Going Beyond Relationship Selling To Become A Trusted Advisor
I’m here to dispel the myth about relationships and selling new business. I’ve been studying the misunderstood relationship selling model for quite some time. One of the factors that never made sense to me was how anyone can expect a friend to give you their business when you haven’t earned the right to it. I know that I am throwing rocks at a few of you, but don’t push the delete key yet. Relationship Selling works; you just need to apply a clearer definition. A recently published study redefines the criteria critically important in making a sale. The study is intriguing and eye opening as it breaks through old myths around “relationship selling” to rank the criteria that are really important to the client when making a buying decision.
I’ve taken the liberty of summarizing a few of the major points of the study. The number one criterion for making important buying decisions is whether or not they TRUST the person. The second is whether or not they RESPECT the person, number three is the REPUTATION of the company, number four is the product’s BENEFITS, and coming in fifth is PRICE. What surprises many people is the eleventh reason a purchasing decision is made. It’s how much they LIKE the salesperson. You may at first disagree with the order, but I challenge you to really think about what’s important to you. How do you define a business relationship? What’s your definition of TRUST? Does having someone take you out golfing build trust? No!
So, if you are currently staking your sales career on being likable with large expense accounts, you will manage your career all the way to the poor house. Why? As someone who travels extensively working with sales professionals around the country, I concur that trust is the number one factor in building a business relationship. Trust is the foundation for creating a powerful relationship and when broken or non-existent will act as a wedge in a relationship that removes any hope of making a sale.
Note: The best sales people have not only developed the skills and knowledge necessary to build trust, they also understand how to communicate their unique knowledge and experience in such a way that they are recognized as the trusted authority with-in their given field. They have a special quality I call “known-for-ness” that provides a level of trust.
A question I often I am often asked is how to communicate or package your unique talents and skills so that the market recognizes and places a distinctive value on your unique talent. The answer is teaching sales professionals how to promote and position themselves. I am aware that lately there has been a lot of hype on the subject of Personal Branding lately that Tom Peters brought to the attention of millions. I too believe, based on working with successful professionals there is quite a bit of validity to the concept of building and extending a Personal Brand.
In the 21st Century it’s a must. Personal Branding is going to be the mantra of the professional for the next 100 years as markets become increasing commoditized. As a speaker specializing in prospecting, I’ve given 57 talks on Personal Branding for professionals around the country. Next month is no exception; I will address 500 Financial Professionals on Personal Branding in an opening Key Note address. So now you are asking… What does Personal Branding have to do with becoming a Trusted Advisor? It goes back to the number one reason people buy from you — TRUST.
Trust is the forerunner to everything else in professional sales is applied through Personal Branding by way of prospecting and marketing (i.e. Client/Practice Development). First, let me explain what a brand is. A brand is a represented ideal that exists in the minds of an individual. A brand competitively distinguishes itself usually with a perceived advantage over the competition. That’s right, I said a perceived advantage. Let’s take Wheaties as an example, people buy Wheaties because they believe {key word} that they will run faster and jump higher all because they are eating wheat flakes out of a box with a picture of an athlete. A brand is all about managing the beliefs for a specific segment of the population.
However, a Personal Brand is different, whereby a brand of a product or service is manufactured; a Personal Brand is based in authenticity. A Personal Brand is based on the unique talents, natural abilities and skills of the individual. It is further strengthened by the person’s experience in an area of specialization extending the Buzz on the individual. One of my favorite quotes by Albert Einstein is “Experience is knowledge. All the rest is information”. Leveraging your experience as it relates to your natural ability (genius quality) is what successful people have been doing for years.
Why think about developing a Personal Brand? Well, believe it or not, you already have a brand, people already “see” you in a certain way. They instinctively know what you are good at and what you’re not so good at. So you might as well focus on optimizing your brand, building congruency with your natural talents and how the world sees you to redefine the reality you do business in. Your brand positions you as a known value in your market. Another question I often get is what do you mean by optimizing your brand? The answer is simple really. It has been psychologically proven that you can only be known as one thing in someone’s minds-eye. That’s why people who do more than one thing wonder why they never get referrals.
Note: If you try to be all things to all people, you market will not know what to believe. They will psychologically choose the individual who has specialized in the area; they perceive them to have a certain expertise that you don’t have to serve their particular need.
Remember, the people who are known for something are the one’s that have the first in mind advantage over the competition. They have become “the choice” and not just “a choice” within their market. The unique distinction of a Personal Brand removes objections from the buying process, especially among products and services that “look alike”.
When I consult with a partner in a professional services firm; their biggest question is how do I become a trusted advisor? Your unique value needs to be communicated to your market in such a way that your listening (target) market immediately knows the value that you bring to their business. In order to accomplish this important goal, you can no longer be all things to all people. You must communicate your specialization to build the trust within your market segment or niche that will increase your sales success.
There are volumes of examples of individuals who’ve utilized Personal Branding to become a Trusted Advisor. These select few have learned to generate business momentum resulting in the establishment of them as “the choice” within their market niche. Interested in learning more about how professionals can take their business to the next level using Personal Branding tools. Contact Joe Heller for more information.
Editor’s note: Joe Heller can be reached at (713) 927-4494 | 1 (888) JHELLER | joe [AT] joeheller.com
(c) 2011 Heller Marketing International, All rights reserved Worldwide.
Trust from the Client’s Perspective
One of the most challenging, if not the most difficult piece of the business development puzzle in winning a new client is Trust. Trust today is truly the pivotal point of building a successful business relationship. Trust is rarely tied to a product or service but it is facilitated by the person interacting with the customer. Why is this important? Because everything depends on trust and in this day and age, trust is difficult to come by.
The “trust” question arises more often with the sale of a service, simply because you cannot see or touch the product. This means, there is no visible brand, other than you, so you become the representative for quality. Because of the downward spiral of ethics in business today, it is no longer simply a matter of a product being trustworthy; you must convince your clients that you are trustworthy. What you do and how you are perceived by a potential client sets the tone for how they view your entire organization.
A recent study found that marketing competencies for professional service firms are explicitly focused on defining the element of trust from their client’s perspective. The study also revealed after interviewing nearly one thousand people they found that trust has three essential elements in the eyes of a future client.
Candor: Clients value honesty when dealing with a service provider. They want the person to be straight forward about what will and what won’t work about their solution as it relates to their problem. They respect and appreciate your candor so if you don’t know the answer and let your client know that in fact “you don’t know” it creates a foundation for a solid business relationship.
Competence: Clients want and need to believe that you know exactly what you are doing. They need to feel there is a low level of risk involved in working with you. Remember, because they cannot see and touch your service, your ability to solve their problem becomes the focal point for your client relationship. Your competence truly represents the product in the client’s mind.
Concern: From a client’s perspective, the most important element of trust is concern. Clients want to know you not only understand their problems but you have the ability to empathize with them and feel their pain. They want to know you are concerned about them and the business issues that go beyond the typical sales rhetoric it takes to land a new client.
The importance of candor, competence and concern are essential for developing trust. The absence of any one element can lose a deal. The challenge is that most people when engaged in a selling scenario is that they are not very good at demonstrating each of the three C’s. In both the professional services study and in parallel studies conducted with product sales forces, the element of concern was most frequently deemed missing. Clients felt that while most professionals were competent and/or candid, when it came to concern they fell short. They were interested in making a sale as it related to their service. As a result, they failed to really listen for the prospect concerns; and when a trust breakdown occurred? The sale ultimately broke down as well.
A quick comparison from the study, using a score of 100 as the highest level of trust shows us that service sales people consistently score a 35 on concern verses a product sales person scoring a 53 on concern. As you can see, when compared with product sales, service providers receive an unexpected surprise. They immediately fall 20 points behind a tangible or product sale in the area of concern. Yet, as professionals, they are used to thinking of themselves as deeply concerned about their clients. They are often surprised and offended if anyone suggests they don’t put their clients’ interests first. As the research shows, this is not how they come across to a potential client.
Thus, not only do clients give service providers the lowest ratings on concern, they judge professional service sales people to be significantly less concerned about them than product sales people.
Why do clients see you as unconcerned? There are several reasons: First, service providers listen for what they can solve rather than what is important to their clients. Prospective clients view service sales people including attorneys and accountants as sharks circling for a kill (we’ve all heard the jokes). Second, service sales people are often too anxious to get to their solutions and fail to listen for the client’s real problem.
Service professionals are very seldom seen viewing the problem from the client’s side of the table. What’s needed is an ability to demonstrate their capability, to see the core business issues, and to drive the results that exceed client’s expectations.
To reinforce and ensure success of a service-based sale, the one element of trust where you need to score an A+ is concern. Not only because it is the most important element to clients, it is the only trust element that your client can make a personal valid judgment with. Keep in mind, it’s hard for a client to judge whether you are competent; it is assumed that you should be sitting in front of him/her because your expertise in solving other client’s problems.
Candor isn’t easy to judge either. It is tough to tell who is being totally honest and isn’t exaggerating. No matter what the selling scenario, the client will always decide emotionally whether or not the sale will move forward and support that decision with logic.
Why? Psychologically, if you don’t believe someone is concerned about helping you, you don’t trust them. And, lack of concern translates into suspicions about their competence and candor, which influences all three levels of the trust equation. If you’ve ever wondered why you’ve lost a sale you need to consider how often clients have drawn the same conclusions about you. Trust is not a prepackaged emotion, it is something that has to be earned and it can only be developed through the interactions you have with your clients.
One final note; in order to build trust with your market you must become an avid student of lead generation and marketing strategy. I’ve developed a toolkit that gives you powerful 1-2-3 lead generation techniques that can skyrocket your success. You can find it on my site http://joeheller.com and click on “programs” to learn more. It’s a great resource from my personal library to yours.
Editor’s note: Joe Heller can be reached at (713) 927-4494 | 1 (888) JHELLER | joe [AT] joeheller.com
(c) 2011 Joe Heller Marketing, All rights reserved Worldwide.
