional risk-taking, no blame-throwing, straight-talking, truth-telling, always-curious, self-knowing, trust-creating.

These are the things that make a connected world work smoothly, rather than grate and grind.

Matters of trust.

Trust matters.
 

One business page, Sunday NYTimes. Two articles. Two distinct visions of our future.

Andrew Sorkin’s “A Growing Aversion to Ticker Symbols” describes the seeming tsunami of private equity money creating a shadow economy, engulfing publicly traded stocks, escaping the scrutiny of Sarbanes Oxley and the SEC, and enabling CEO compensation even greater than we’ve seen in public companies:

As one buyout king put it over drinks… “If one of my C.E.O.’s made $100 million, I’d say that’s great because it means that we probably just made $2 billion.”

Licensed greed, free of oversight.

Or not?

In the same article, John Thain, the New York Stock Exchange’s CEO, reminds us that much of the big money in private equity lies in taking the companies back public again.

Viewed this way, private equity is simply the vehicle du jour for creating efficiency in the financial and asset markets. Take the old company out of circulation for a bit, do a turn in drydock, clean up the turbines, a new coat of paint, voila—new company. A public service.

Au contraire, says Ben Stein in "The Hard Rain That’s Falling on Capitalism. A writer and literate comedian, he has standing as an economist. He came by it honestly; his father was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Capitalism values people as individuals according to contract…not according to the status of our birth. This in itself is a miracle.

This miracle has been vibrant in the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans who have gone from nothing to something, thanks to the dynamics of capitalism. They have seen their pay rise and they have been able to convert their sweat and toil and creativity into capital by saving and investing in the stock market and becoming capitalists themselves — myself.

The system of capitalism is wide open. If you have an idea, you can turn it into capital.

But… in capitalism, the most fundamental building block is trust.

When I see what the top dogs at all too many corporations are now doing to that trust, I feel queasy. Outrageous — yes, obscene — pay. Greedy backdating of stock options, which in my opinion is straight-up theft. Managers buying assets from their trustors, the stockholders, at pennies on the dollar, then forestalling competing bids with lockups and insane breakup fees.

These misdeeds and many, many more are hammer blows at the granite foundation of trust we built in the 1940s and ’50s. How long democratic capitalism can survive these blows before it gives in and gives birth to revolution or to an out-and-out aristocracy, I am not sure.

Stein’s not alone. Professor Bruce Scott, of Harvard Business School, is in the final stages of a forthcoming book tentatively titled Capitalism and Democracy in a New World. He enthralled senior audiences at Harvard Business School’s reunion last fall. A great number of seasoned MBAs, it turns out, share Stein’s sense that something is rotten in the State of Business.

Scott suggests we have succumbed to an exceedingly narrow application of the democratic concept of freedom—economic freedom. Capitalism, he suggests, is strangling democracy. Scott points to the same social tensions Stein mentions—the accelerating gap in wealth across the world.

Financial fine-tuning for fitness is salutary. A nation of laws is a wonderful thing. But a nation whose laws of financial fine-tuning are opaque, written by those with a bias toward more concentration of wealth, and even then brazenly violated, is not a nation whose capitalist system is any longer built on trust.

If capitalism’s best effort at an ethical pronouncement is, “hey, it wasn’t illegal,” then Stein is an optimist.

We can do better.