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SECTION VI: Trust

I never made a good deal with a bad person, and I never made a bad deal with a good person.

Warren Buffett

Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none.

William Shakespeare

CHAPTER 8: Trust

It Starts with the Heart

I’ve asked many sales managers what they think is the most important thing in selling. Some say that it’s closing, some say prospecting, and some say process. I say it’s trust.

Trust is always the strategy. Trust isn’t about what you do; it’s about who you are. If you want to be trusted, you have to be trustworthy first. And it starts with the heart— you can’t fake it.

You can lose with a great product and a great company through a weak salesperson whose messages are not believed. All your value can be lost because there is no bridge of trust between the buyer and the seller. All your investment in your company, product, and marketing can be lost just as if it went off the edge of a broken bridge.

Although character is the foundation of trust, most companies don’t interview for it, don’t require it, and don’t reward it. And yet it may be the root cause of most sales turnover, sales losses, and customer problems.

I had one salesperson who was struggling in a given year and asked me for advice as his manager. I told him, “I’m your manager and your friend — and you can take it or leave it — but I think I’ve identified your problem. You are doing almost everything right except one thing: You’re a snob. You like the finer things in life — which is fine — but you have no tolerance for those who don’t. You basically don’t like your customers, and you can’t hide it. You aren’t a good enough actor — none of us are.

I watched you in one sales call where you were disdainful of the administrative person and barely tolerant of the project leader, and you patronized the decision maker. None of those emotions are genuine. I can see it, and I’m sure they could see it, too. You have to find something about your clients to like and discard the rest. But most of all, you have to be genuine. You have to build sincere relationships that have value.”

Alignment — Opening the Door to Rapport

The first decision a buyer makes is about the salesperson. The first step in the process is alignment. This is sometimes called neurolinguistic programming and means matching one’s voice, rate of speech, level of humor, level of familiarity, and body language to those of the buyer. It removes the physical barriers of bias from the salesperson’s message.

You can lose a great product and a great company through a weak salesperson whose messages are not believed.

Alignment is the first step in building rapport. Many salespeople ruin the entire call by aligning badly—becoming too friendly too fast, laughing at things that aren’t really funny, being too familiar (this is especially deadly internationally), or dressing inappropriately for that industry.

How many salespeople have you met who were too aggressive and turned you off? They could have been selling one dollar bills for 50 cents and you still wouldn’t have bought from them. They create barriers to what may be a very sound solution. A good message can be lost through a bad messenger. Sometimes salespeople are so bad at this that they become sales prevention people. They just annoy us.

I once walked out of a clothing store that had a suit I had been looking at for months. I ended up leaving because I refused to buy it from that particular salesperson. Unfortunately, when I went back for the suit later, it was gone. I didn’t find it again for two years, but it was still better than buying it from that jerk.

A good message can be lost through a bad messenger

I later went to a store where the salesperson knew the manufacturer, called and had them check next year’s stock for my material, pull it out of inventory and make my suit. Now I always go there first.

The salesperson was ex-IBM and very organized, but he had poor alignment and interpersonal skills. We once went on a sales call to a “good ol’ boy” in Alabama. The salesperson began the call by pulling out a checklist of all the things he had done in the sales cycle and started ticking them off one item after another while sitting on the edge of his seat. After listening for a few minutes, the gray-haired IT director leaned back in his chair and said, “Son, you’ve got a really good memory. Think you can remember your way outta here?” It was over.

This is a case of very bad alignment. Everybody knows that in the South, you spend the first 30 minutes “cracker barreling,” talking about traffic, the weather, football, BBQ — anything but business. On the other hand, in Manhattan, you have about 30 nanoseconds to get to the point or you must be from somewhere “out West” — like New Jersey. It’s called alignment. And this salesperson didn’t have it.

Alignment can be based on gender, cultural background, or personality. In the movie My Cousin Vinny, Joe Pesci plays a New York lawyer who has to try a murder case in a rural Alabama courtroom. When he shows up for court in a leather jacket, the stern, conservative judge eyes him suspiciously and demands angrily, “Mr. Gambini, what are you wearing?” Joe Pesci looks down at his outfit, confused, and says, “Clothes. I don’t get the question.”

Some people who have become involved with sales don’t get the question. Customers have the right to discriminate. And you’ll never even know why you lost.

In business, different people align differently with different personalities. Some people like to be approached by task first and then relationship. Others like to establish a relationship before talking about business. Internationally, there are many cultural rites and practices that must be observed. If you get it wrong, your sales call will be ineffective at best — disastrous at worst.

One of our principals, Nick Holbrook, was shopping with his wife for a new car in England, where they live. As they entered the showroom, a salesman appeared and introduced himself to Nick, shaking hands with Nick first and then Sue.

It was the last interaction he had with Sue that afternoon.

Instead, the salesman spent the next 15 minutes asking Nick a series of questions about his budget and timeframe for buying a car. Then he showed the interior and external features of the car to Nick and offered him the keys for a test drive. He asked Nick what he was looking for in an engine, his color preference, and which accessories he would most like to have. Before they left the showroom, he loaded Nick down with brochures about the car, explaining the different makes and models.

But it was Sue who was car shopping that day — not Nick. She is also a very successful sales manager for a major software firm. That day, Sue was the decision maker with the sum of all votes plus one.

The salesman lost the sale because he made the false assumption that Nick was driving the decision-making process and held all the power.

As Nick and Sue walked out the front door of the showroom, the salesman made one last-minute effort to reach out to Sue. He called out, “And what about you, Love? I’m sure we could find a nice little run-around for you?”

No understanding, no rapport, no trust, no sale, no going back ever.

Alignment is usually different by industry. Bankers dress and act differently from academics, who dress and act differently from manufacturers. If you are selling to consulting firms — and we learned this early in our company history — you have to do a universal “search and replace” on your vocabulary. Most industries have a language and style of their own, and insiders can spot outsiders easily.

There are a number of training courses to help people with this fundamental skill going all the way back to Meyers-Briggs and DISC—all of which are strong fundamentals and help salespeople match their selling style to the personality of the buyer. The challenge, of course, is to avoid stereotyping by nationality, race, or gender and approach each individual as an individual. Different people want to be sold to in different ways.

One of the most enduring books on this topic is How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. It has stood the test of time for decades. In his book, Carnegie talks about such tips as learning and saying people’s names, the importance of a firm handshake, and finding things in common with other people. As old and fundamental as these concepts are, it is amazing how banks and grocery stores today have never learned the importance of remembering and repeating their customers’ names.

Consultative Selling — The Answer Is a Question

Listen, or your tongue will make you deaf.

Cherokee saying

By far the most important step in building rapport is probing and listening. In the early seventies, Neil Rackham, author of the best-seller SPIN Selling, was hired by large companies to observe what successful salespeople did right and what unsuccessful salespeople did wrong. Rackham discovered that the best salespeople actually held back the product for the longest time and were not necessarily the best talkers but the best listeners. This was the birth of consultative selling. Listen first, talk second — no matter if it’s a one-hour call or an entire-day demo.

And yet, 20 to 30 years later, one of the most common mistakes we find among salespeople is still “dashing to the demo”—running out and showing the product or solution before doing a needs assessment with the client. The reason is this: There is a whole new generation of CEOs, sales managers, and salespeople who have to learn to break this habit all over again.

When I was in the software business and I started doing needs assessments before demos, my partners and I cut our presentations from eight hours to two hours — and they were better. The irony was that not only were our presentations more focused, but we also were winning at the needs assessment — before the real demo. This is where the selling really took place.

Through better listening and understanding — elbow to elbow with the client, face to face — we not only began to “outcare” the competition, but we also were able to better understand the decision-making process, politics, our competitive position, and the needs of each buyer as an individual, as well and the needs of each buyer as an individual, as well as their culture.

By the time we got to the presentation, most of the deals had already been decided (as they are now). We had friends in the audience, we knew their terminology, we knew their strategic issues, and we had planted subtle traps to get the competition reacting to us rather than vice versa.

We began to get inside their competitive loop much earlier, and our presentations were more focused on their needs and motivators rather than on our features. In addition, we qualified out of bad deals earlier.