No trust? No sale!

Trust is the single biggest motivator of buyer behavior and one of the key components to establishing a successful buyer/seller relationship. Do your potential customers trust what you say? Do they trust you as a salesperson and a business professional? Not putting your customer’s interests ahead of your own is a recipe for disaster.

Customers overwhelmingly buy from people they trust. These customer relationships are longer lasting, more effective and more efficient than relationships not built on trust. But building trust takes time, and the only way to do it is to sell in a trustworthy manner.

So, do you have a specific, well-thought-out plan designed to overcome this obstacle and build greater levels of trust with your customers?

In the past, customers had negative perceptions of salespeople because selling itself had been associated with manipulation, dishonesty and trickery. That stereotype of untrustworthy, lying salespeople still comes back to haunt the sales profession today. But salespeople can play a critical role in its dismantling.

You may be the most honest salesperson on the planet but if your customers don’t perceive you to be trustworthy because of sloppy sales skills and negative selling behaviors, it doesn’t matter.
Do you follow these 4 principles of selling to build trust?

1. Begin and end from the customer’s perspective and walk in their shoes
2. Think in the long term; the relationship is the customer
3. Behave in a collaborative manner and openly conduct honest conversations with customers
4. Be transparent and trustworthy in all meetings and phone calls

Knowing, understanding and possessing the traits that customers like are the best way to gain trust and close the sale. So, in addition to being honest, you need to be knowledgeable, punctual, solution-based and customer-focused, just to name a few. It’s the way you relate to others that determines your customer’s level of trust.

I see salespeople destroy client trust in the sales process and rarely recover, but it does not have to be that way! Always check your behavior. Focus on trust-building activities with customers by creating an action plan and then constantly focus on executing that plan. Once you’re able to increase your trust factor with buyers, you will also see an increase in sales. Salespeople who fail to put an emphasis on developing trust and rapport actually do a disservice to their customers and leave the back door open to their competition.

To be a professional salesperson, conduct yourself as a true professional. Your buyers will like it when you do – and you’ll be more successful. The most effective way to build that trust is to put customers first; always. You must do this by design, not by default.

In today’s highly competitive marketplace, your customers have many options and they are looking for a salesperson they know they can trust to work in their best interest. It’s not what you sell, it’s how you sell.
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