The Massive Importance of Trust in Sales

We all understand that it is important to have trust in the relationship between a salesperson and a customer. Think of the opposite…it’s bad.

No Trust = Friction

If you don’t have trust, there’s friction, the customer is “not ok” and your chances of success in that account are limited. Because it’s so obviously relevant, building trust is a standard concept that’s consistently addressed in sales trainings and built into sales methodologies. At a surface level, we all just understand that you need it.

So let’s go deep under the surface.

What is Trust, Really? And Why Does it Matter?

What does it mean to have trust with a customer, exactly? And why is it important? And I believe the best question is, just how important is trust in sales? If you understand the importance, you will operate accordingly and you will be more effective. After I explain why I believe trust is critical, I’ll share a new development that will open up the opportunity to get this highest level of trust, instantaneously.

Trust Related to Your Behavior

To me, building trust with a customer is behaving in a way that instills a baseline understanding that you are not going to screw them over. Yes, that’s a horribly low bar. But I believe it’s key to understand the importance of trust in this light, because it shouldn’t take much.

In fact, you are probably good with trust if you follow this simple principle: don’t be a dick. (I’m using this crude term intentionally because it highlights the point and its figurative usage is perfect for any gender; better than “jerk”, which is too light; or “asshole”, which is too crude and harsh.) It shouldn’t be difficult with a bar that low, but the most important concept for salespeople to understand is that you do not have their trust at first. You are presumed to be a dick; you are expected to screw them over…or at least to try.

Turn It Around: When Do You Trust?

When you step onto a used car lot, are you expecting the salesperson to have your best interest in mind? No, you are on guard and trying to avoid getting screwed. Why doesn’t everyone respond to your emails when they have a minute or pick up the phone when you call when they are free? They don’t trust you. You are going to eat up their time. You are trying to take their money. You might make them look foolish.

That’s why the baseline you need to establish is that you are not going to screw them over. In fact, it is critical that you make it clear that the opposite is the case: you have their best interests in mind, and that will encourage them to trust you.

Trust is a Derivative of Empathy

Earlier in my career, I was managing strategic accounts and one of them was a multi-billion technology company with a variety of large business units. I had a $1M+ opportunity with one of the business units and had developed a good relationship with the decision maker and champion, who was a Sr. Director.

I had always made it a point to engage at a personal level, but I’ve never spent a lot of time on my customers’ personal interests outside of their job. I believe it’s better to focus immediately on their business interests. Not only does it streamline things, but if I was a customer, I feel like I’d be on guard if a salesperson was asking a bunch of personal questions. Kind of cringey, actually.

I know inquiring and engaging in a customer’s personal life is a good tactic in some kinds of sales, but it doesn’t seem to be the case in technology. Plus, unless the customer has all the time in the world–which is never–you may be perceived as wasting it. Wasting someone’s time, of course, is bad for trust. Plus, by doing that, you could be being a dick in their eyes even though from your perspective, you are just trying to get to know them.

I was taking this Sr. Director to a baseball game and on the drive out, he told me, out of the blue, “I can tell if I have a good salesperson in the first two minutes.” I was surprised to hear this and super curious so I bit and asked him to explain. He said that he feels there are two types of salespeople; the ones who have your best interests in mind and the ones who have their own best interests in mind.

Whose Best Interests are Most Important?

He said he can tell within minutes because salespeople who have the customer’s best interests in mind ask questions to try to understand what’s important to the customer. Salespeople who don’t have the customer’s best interests in mind start to pitch their product. Or they might ask questions, but the questions are too obviously related to their objective. So these are some nuances that are important to consider.

In addition, this particular person has an intuitive ability to suss out a salesperson’s intentions. But regardless of your customer’s personal skills, there are certainly signs of whose best interests come first in initial conversations that can be noted by anyone. Both intuitive and non-intuitive customers are paying attention.

Putting Yourself in Your Customer’s Shoes

This conversation presented a great lesson for me, not because I wasn’t building trust in this way already but because of the realization that trust is something that customers actually think about. Of course, they don’t consciously think of it as trust, they think of it as whether you care about their best interests or not.

So when you think of it from the customer’s perspective, it becomes more clear just how important trust is. Repeating this for emphasis: the ability to make a customer feel like you have their best interests in mind is a huge part of building trust. And again, that’s partly because they are likely to assume you are naturally untrustworthy.

Human Nature: Fight or Flight When Expecting a Confrontation

For younger sales people who are used to a friendlier work environment than the ‘old days’, do not be alarmed. I do not believe that most customers are aggressively or even consciously distrustfu people. It’s more that the nature of the situation breeds distrust. You are trying to “push” something on them that they don’t know they need. It is obvious that your goal is to get them to spend money and most people find this less than appealing when they don’t know that what you’re selling will be valuable to them. Just put yourself in their shoes.

In contrast to the bad old days, the trust building process seems to be more subtle these days. Based on my experience over the last few decades, it seems like there are less salespeople acting like dicks. Plus, the trend towards product-led growth is fashioning a different kind of sales approach, just by the nature of engagement these days. Some trust gets built in before you even engage because customers can use the product before talking to a salesperson and don’t have to worry that it doesn’t work like you say it does.

The Perceived Nirvana of No Salespeople

Again, I say that sort of tongue-in-cheek, but we all know there’s some truth to it. Why else would people be all giddy about product-led growth solutions that don’t require salespeople to set all sorts of expectations that you innately question before you even see the product? See what I mean? It’s just reality.

There’s a Whole Range of Trust

Not only is building and maintaining trust a critical part of selling, but there are also various degrees of trust. Typically the degree of trust matters more as the deal size grows and more people get involved in the decision on the customer side. It’s one thing to trust a person in a 1-on-1 relationship. It’s a whole different thing to trust that person (and their team!) when you are about to expose a lot of other people, including your management, to them and their solution.

At that point, the degree of trust must be high and typically that is achieved by building trust with some of the other individuals involved so that the whole organization begins to trust you.

Extended Trust

It’s rare, of course, to have the opportunity and the time in most sales processes to build trust with all involved parties, especially in bigger deals. And for the most part, your champion’s management will assume you and your team are trusted if your champion is rolling with you with a great degree of confidence.

On that note, a gauge of trust is if your champion will introduce you to his or her management or to other groups in the company. Sometimes it’s a personality thing–if that’s an issue–but often it has to do with trust. Do they trust you to behave in a way that reflects well on them? Do they trust what you told them about your solution?

Personal Trust Isn’t Always Required

Of course, customers do sometimes buy from sellers they don’t completely trust. There are degrees. Sometimes it doesn’t take much work and sometimes it takes a lot. I believe sales is both an art and a science; and in fact, it could be an art or a science. There are degrees of trust, just like there are degrees of competence. The artful seller will build trust using personal skills. The scientific seller will build trust using organization and providing structure. Both are effective at building trust, but combining the two is by far the best approach.

Shared Trust is Powerful

But by far the most effective approach is to be introduced by someone the customer trusts already. If you are introduced by a seller who successfully transacted with the customer, you will gain a degree of trust.

However, it’s important to note that trust that you did not create on your own is very fragile. Just because they trust you initially doesn’t mean you will keep their trust; one breach could take you into the untrusted realm, and in that case you will have to fight your way back.

Investing in the “Emotional Bank Account”

The concept of an emotional bank account is a great way to look at trust in sales as well. If you are constantly building trust and a question about your character comes up, it is likely you will be able to stabilize things because you have made significant and consistent investments. If you invest very little, you are less likely to regain your footing if that same question comes up.

I mentioned the idea of being “not ok” earlier. I learned this from Guru Ganesh in Sandler training very early in my career. The general idea is that a misstep may cause a customer to go from “ok”, meaning feeling stable, open-minded and relatively positive in a sales process, to “not ok”, meaning feeling unstable, shut down and relatively negative. Ganesh makes a point of the importance of getting the customer back to “ok.” It’s an interesting perspective on the unique dynamic of the seller and customer engagement, and I believe that’s because trust is so massively important in sales.

The Golden Rule

If the idea of having to be careful to foster a fragile trust is stressful, there’s a simple mindset you can take on that is based on two of the oldest and wisest principles known to humankind. First, the golden rule. Treat other people like you want to be treated–which typically means with respect and kindness.

Second, seek first to understand, then to be understood. If you set your mind to these two principles and apply them both to the partner who introduces you as well as the customer who holds that fragile trust, it is unlikely to break.

Identifying Opportunities to Leverage Shared Trust

So back to the idea of gaining instantaneous trust…who are the most trusted partners to approach? The truth is that you rarely have the opportunity to choose. You are most likely connected to partners that are in your specific ecosystem, i.e., your category of software.

Of those partners, the most trusted ones would be specific to certain customers who have bought their solution–from that seller. In a lot of cases, the original seller was the most trusted and sellers who took over the account after the initial sale have to build it.

So that leaves limited options for partners in your category. If you have a partner in an account that has sold to that account, that’s your target. I’m a huge fan of partnerships, so I recommend partnering with any other sellers who are in the account or even those who are targeting the account.

But if you are trying to establish trust, the software seller who sold the solution to your target customer is going to be the key partner. Find out what they care about and approach them. But best to not put all your eggs in one basket. You should make it your goal to have at least two partners to collaborate with on any account.

Instantaneous Trust

The good news is that there is another category of partner that can relate to any ecosystem: the cloud provider.

It is likely that if you are targeting an enterprise-type account, there is a relationship with either AWS, Microsoft, or Google in place with the customer. In many cases, especially in larger enterprises, there are relationships with all three.

Cloud Provider Partner Power

Due to the nature of their business, the cloud provider sales teams are likely connected at the highest level and are likely aware of the customer’s software stack.

They are also likely to know how decisions are made, have an understanding of the procurement process, and have at least a sense of the political situation.

Perhaps more importantly, the cloud provider seller works for one of the top 5 largest and most powerful technology companies in the world. The size and influence of these companies leads to a degree of trust.

Maximizing Shared Trust

So if the individual seller has also built a strong relationship, you have the maximum degree of trust possible. All that is to say, if you are brought in by a cloud provider who has a relationship with the customer, you have the opportunity to gain trust instantaneously. The next best thing outside of actually being brought in is to at least be engaged with and known by the cloud provider sales team.

Engaging Shared Trust…Back to Empathy

It is key to understand that unlike salespeople for vendors who are in your ecosystem, it is very challenging to get the cloud providers attention and the approach is very similar to that of customers when it comes to building trust. You need to understand what they care about and how to approach them. It needs to be clear that you have their best interests in mind and that you will be valuable to the customer in a way that benefits all parties.

In general, practicing the principles above will go a long way. Similarly, getting educated on what the cloud providers care about, how to approach them, and what to be aware of throughout the sales process will put you in a position to leverage the highest degree of trust in an account.

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