Overcome obstacles to sales by building customers' trust

In a recent article, corporate trainer Zig Ziglar wrote, “Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.”

He goes on to explain that as business owners, while you can’t control the lack of need, money, urgency or desire, the one thing you can control is trust.

We can all agree that in recent months there has been a loss of trust in business – all you have to do is skim the newspaper headlines to see that.

In fact Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations firm just released its 10th annual Trust Barometer for 2009. Not surprisingly, trust in U.S. business is the lowest it has ever been in Edelman’s tracking history - at 38 percent compared to 58 percent a year ago. It’s lower now that it was in the wake of Enron and the dot-com bust.

The study, which can be accessed at www.edelman.com/trust/2009, only confirms the wisdom that Ziglar imparts - trust affects consumer spending. Here’s a quick glimpse at some of the findings:

• “In the past year, 91 percent of 25-to-64-year-olds around the world indicated they bought a product or service from a company they trusted, and 77 percent refused to buy a product or service from a company they didn’t trust.

• Trust is one of the most important factors in determining a company’s reputation. It ranks just below quality of products and treatment of employees.

Likewise, in the first ever BBB/Gallup Trust in Business Index survey commissioned recently by Better Business Bureau, nearly one in five respondents said their trust in the businesses they regularly deal with has decreased in the last 12 months. Our national statistics support this trend. For the past five years the number of consumers both inquiring and complaining to BBB has steadily risen.

So if customer trust is something companies can control, why is it declining? And more importantly as a business owner, what can you do about it?

Define trust as it relates to your company. What does trust mean to you and how does it relate to your mission? What does it mean to your customers? Employees? Once you have a definition, live by it. It doesn’t work if you say your business is trustworthy. You have to act on it.

Below are the Standards for Trust that all BBB supporting businesses agree to uphold as a condition of their membership. If you’re not a member, consider pulling from them to develop your own internal standards. If you are accredited by BBB, now would be the time to let the world — or at least your potential customers — know these are the standards you uphold.

BBB Standards for Trust

• Build Trust: Establish and maintain a positive track record in the marketplace.

• Advertise Honestly: Adhere to established standards of advertising and selling.

• Tell the Truth: Honestly represent products and services, including clear and adequate disclosures of all material terms.

• Be Transparent: Openly identify the nature, location, and ownership of the business, and clearly disclose all policies, guarantees and procedures that bear on a customer’s decision to buy.

• Honor Promises: Abide by all written agreements and verbal presentations.

• Be Responsive: Address marketplace disputes quickly, professionally, and in good faith.

• Safeguard Privacy: Protect any data collected against mishandling and fraud, collect personal information only as needed, and respect the preferences of consumers regarding the use of their information.

• Embody Integrity: Approach all business dealings, marketplace transactions and commitments with integrity.

“Trust affects the quality of every relationship, every communication, every effort in which we are engaged … by behaving in ways that build trust with one, you build trust with many.” - Stephen M.R. Covey.

(Better Business Bureau of Southern Arizona)

Be effective in tough times and win back trust: Stephen Covey

Stephen R Covey has this knack of delivering the goods in a way that others sit up and listen. When the he penned The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989, few imagined it would sell 15 million copies worldwide. Even its audio version became the first non-fiction audio-book in US publishing history to sell more than a million copies. With this success, Covey was set for self-help stardom .

Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1996 and ‘The Chief Executive’ magazine named ‘7 habits’ as the most influential book of the 20th century. Covey followed this chartbuster with The 8th Habit where he observes that effectiveness does not apply to the knowledge-age worker.

Instead, he contends “the challenges and complexity we face today are of a different order of magnitude” . So The 8th Habit prods people to “find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.” His other best-sellers include First Things First and Principle-Centred Leadership.

The 76 year old vice chairman of professional services firm Franklin Covey, who will be in India in a few days time, believes a recession is the right time to gain competitive advantage. Though a bit concerned about the argumentative traits of Indians, he is a great admirer of the country’s spiritualism and believes that if channeled properly, it can lead to the country becoming a global powerhouse again.

As a thought leader, Covey today is the toast of many a government and corporation for advice on managing change, and that includes President-Elect Barrack Obama’s transition team. Having worked with ex-Presidents like Ronald Reagen, George Bush Sr, and Bill Clinton, he is now helping foster a more creative culture in Obama’s team. Excerpts from a candid interview with CD:

How can you be effective in time when negativism is so pervasive ?
This is a perfect time to create long-term competitive advantage . It’s in times like these that people can adapt and make sacrifices . This is really an opportunity for creative businesses to gain long-term competitive advantage. Even if we find that we are not in control of anything, one always has the power of choice to do what one can do.

Every management expert says that tough times should be used to build competitive advantage. But is it easy to think about building competitive advantage when all you are thinking of is survival?

It’s tough because everything around people is negative. When the external factors over which one has no control in a way start to become negative it starts to affect our creative juices. You have to be creative in these times and take advantage of this ‘valley’ and turn it into a ‘peak’ , a new initiative can make a difference and the key to that is to move away from the industrial age model because the industrial age model is top down and command-and-control.

And tough times help unleash the creative force in people’s own professional lives and that feeds upon itself and the creative juices get going again. It’s not easy but it’s within reach. And it’s the perfect time to do so.

Do you believe it was plain greed that was responsible for the present state of many companies?
Yes. People were being rewarded for the wrong things and that leads to greed. It’s an example of using an Industrial Age model in the new Knowledge Worker Age we are in today. We had a risk reward system that bred greed. Today confidence is pretty low, people are becoming very pessimistic and almost paranoid and it dries up all the creative juices within us.

Hasn’t trust been the biggest casualty in recent times?
Exactly. It’s because of misaligned systems. The system rewards people for the wrong things, for not being creative but more on the lines of getting the numbers. And then that’s all that’s in their minds.

This profits vs principles war is seeing the wrong winner in some cases. Do you think there needs to be a rethink on the ‘hows’ of the business?
I think that’s part of it. People have to look up to themselves to begin with - an inside out approach. They must also learn how to involve other people all the way; to involve the entire organisation to look at these issues; to develop systems and structures which reward the right things.

What’s the new model of openness that you are advocating these days?
It involves being clear and transparent. In taking the reality of what is happening with the people and then asking them: What do you think we can do in this situation? You will find that it will work on the basic underlying forces that produce trust and openness. We have had misaligned systems that rewarded people for wrong things and this has been happening all around the world.

This is the perfect time to unleash people’s creative energies and come up with new creative ideas and companies can do this with suppliers and their customers because everybody is feeding on the paranoia and the fear.

It’s like a cancer that feeds upon itself and people get victimised by all these forces. So they criticise, they complain, they compare, they become cynical, they compete. This is the perfect time to take advantage of this and turn it around. And you have to be creative on how to do that and that will be the main challenge.

Why have you focused on habits to bring about change?
Because people co-relate habits of thought and habits of actions which are completely misaligned with these new realities. And it’s like trying to play tennis with a golf club. The habits, not only of people, but also the structures of the system (Covey calls them habits of organisations) of the organisation are misaligned. The result is that people get negative and pessimistic and discouraged and disparaged and that feeds on itself.

(The Economic Times)

Build trust through ability, competence and empathy

• "Consultative Sales" -- Something new? • What does "sales" have to do with helping others? • Building trust is a key to sales success, but how?

This semester, a student approached me before my first class and asked, "Is this course going to cover this new thing in business-to-business sales called consultative selling? My boss mentioned it, your students from last semester talked about it, I even heard it mentioned on the golf course. I `Googled' the phrase and got more than 1,700,000 hits. What's the short answer?"
My first thought was, "New!" My second thought, "Short answer!" Consultative selling has been around since the early 1970s in one form or another. That this student did not know about it, however, was no surprise. Many people, some in sales, believe that sales success depends on fast talking, pressure, manipulation and never taking "no" for an answer. They are wrong. Willy Loman is dead! I told her, "You are in luck! Consultative selling is the subject of the entire course." I went on to say that it's similar to the process used by other professionals who "consult" in law, finance, medicine, IT and other fields. The process involves researching the client before the first visit, establishing rapport, asking strategic questions, interpreting responses in financial and human terms, and offering comprehensive solutions to customers' needs. These are the steps, but they are just the rudiments. A successful B2B consultative sales person knows that being successful comes from helping clients meet needs. This is done through having a strong customer orientation and being a trusted advisor. Mutual trust is critical. A Swiss study of sales relationships indicates that trust is the most important factor in long-term success. Developing trust takes time, and it's done through demonstrating dependability, competence and empathy. Dependability comes from simple acts of courtesy, such as showing up for appointments on time, honoring promises and keeping confidences. Show you are good for your word. Competence comes from experience and training. Companies worldwide spend billions to develop capable sales people. Hewlett-Packard, for example, trains its sales professionals to become business consultants to their technologically sophisticated buyers. HP sales professionals learn about their products and services and their competitors, too. Empathy is the ability to see things from the other's perspective. This requires active listening to generate an environment of understanding and sincerity. The ability to pick up on subtle cues and remember small details demonstrates a customer orientation that creates feelings of trust. In short, success in consultative selling could be summed up by a comment from Zig Ziglar, a well known motivational speaker. He once observed, "You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want."- (Charlotte Obserer, 16 Sep 07)