Discover Why Creating Trust Is The Secret To Generating New Sales Opportunities In The New Economy – By Ari Galper, CEO of Unlock The Game® The World’s #1 Authority On Trust-Based Selling
If you flick through the pages of business magazines and traditional sales training material, you will find a constant flow of messages like, ‘Focus on closing the sale’; ‘Overcome objections’; ‘Be relentless’; ‘Accept rejection as a normal part of selling’; ‘Use persuasion to get useful information about your prospects’; and ‘Chase the sale’.
In most cases, it becomes about getting the sale at the expense of the human relationship. For the customer, this approach is transparent and all too familiar. Crossing social boundaries and adding pressure to the sales process makes it a gut-wrenching and painful process for both the seller and the buyer.
But in this new economy, there is a much better way to succeed in selling. But it’s not for everyone. You’ll need to be open minded because it may contradict everything you’ve been taught about what selling is about.
It begins with moving away from the hidden agenda of focusing on making the sale. When you do this, a new world opens up for you. In other words, when you stop selling and start building authentic relationships based on trust, authenticity and integrity, the possibilities become endless. It’s a whole new mindset in selling, which I call Unlock The Game®.
The vast majority of traditional sales techniques contradict everything we know about what it takes to build relationships. But shouldn’t selling be about creating new relationships with customers, clients and patients? No one likes to be pushed and no one wants to talk to someone whose only agenda is to get what they want. By not focusing on the sale, but on building trust instead with your potential clients, you can eliminate angst, negativity and frustration, and watch your sales grow to levels you never thought were possible to achieve.
Have you ever made a sale without trying to “make the sale?” You know what I mean, it just happened naturally without you having to force it to happen. That process you did unconsciously is the process that I have created at the conscious level so that you have a “system” you can follow that makes the sales process effortless.
The Sales “Wake Up” Call That Changed The Sales Game
About ten years ago, after spending many years studying the great sales gurus, designing sales training for major companies, and completing my master’s degree in Training and Development, I had the most important sales call of my life.
At the time, I was the Sales Manager for a team of 18 salespeople at an online software company. One afternoon, I was on the phone doing an online demonstration with the top executives of an account that we had been working on for the previous nine months.
The call was going well, extremely well. Everything was going to script – they were interested and asking me tons of questions and I had all the answers at my fingertips. At the end of the call they thanked me profusely for my time.
I still remember the vice president’s final words: ‘We’ll definitely be getting back to you’.
I was so proud of how well things had gone that I could almost feel my head swell as I started to hang up the phone. But by accident, I hit the phone’s mute button instead of the off button. I heard them continue their conversation on the other end – they had not hung up, but obviously thought I had. I listened to the vice president talk to the other executives about our ‘oh-so- promising’ phone conversation. Here’s what they said word for word: ‘Okay, so we’re definitely not going to go with him. But keep stringing him along, so we can get more information and strike a better deal with another company’.
I was devastated!
My first feeling was outrage – they had lied to me! I felt hurt and used, but the waves of rejection that swept over me were even worse. ‘I’m a good guy’, I told myself. ‘I did everything right. I’ve studied all the best sales programs in the world. I didn’t cut any corners. Why are they treating me this way?’ Then I remembered all the other times that I had gotten a gut feeling that something was ‘off’ about how a prospect was reacting to me. I could never put my finger on it, yet at some level I knew that everything I had learnt was incomplete. I’d ignored that nagging discomfort and kept on doing what I had been doing, until that wake-up call.
A lot of today’s sales programs would analyse that call and conclude that if a prospect lies to you, then it’s okay to lie back; if they’re aggressive to you, it’s okay to be aggressive in return (because that’s how you control the situation); if they try to box you in, it’s okay to force them into a commitment. But this buyer and seller conflict, battle, whatever you want to call it, just felt so wrong. It took me a long time to figure out one basic truth that none of those ‘fight back’ sales programs ever talked about – my sales approach was all wrong!