Without trust, sales die before they can begin. You know this in your gut - if you walk into a car dealership and the salesperson gives you a slimy pitch and a barrel of lies, you will walk right out again. In complex b2b sales, the timeline from “walking into” the conversation and walking away may take longer, but it’s still true that you don’t do long-term business with people or companies you don’t trust.
Great leaders know that trust is key to sales success, and take the time and energy to help their teams develop their trustworthiness. Recently, I spoke with a hostage negotiator about how he builds trust in high stakes environments, then I followed up with a conversation with Charles H. Green, the founder of TrustedAdvisor, to talk about how to apply those principles in sales situations.
“Trust is a form of relationship between two human beings,” says Green. “It’s an asynchronous relationship in which there is a trustee and a trustor.”
The trustor is the person who takes a risk on trusting the other person. The trustee is either worthy of that trust or not. When the two match up, then trust levels go up.
Thus, in Green’s definition, risk is a necessary component of trust. Until one person takes a risk, there is no trust. This has interesting and powerful implications for how salespeople can quickly build trust by becoming the first to take a risk.
Green says that trust is often misunderstood in sales, because we think that the only thing we have to do to earn trust is to be credible and reliable. “Do what you say and say what you’re gonna do” is sometimes the mantra of choice. But it’s not the whole picture.
Credibility and reliability are important. But, according to Green, they’re not enough. Instead, he offers this trust formula:
Credibility and reliability are often talked about and measured in sales organizations. Intimacy and self-orientation, less so - partly because the first two are easy to measure, and the second two are impossible to measure.
Yet intimacy, according to Green, is the most powerful of the four factors. He defines it as “the extent to which a person feels comfortable sharing things with another person.”
He says it overlaps with ease, comfort, vulnerability, and rapport - but goes deeper than that, and it’s connected to risk.
“If you’re guarded or watching what you say, then you’re not taking a risk,” says Green, “and intimacy cannot build.”
Self-orientation is the denominator in the equation, because no matter how much the first three add up, if people perceive you as highly self-oriented, it will undermine trust.
For instance, you may always do exactly what you say you’re going to do. You may have all of the credentials necessary to serve the customer’s needs. And you may even have shared vulnerably and received vulnerable information from the other person.
But if they perceive that you care more about your self interest (self-orientation) than theirs, they still won’t trust you.
Kirk Kinell (see previous episode here) says that there are some things you should never do in a hostage situation, because you will never gain back the trust you lost. Green says the same is true in sales, and the list of “never do this” items is very similar:
On the flip side, the list of “to dos” is straightforward, at least in theory:
Green says taking risks should be part of the sales process, and it should be part of the salesperson’s mindset.
A part of intimacy is the willingness to take risks with someone. Intimacy grows when risks are taken and trust is maintained.
For instance, in personal relationships, intimacy grows when you tell someone a secret, and they keep it.
To jump start this process in a business relationship, salespeople can take advantage of the law of reciprocity and start by taking risks of their own.
Green says there is no formula to this aspect. Emotional risks may be as simple as saying, “I don’t know” in response to a question, or offering to bring in outside experts without the guarantee that they won’t steal your customer away. Or it may mean researching a customer thoroughly, and then venturing a tentative “We don’t know, but after researching we think this situation may be an issue for you - is that true?”
By admitting that you don’t know, and being willing to accept correction from the prospect, you begin the process of building intimacy. When you approach customers this way, they are more likely to reciprocate by taking similar risks with you.
It’s one thing to talk about building trust in a one-on-one relationship. Another thing entirely to figure out how to scale trust across a sales organization.
Credibility and reliability are relatively easy to scale, because they are measurable and can be mapped to process. But intimacy and self-orientation are harder.
“You can’t describe intimacy and self-orientation behaviors well enough to scale them,” says Green. “There is an infinitely expanding set of human behaviors, and you can’t define them all. Something as simple as the word ‘wow’ changes with body language, who you’re talking to, and the moment you’re having.”
Instead, he says to look to your storytelling and role modeling. You have to be in front of your salespeople and modeling the behavior you want to see, reinforcing it when you see it in them, and snuffing it out when you see the opposite.
Green’s organization surveyed 70,000 people to study the state of trust in business. He says that based on that data, he believes the state of trust is getting worse, not better. That, he says, is in part due to the focus in management to be analytical and to manage by numbers.
“You look at the hostage negotiator you interviewed,” he says, “and his organization has a success rate of more than 99%. How many sales organizations can boast that? Yet we track data into the ground and still can’t get even close.”
Analytics are important, but they can only measure what is measurable. They can’t measure intimacy or self-orientation. That has to be managed at a much more emotional and individual level, through modeling and teaching and nurturing.
It’s not easy - but teaching, reinforcing, and modeling trustworthy behavior may be one of the best investments you ever make.
Green’s organization, TrustedAdvisor, works with individuals whose role requires them to be persuasive - whether it’s in sales or within an organization. He says his methods have helped thousands of people become more effective through strengthening their trust-building skills. You can learn more about his work at Trustedadvisor.com. You can also listen to the full interview with Green here.
George is the founder & CEO of Membrain, the Sales Enablement CRM that makes it easy to execute your sales strategy. A life-long entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. With the life motto "Don't settle for mainstream", he is always looking for new ways to achieve improved business results using innovative software, skills, and processes. George is also the author of the book Stop Killing Deals and the host of the Stop Killing Deals webinar and podcast series.
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