فصل 10

CHAPTER TEN

ESTABLISHING TRUST

SHOW, DON’T TELL

In this chapter, you’ll discover how you can earn and secure full trust with your buyer and, in so doing, increase your effectiveness.

Because of a handful of unethical salespeople who have misrepresented the benefits of their products, customers may not completely trust everything you tell them. TV news broadcasts and papers are constantly running stories about scams and cons that make consumers skeptical of salespeople. This skepticism keeps the prospect on guard and prevents the salesperson from correctly establishing the trust that is critical to getting a decision.

Regardless of the cause, it’s critical that you’re aware of the buyer’s lack of trust and that you tackle it. Distrust in the sales cycle is not the buyer’s problem, but yours! If the buyer doesn’t trust you or your presentation, the information that you’re offering will be minimized, challenged, or shopped. Of course, the buyer will make a decision—it just won’t be the one you want. When the buyer decides to “think about it,” that’s a decision, but unfortunately not the one you were looking for.

A salesperson always gets a decision from his customers. Always! They decided to think about it, and you got them to do that! You convinced them to go home and talk about it. They decided to present it to the board. That was all because of you!

When the buyer doesn’t trust the salesperson or something about the presentation, he’ll add time to the cycle by not making a decision to purchase. Even if you manage to close the deal, the unhandled element of distrust will almost always guarantee future problems in delivering and servicing the buyer.

When a salesperson understands what’s going on in the mind of his customer, he’s just stepped into an area that only a professional would delve into. The unspoken thoughts of the customer are an interesting field where you’re no longer looking at what the buyer said; you’re looking at what he didn’t say. You’re looking at what’s going on behind the scenes in the customer’s mind. When a salesperson is willing to go there, that’s the point where he transitions from a painter to an artist! All my studies in sales over the last twenty-five years have involved the mind of the customer, not just his money.

PROSPECTS DON’T MAKE SALES—SALESPEOPLE DO

As stated earlier, prospects do not stop sales; the salesperson stops the sale. Understand also that prospects do not make sales, either. It is the salesperson’s job to make the sale. Whether or not the sale happens is entirely up to the salesperson, not the prospect.

In order to make sales, you have to understand the mind of the customer. If you don’t recognize how buyers think and what causes them to respond and act, you’ll be unable to take full responsibility and will never reach your full potential. When you step into this arena, you are in the business of handling people, not products. People are run by their minds. Understand the mind and you understand people.

Most salespeople tend to blame their customers when sales are down, but they don’t usually do so to the customer’s face. They do it later when they’re with their coworkers. “He can’t make a decision. He doesn’t know what he wants. He wants more than he can afford. He’s just wasting my time.” On and on! I never tolerate this sort of talk from any of the people who work with me. Such unwanted behavior is an indication of very low responsibility, and low responsibility = no sale.

The salesperson must assume responsibility for himself, the prospect, and all that occurs.

One time a buyer in a retail furniture store said to me, “I’m not buying anything today.” With a smile I replied, “Sir, if you don’t buy anything today it’ll be my fault, not yours.” He looked at me with a grin and said, “Great. Let me tell you what I’m looking for.” The customer did buy from me that day and we furnished his entire house. All I did was take full responsibility for the selling and the buying. Also, I understood that his statement that he wasn’t buying was just a reactive response from his mind and not really him. The only thing the buyer should ever have to do is give you the money.

The buyer who says, “I’m not buying today,” is indicating his lack of trust of either salespeople or his ability to make good decisions. It’s vital that you understand why the buyer is wary of salespeople and why he distrusts his own ability to make decisions. These points must be understood and handled.

When someone meets you and you sense his or her distrust, know that it doesn’t have anything to do with you personally. You haven’t even said anything yet! Perhaps the blue shirt you’re wearing reminded him of some bad experience he had. I don’t know, but I do know that if you don’t handle it, you will not sell him!

CREDIBILITY = INCREASED SALES

A lack of trust will cost you sales! Distrust will cost you credibility, and lost credibility will add time and reduce your chances of making the sale.

Credibility is one of the most valuable assets you have as a salesperson. When something happens that calls your credibility into question, it becomes difficult to get the buyer to trust his decision to do business with you. If an element of distrust exists, no matter what you say or how you beg, plead, or persuade, realize that you’ve got your hands full and you must handle the distrust first in order to get the job done. You must rebuild your credibility immediately. Ignoring the credibility issue won’t make it disappear. It has to be handled! When the buyer doesn’t trust, you can use all of the greatest closing lines throughout history and watch them fall upon deaf ears.

Great salespeople understand the buyer’s distrust, accept full responsibility for it, and never take it personally.

I always assume that the buyer doesn’t trust a single word I say to him. He might not even believe that my name is what I say it is, which is why I create something that buyers know they can trust because they can see it. When I’m talking about the product, I provide everything I say in writing or support it with printed materials. If I’m telling a buyer that the piece of property is 44,000 square feet, I’ll show him the documentation that supports my statement, and this will start to show the prospect that I’m trustworthy—that I know what I am doing. Then he’ll lend credibility to what I say in the future!

PEOPLE BELIEVE WHAT THEY SEE, NOT WHAT THEY HEAR

Have you ever noticed that a buyer isn’t fully listening to you? This phenomenon occurs because the buyer assumes that he can’t trust what a salesperson says.

People believe what they see, not what they hear. Always have your presentation, proposals, and prices in writing for your buyers so they can see it with their own eyes.

Your prospects will not believe the words they hear, but they will believe the words they can see. Tell a guy some unbelievable and bizarre conspiracy theory that you heard about and then show him the article where you read it. If it’s in writing, it becomes more real to him.

I had a very wealthy friend and I wanted to get him to invest with me on a real estate deal. I didn’t tell him a single thing about the property, the deal, or the investment. I didn’t waste one second telling him how good the investment was, since he had been told this a thousand times. I called him and asked him to meet me at the property because I wanted to get his opinion on how I could expand my company and wanted him to see what I was doing so he could give me the best advice. I showed him the properties, the tenants, the competition, the possibilities. Within thirty minutes of touring just one of the projects, he was asking if he could invest in the project!

I want you to make this a rule that you sell by: Assume that your buyer, no matter how well you know the person, never believes your words and will only believe that which you are able to show him.

As I stated earlier, there are many reasons for distrust, and it’s necessary that you know what they are. The most common and least considered is the buyer’s own experience with fabrications, exaggerations, and embellishments. You’ve got to assume that at some point in his life, he committed such an offense himself. It might be something major or it might be something minor, like the time he lied to his parents about not feeling good so he didn’t have to go to school. Whatever it was, the buyer knows that another person is capable of slight exaggerations or even outright lies because he’s done so himself. The buyer believes that if he’s done this, you’ll do it too, even if you won’t! Regardless of how honest you are and how much integrity you might have, your prospect believes that you’re capable of the same things he has been guilty of. This belief and distrust is what is real to that person, regardless of how much you try to convince him otherwise.

The element of distrust is intensified when your prospect has had the negative experience of being ripped off by some earlier salesperson or at some time when he had a plain misunderstanding between what was said and what was promised. People have misunderstandings all the time, and misunderstandings can lead to distrust. I want you to try this simple exercise to prove my point: Write down a short story about something that happened to you and read that story to one person. Then have that person pass it on verbally to another person. Continue this until at least five people have heard the story. Have the last person come back and tell you what he was told and compare it to what you wrote down. I assure you that your story will have changed. It didn’t change because of lies, but because of incorrect duplication and misunderstandings. If you had passed your story in writing to each person, there would have been a greatly reduced chance of misunderstandings.

HOW TO HANDLE THE BUYER’S DISTRUST

The rule for handling a buyer’s distrust is to always use and show written material to support your presentation and proposal. When you’re documenting facts for your customer, it’s preferable to use third-party materials that support what you’re saying. Remember, people believe what they see, not what they hear.

Always, always, always write down what you’ve said, offered, proposed, promised, implied, and suggested. Anytime you’re going for the close, insist on putting it in writing.

I see so many salespeople shying away from contracts, buyer’s orders, and signatures! Why? Because they falsely believe that they may scare the customer with a pen or a contract. This is a ridiculous assumption that has no basis in reality.

You don’t go into a military operation without equipment and supplies, and you never go for the close without a pen and a contract! There’s nothing to hide. You aren’t a covert operative or some kind of criminal who needs to sneak around. You are a professional salesperson offering a product that will benefit and solve problems for your prospects when they purchase and own it.

When you’re presenting your product, write it down or show potential buyers the benefits on paper. If you’re showing them how your product will improve their business, show them the proof by using statistics and success stories. I used to keep an evidence manual with me to show my facts and what others had said as a result of doing business with me. People love to see that you are prepared and sold on your product.

When you show your prospect what your competition will do or will not do, prove it in writing. When you know you’ve got the best price, the best product, and the best service, always back it up with documentation. If you do this satisfactorily, you’ll earn trust and reduce the prospect’s need to shop, think, research, and talk to others, all the while increasing your odds of closing the sale.

It’s incredible how much significance people place on the written word. You want to capitalize on that. Every day, people quote things that they read in the paper without ever researching the facts for themselves. They assume that if it was written it must be true! People read books in school and then go through the rest of their lives believing that what was in the books was true. Twenty years ago a book was written and the first line read, “Life is difficult.” This book became a best seller and everyone adopted this one line as truth, when it was garbage. That line certainly isn’t true to me and it’s definitely not a quote that I’d live my life by. But because it was written, people assumed it was true and adopted it as their own reality.

Newspapers perpetuate things that are not true and history books are filled with errors, opinions, false reports, agendas, and even outright lies. Some of the best-known books were written many years after the events even took place and long after all of the players were dead. Yet if it’s written, people tend to believe it’s true! Remember the movie Jerry McGuire where the character played by Cuba Gooding Jr. kept saying to the Tom Cruise character, “Show me the money!” In sales, the customer is Cuba screaming, “Show me the data!” That’s the point here: Show the proof to the prospect, make it real to him, and he’ll have the confidence to buy.

With the abundance of information available today through third parties, consumer guides, the Internet, and other sources, your prospect becomes even more dependent on facts to support decisions. Buyers are going to continue to rely on these sources, so you need to make use of the same sources to support your cause and help the buyer make the right decision.

Anytime you’re presenting product information, performance reports, facts, historical data, comparison information, pricing data, proposals, etc., the rule is don’t tell, show. The automotive industry is notorious for not wanting to give information to prospects, and because of this error, the industry suffers from high turnover, poor loyalty, high advertising costs, and shrinking profits. The premise was, “The less they know, the better off we are!” Nothing could be further from the truth. The more the buyers know, the more they can trust the information and the more likely they are to buy. By offering written information, you’ll find that your sales will be easier, you’ll make more money, and you’ll have more satisfied customers.

As a salesperson, I prefer informed buyers over uninformed buyers for the very reason that an informed buyer can make a decision and can be handled with logic, while the uninformed buyer cannot make a decision and tends to get emotional. When facts, data, and logic are missing, people get emotional, and when people get emotional, they can get irrational. It’s okay to sell with emotion, but you want to close with logic, data, and facts. An informed professional buyer is much easier to sell than one who is not informed. Someone who is not informed about the product will make an offer that has no reality to it. That would be an emotional offer, not a logical one. I want logic and facts in the close, not emotions. So I keep people logical by providing them with credible validation they can trust.

TIPS ON USING WRITTEN AND VISUAL INFORMATION TO CLOSE

Never sell with words. Always show documentation.

Never negotiate with words. Write your negotiations down on paper.

Never ask for the close with words. Use a buyer’s order.

Never make verbal promises. Put all of your assurances in writing.

The more data you provide, the better. Don’t be afraid to use a lot of data.

Keep your information current.

Have your written information available and easy to access.

Use third-party data as much as possible.

The more you’re able to access the data in real time, the better. Real-time data are preferable to prepared data.

Use computer-generated data whenever possible.

Have Internet access available so you can pull the data up in front of the customer and he can see that it hasn’t been contrived or manipulated.

Make it easy for the buyers to do research while they’re with you instead of at home or at their offices when you can’t be there. If the buyers want to look up their own information or research, encourage them to do so.

After consulting with thousands of companies on improving their sales processes, I’ve often encouraged business, management, and salespeople to make all competitive advertising available and fully displayed in their offices so that the buyers don’t have to go out and look at what the competition is offering; instead, they can do so without leaving.

HELP ‘EM BELIEVE YOU

People want to believe you, but you have to help them. If you have a good product and a good service, then do everything you can to build your case and do it with written information. That way the buyer doesn’t have to trust you. Once buyers read that what you’re saying is so, they have no choice but to believe you.

I was involved in selling a 144-unit condo project that I owned, and the onsite management was having trouble selling the units. I decided to visit the building and find out what was going on. I walked into the office and asked them to run me through the process like I was a prospect. I found that there was no place to sign in and the pricing wasn’t available because the pricing sheets were kept in another office. They weren’t able to quote me a payment and finance rates and there were no data available to explain what the product offered. There was no competitive pricing displayed and there was nothing to offset the bad news about the neighborhood in the local newspapers.

I fired the project managers, installed a new group of inexperienced but eager people, and made sure that they had everything available for the sales team and prospects to look at. We sold thirty units in three months. That was three times the sales that the previous people had made in a year.

Some people distrust the selling profession because of the actions of a few criminals and the inactions of many well-intentioned salespeople who don’t understand this basic rule of selling: People believe what they see, not what they hear. So show them, don’t tell them!