June 11th, 2013

How to gain customers’ trust.
Author - Mick Merrick

Can you remember a time when you bought from a sales person that you didn’t trust? I frequently ask this question when I give talks on sales techniques. Quite often I can find people within the group who are prepared to buy from a salesperson they don’t like, but I can’t remember a single time someone put up their hand and said that they would buy from someone they didn’t trust.

And that makes sense doesn’t it? Because if we don’t trust the person we are buying from, how do we know what it is that we are buying?

Trust then is a pre-requisite for winning a customer. So, how do we generate trust in a new prospect that we hope we can turn into a customer?

The secret of generating trust is really quite straightforward. There are essentially four steps that we need to take, and they are as follows

1. showing interest in the customer
2. showing concern for the customer’s issues
3. showing expertise in dealing with those issues
4. offering solutions to their problems

With the possible exception of 3, everything we need to do is about the customer. The reason for this is very simple; customers don’t do business with us for our sake, they do it for their own. Customers are concerned only with their own problems and issues and will respond favourably towards people who help them to resolve those problems and issues.

If we are to win more customers we simply have to focus completely on solving their problems.

Now, when we do that well we will find that we generate something that is beyond trust; at Precept we call that Congruence. Congruence exists when the customer truly believes we are totally focused on achieving the same thing that they are. When we achieve Congruence a strange thing happens; the customer stops thinking about whom else they can buy from, they even stop thinking about getting the best possible price. In fact their only thought is how to get our help as quickly as possible.

The next time you are dealing with a new prospect try putting the four principles into practice and see how quickly you can win your next new customer.

If you’d like more tips and ideas to improve your selling please have a look at our website http://www.precept.uk.com/tips-and-advice-main/