Trust.
It remains a hot issue and will for a while.
With that, we at Egyii will be doing a series of interviews and Podcasts with the leaders in Trust, in anticipation of our August announcement on our new programme on Trust.
The second of the series is Charles H. Green, one of the founding fathers of the “trust movement ” and founder/CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates. He is the author of Trust Based Selling and co-author of The Trusted Advisor. His expertise is in trusted relationships in business. For more on Charlie, click here.
Here is Part 2 (a continuation of Part 1).
The following is transcribed from a recorded session.
Trip Allen: Moving on to 2006, the theme of your second book called “Trust Based Selling,” encompasses two words: sales and trust.
These terms together have a bad reputation and don’t mix well with the business world, a little like oil and water. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
Charlie Green: Well, you are exactly right and I was completely conscious of that when I wrote it that way. In fact one major firm told me if you write a book with “sales” in the title we are not buying it. The phenomena you just mentioned is that strong, and I wrote that way any way because I wanted to play off the tension.
I think the word sales or selling is a four letter word. We all have these negative feelings about it, and the whole sales function in many ways has gotten a bad name, too.
What fascinated me about is that sales is where the person and the business come together. When a company buys from one and sells to another, with the exception of reverse online auctions, there are people doing “the deal,” and that is where institutions come together, where they connect. That is what fascinated me – how do people behave when there is serious money at stake and they are doing business? That is the essence of commercial relationship; commerce, in the old sense of the word.
I am happy with the choice I made, because I think it intrigues people. They say “how can you put those two together?” Well, you examine why they don’t fit, and it turns out to be a very interesting way of looking at it.
In a nutshell, there is nothing that sells better than being trusted – period. That’s the power of trust in the commercial relationship. I just find it fascinating.
Trip Allen: Charlie, what’s the biggest thing you see wrong with selling today? You just mentioned that the reputation of a salesperson is bad, but what else do you see out there? What’s happening?
Charlie Green: Well, it’s a great question because 10 to 15 years ago the biggest problem was salespeople selling and really not understanding the customer very well. I think we have come to have a different problem and that is, let me call it the “mechanisation” of selling or the overdoing of “process reengineering” and the overuse of sales management systems.
Because of that we have broken the personal relationship and we have taken that “commercial” personal relationship (that I mentioned) and broken into a thousand mechanistic, metrics based, measurable behaviour based process. We have taken something that is, ought to be and can be very personal and have essentially depersonalised it. We have gotten to a level of detail where too often metrics have taken over from what the metrics were supposed to be measuring. People have therefore long ago “lost the forest for the trees” and have gotten deep in sequentially linked behaviours, so there is no relationship left.
I would actually say that is the biggest problem in selling today. We have lost the long term interpersonal relationship component of it. Every business I can think of out there still has an enormous amount of room for an increase in the level of relationships, and again, nothing is still better than that.
Trip Allen: Great Charlie. One thing I am going to pull specifically from the book and one of the many activities I use – and I believe is very powerful, is called “selling by doing and not telling.”
Traditionally salespeople told clients about the products, the features, the benefits etc. Salespeople have pretty much controlled the conversation. Can you elaborate a little bit on “selling by doing not telling?”
Charlie Green: Yes, and thank you for raising that. I agree with you, that is one of the powerful ideas in the book. If you think of it this way, with “selling by doing and not telling,” the more complicated the product, the more intangible the service, the longer relationship, the more difficult the whole sales process is, the less it is likely to be about snap decision and product qualities and so forth.
It’s complicated.
What you don’t want if you are buying a jet engine or if you are buying an audit or buying a brand advertising campaign, is to “out the expert the expert.” That is an endless game that you will never win as a client or a customer.
What you really want to do is to be able to sleep at the night knowing you made the right decision about the person you deal with. And that is not going to come through PowerPoint presentations, Etc.; people are human beings and not persuaded of the trustworthiness of another human being by overused tools such as PowerPoint decks. We’d like to think they are, and they will tell us they are, but they are not.
We are all human beings and profoundly make trust judgments based on much more of a “gut feel,” emotional feelings through connectivity and emotional feelings of safety. And that’s simply the way it is. I think we sort of rationalize it with all the logic and the data because, after all, we are supposed to be able to justify things.
That’s all true. But “selling by doing” basically says, instead of telling somebody about all the other past clients and all the wonderful things you have done, leave that behind and “just do it.” Deal with the person in front of you and deal with their issues, with their concerns and bring to them all the wonderful things and experiences you can deliver for them.
Just to simplify, I like to say it is like going out on a blind date with somebody. If they were to talk about the last seventeen people they went out with, you would be bored and offended.
But if on the other hand, what if your date is interesting, innovative and engaging and instead they ask you questions about you, we love that. We love it when people make the topic and conversation about us.
We need to take our expertise and apply it in real time to the problem at hand as it affects the person sitting in front of us. They don’t want to hear our resume or our history. They want to hear what our resume means for them. That’s what “selling by doing and not telling” is all about.
Trip Allen: Great. Thank you for that. The next question has to do a bit with “selling by doing a not selling,” but it is all about collaboration. That is another key point you have in your book “Trust Based Selling.” How does collaboration improves trust and thereby improve the relationship?
Charlie Green: Well collaboration is one of the important elements I outlined in the book and it goes well beyond selling actually, although we will focus on the selling aspect only.
The other three key elements on the list are transparency, focus on the well being of the client (for sake of client and not just for us) and the tendency to look at the medium to long term (rather than just the short term).
Collaboration may be just the most important of the four elements. In any case, what collaboration means is a fundamental mindset. It says “I am not in this for me and dealing with you as an object. We are in this together. We are in for the sake of however long this relationship is going to be, working together for the greater outcome for both of us, but mainly for you, the client.”
So any decision we make has to be good one for both of us. We both have to be involved in it. We can’t keep too many secrets from each other. And if you begin thinking that way, you will begin behaving that way. You’ll start sharing more information with your customer, you’ll start feeling more free to ask them questions. After all, you have to know their answers in order to be collaborative, and frankly it even begins in the selling process.
In those businesses that have process of using proposals, my “radical” suggestion is to write the next proposal, sitting next to the client in their offices. Instead of saying “great discussion” or “I’ll get back to you with the proposal later this week,” say “let’s book the conference room again and let’s work on this together. I know it is a proposal and, we may not get the job, I understand that. But if we may do this, you will have, at the end of the day, the best proposal possible from the combination of the two of us. By the way I suggest doing that with other potential vendors also. You will learn so much more about working with people if you begin working with them.’
That is an example of the power of collaboration.
End of Part 2. To be continued…
Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore
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