Real Life Selling

Trust

You will always have a problem selling if your customers don’t trust you. In fact if you are selling products that have a long sales cycle or are managing major accounts you will be dead in the water without trust. Here are five ways to help build trust…

• Have the customers best interests at heart. If your customer can see that you truly want to achieve a win-win situation they will be far more likely to open up and work with you.
• Warts and all. When you present your product it’s often a great credibility builder if you admit (openly and frankly) a minor weakness, or missing feature that you know isn’t too important to the customer. Customers are so used to powerpoint-jockeys coming in and claiming every single feature of their product is world beating. They know it’s unlikely your product is perfect; better that you proactively admit a minor wart and gain lots of cred in the process.
• Respect her time. If you have a 30 minute slot with a prospect or customer, make sure that you stick to it. If you are still there an hour later working your way through every feature on a datasheet what do you think happens next time you try to make an appointment for “just” half an hour?
• Liar liar. Don’t lie to the customer. If you don’t understand something or if there is some confidential information you can’t share say so. If you make a habit of lying to customers you will eventually get caught out, at which point you may as well give up and go home.
• No… you are a liar, liar. An obvious one, but don’t call the customer a liar or imply it. I once had an appalling customer meeting with a technical marketeer colleague who ran out of control during his presentation, making boastful comparisons between our product and the competition. The customer (who most likely had our competitor’s product in his lab) helpfully tried to correct him on some of his facts and was told that “no” he was wrong. Fortunately for him, my colleague was across the table out of my reach!

A happy farmer?

Many years ago a colleague of mine told me that he thought I was more of a farmer than a hunter, which he said was fine. At the time I didn’t agree because being a hunter sounded a lot more macho, active and plain fun.

With the benefit of hindsight I think he was probably right. The company I was repping for had the first product of its type running on low-cost PCs instead of expensive engineering workstations, so the sales team had spent most of their time in what I would call “rape and pillage mode”. Sales people took orders and then moved on to the next prospect, like foxes in a henhouse they had so many targets they didn’t know which way to turn.

When I joined I visited some major accounts who had bought the product a year or two previously and had never seen anyone again. Nobody had made sure that the tools were being used properly, nobody had asked if they needed more seats, worst of all no one had even collected any maintenance (then 15% of list price). So I did some pretty good business just fixing up the existing customers, selling them more seats, new tools and making sure the 15% was collected. Of course, I did my fair share of “hunting” as well… but not maximising your business out of existing customers is just plain dumb.

Many sales trainers stress the need to always ask satisfied customers for leads and referrals, but before you do that make sure you are maximising your sales into those existing customers. As a species we moved on from being hunter-gatherers to farmers about 10,000 years ago… there were good reasons for that!