How high is your sales trust factor?

Is it higher than the sales trust factor of your competition?

It should be, if you want to increase your success in sales.

Your trust factor represents the level of trust that buyers have in you as a seller. In the buy/sell relationship, perception is the reality under which sellers operate, and trust is based on the buyers perception of you.

You may be the most honest, trustworthy person in your field, but if buyers dont perceive you to be trustworthy because of your selling behaviors, it doesnt matter how trustworthy you are in reality.

Buyers Dont Trust Sellers What is the greatest challenge, usually unspoken, that sellers face when working with buyers?

Distrust.

The simple truth is buyers dont trust sellers. Unfortunately, because of the way a lot of people have sold in the past and still sell today, buyers have very good reasons not to trust sellers.

We all like to think were trustworthy. In fact, a study has shown that we think others trust us at significantly higher levels than they really do. For example, you may think that buyer A rates you as eight out of ten on the trust factor scale. When asked by a third party, however, the same buyer may actually rate you as five out of ten, the same they rate most other salespeople. Again, the reality is that most people mistrust sellers regardless of what they may tell you.

Trust YOUR Competitive Advantage To win more business, especially in todays competitive environment, its imperative that you create a separation point between you and your competitors based on trust. Notice I said YOU. For most products and services today, there is relatively little functional difference for the buyer among the available choices, even though companies continue to spend billions of dollars in advertising each year to attempt to create separation points in the minds of buyers.

Todays buyers are so busy and exposed to so much information that often they either ignore or do not recognize these efforts. Buyers have a difficult time making a purchase decision because they are not able to identify one product or service that is clearly superior to the others.

Its critical, then, that sellers focus on trust-building activities with prospects and customers and avoid trust-breaking activities. You must take it upon yourself to create a separation point in the mind of potential buyers between yourself and your selling competitors.

The best way to create this separation point is to increase your trust factor with your buyers.

You Need a Plan Given the perception of buyers, trust-building is not likely to occur simply as a result of your sales process.

If you attend the same training courses as other sellers in your industry, read the same books, say the same things, and use the same sales tools and techniques, chances are youre not going to create much of a separation with buyers based on trust.

Despite the fact that level of trust is the number one decision factor in many purchases, it is rarely addressed. If you were to take a look at the indexes of the ten most popular sales books, how many do you think would include the word trust in the index? Try it. If the books you read are like the books on my bookshelf, only one or two will even have the word listed in the index. The others probably have only a few paragraphs discussing the topic of trust.

So what IS your approach to overcome distrust, one of the most significant obstacles in the buy/sell relationship? Do you have a specific, well-thought out plan designed to overcome this obstacle and to build greater levels of trust with your prospects?

You must create an action plan and constantly focus on executing the plan in order to build trust. And once youre able to increase your trust factor with buyers, you will also see an increase in your sales.

Summary Three Key Points to Remember:

• Regardless of what you believe about your own level of trustworthiness, your trust factor with buyers is low.
• To increase sales, individual sellers must create their own separation point from competitors rather than rely on their product, service, or company to create the separation point.
• Sellers can create a separation point by building a greater level of trust with buyers versus their competitors.

Robert Reed

Rob Reed is a sales, marketing and management consultant and president of Terrakon Consulting. He is also an entrepreneur having launched and funded two previous start-ups. For five years, Rob was a management consultant with one of the top consulting firms in the country. He is a former top sales producer with the highest-rated sales force in health care selling high-end capital medical equipment to hospitals.

He has over fifteen years of marketing, consulting and sales experience and has worked or consulted for many well known companies including Anheuser-Busch, Boeing, Dillard Department Stores, Ernst & Young LLP, Hill-Rom Company, McKesson, Wellpoint and others.

Rob has researched over 25,000 pages of material related to sales, marketing, internet-based strategies and trust development. He has authored numerous white papers, book reviews and articles on sales and marketing and has been interviewed and quoted in Sales & Marketing Management and Selling Power magazines. He holds an MBA in marketing from Saint Louis University and a BSBA in marketing with a minor in psychology from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

He currently authors two sales and marketing blogs. Marketing Centricity for Small Business focuses on marketing and internet marketing strategies and tools for small businesses. Your Trusted Selling Brand targets salespeople, service firm professionals and business owners who want to win more customers by building the most trusted personal selling brand.