Читать книгу Never Say Sell - Tom McMakin - Страница 60

When we work with clients, we have the opportunity to do the right thing when their backs are turned, and we can demonstrate that we can be trusted with caring for their interests.

We are sometimes given a choice between leaning in the direction of our client – prioritizing transparency and investing in the relationship – or leaning in the direction of ourselves and our interests. Say, for example, you're in a meeting with your buyer and her boss, presenting to the boss on the results of a project you've just completed. Her boss is giving you high praise for the work your firm has done. You notice your buyer looks frustrated for the lack of acknowledgment she's getting (even though you did in fact do 90% of the work). One option is to accept that praise fully and take this as an opportunity to try to win more work from the boss. Instead, you use this as an opportunity to praise your buyer in front of her boss – underscoring the team effort of the project and how great she was to work with. This is how trust is created – one act at a time. You're investing in the long game.

Once we are working with a client, we no longer need to say, “You can trust me!” We have been afforded the opportunity to show our clients we have their best interests at heart.

But, like credibility, trust doesn't transfer quite as easily as we might like to other potential buyers in the client company. The more degrees of separation from our buyer, the less you can lean on your hard-earned trust. Client organizations can be big – perhaps hundreds of potential buyers – and the further away from our buyer we get, the harder we have to work to rebuild trust with others. Additionally, we often run into competing circles of trust – where incumbent relationships may box us out from even being able to prove our integrity.

Rob Benson, chief sales officer for Kele Inc., explains,

If you're in there doing something really well, you may want to offer another service that your company provides. If the customer has an incumbent in there doing those services already and they're doing a really good job, it can be hard to win that business, especially if that incumbent is doing a good job and the customer does not see a need to make a change. It's a risky situation because if you're saying, “Oh, just give us a shot. Give us a try,” that's risky as that could cause the customer to consider other options for your existing services. It can be tough to break through that incumbent relationship.

When trying to walk across a client company, we need to remember that our credibility – our reputation for doing work – often travels more easily than our ability to prove our trustworthiness.

Hurdle 5: Our client trusts us implicitly, but our reputation for being trustworthy doesn't always travel as quickly or as broadly as we'd like. Just because our buyer trusts us, does not mean that the buyer's counterpart in Johannesburg will trust us automatically. There may also be competing circles of trust that hinder our ability to even prove our integrity to other potential buyers in the organization.