WD3
Please review the article “Don’t Treat Clients Like Competitors” listed attached. What are you overall thoughts about the article? What 4 major points do you believe this article is making about trust-based selling? How do these four points align with the content of Chapter 4? Are there any points in the article with which you disagree? Would you recommend this article to a new salesperson just starting in the business?
350-500 Words
take the tq diagnostic testnew are you as trustworthy as you think?
a Trusted Advisor.com article
Charles H. Green, 200
6
The words “trust” and “selling” are rarely mentioned in the same
sentence, and some people feel that “trust-based selling” is an
oxymoron. That says something about the relationships between
sellers and their clients.
And it’s one reason that professional services firms don’t like the “S”
word. We prefer euphemisms like “business development,” itself
phrased in the passive voice as if to distance ourselves as far as
possible from the crassness of commerce.
Trust-based Selling® is a principled way of approaching the com-
mercial relationship between two parties. It is not a methodology,
or a process model; it can coexist with existing methodologies or
processes, as long as they are not manipulative or selfish.
People—including sophisticated clients—are overwhelmingly dis-
posed to buy what they need to buy anyway from someone they
trust. They trust people who are trustworthy— worthy of trust.
Trustworthiness can be defined as behavior in accord with certain
principles.
Relevant Resources
Article:
Clients, Values and
Guiding Principles
Article:
The Relationship
is the Customer
Blog Post:
Four Principles of
Organizational Trust:
How to Make Your
Company Trustworthy
Don’t Treat Clients Like Competitors!
The Four Principles of Trust-Based Selling
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take the tq diagnostic testnew are you as trustworthy as you think?
Charles H. Green, 2006
Don’t Treat Clients Like Competitors!
The Four Principles of Trust-Based Selling
There are four such principles. Trust-based Selling means applying these prin-
ciples across all stages of the sales process, all
aspects of selling, and all characteristics of
the client/professional relationship. Those
principles are:
Client focus for the sake of the client;1.
Medium to long-term 2.
perspective;
A habit of collaboration with 3.
the client; and
Transparency in all things 4.
with
the client.
In total, the principles of
Trust-based Selling define an
alternative to the heavily compe-
tition-based paradigm that defines
most approaches to selling.
Let’s look first at each principle and its
applications.
Client Focus for the Client’s
Sake
A lot of what goes by the name “client focus”
or “customer-centric” these days is a bit mis-
leading. It is client-focused, all right—but in
the same sense that a vulture is client-focused.
The focus benefits the seller, not the buyer.
For example, loyalty programs are designed
by paying very close attention to exactly
what clients are looking for. CRM systems
are designed (and sold) to allow very fine
analyses of client behaviors and preferences.
But in each case, their ultimate purpose is
to enhance the bottom line of the seller, not
the client.
The more refined and the more pervasive
those measurements become, the more obvi-
ous it becomes to the client that “having his
needs met” isn’t really about him at all. Instead,
it’s about getting a greater share of his wallet.
When we treat clients like
we treat supply
chains, they will feel like supply
chains.
They
become means to the seller’s ends, rather than
valued as ends in themselves.
Client vulture focus comes from the com-
petitive paradigm: a semi-conscious belief
that selling is a zero-sum game in which we
compete with our clients.
In Trust-based Selling, client focus is prac-
ticed for the sake of the client. This doesn’t
mean we are oblivious to the impact on us as
When we
treat clients like
we treat supply
chains, they will
feel like supply
chains.
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take the tq diagnostic testnew are you as trustworthy as you think?
Charles H. Green, 2006
Don’t Treat Clients Like Competitors!
The Four Principles of Trust-Based Selling
sellers, but it does mean we approach clients
in fundamentally different ways.
Medium to Long-Term
Perspective
A lot of firms feel that their time perspective
is reasonable—a bit short-term, perhaps, but not
out of line. But look at behaviors.
Most approaches to profes-
sional selling are derived from
industrial process models;
they all have a few things
in common. For one, they all
have arrows, going from left
to right. For another, the last
step is almost always “closing,” followed by
a feedback loop that says “go back to start
and repeat.” That is a short-term model. It’s a
transaction model whose end is closing. How
much reward does your firm give to maintain-
ing the relationship and how much to the sum
of the year’s transactions?
Trust-based Selling focuses on the rela-
tionship, not
the transaction.
This longer-
term focus takes care of much of the concern
that some people have over the client focus
principle. They need not worry that the client
will take advantage of free services and bleed
the provider dry.
In the long term, it is not just unfair but
infeasible for the provider to lose money and
the client to make money. In the long term,
unequal relationships are simply unsustainable.
The discipline of thinking long-term forces
provider and client alike to think in terms of
win-win or lose-lose, rather than the competi-
tive paradigm of win-lose or lose-win.
A Habit of Collaboration
In most approaches to selling, the firm
and client spend most of their time apart
from each other. Firms spend the majority
of their time imagining what the client might
be thinking, how the client might react to our
guess about what they might be thinking, and
even more time developing elaborate “what-if ”
scenarios about how to respond to and control
the client’s reactions to our guesses. What an
elaborate substitute for simply asking clients
what they think and talking about it!
Again, the paradigm underlying the usual
belief is competition. We act like face time
Trust-
based Selling
focuses on the
relationship, not
the transaction.
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Charles H. Green, 2006
Don’t Treat Clients Like Competitors!
The Four Principles of Trust-Based Selling
must be “managed,” as if client interactions
are theatrical events which require staging
and rehearsal.
Trust-based Selling urges collabora-
tion. Significant selling acts are undertaken
together. The next time you write a pro-
posal, instead of doing it back at the office
and FedExing and emailing
files, what if you were to book
the conference room and write
the proposal with the client
with each of you bringing to
the process all the informa-
tion needed to prepare the best
proposal possible?
That is collaboration. It
doesn’t guarantee you get the job.
That’s not the point. The point is to help the
client get the best possible proposal while you
are secure in the belief that, if you behave con-
sistently in a trustworthy manner, you will get
more than your fair share of the business—in
truth, much more.
Again, the resistance to collaboration comes
from our internalized beliefs that somehow
we are in competition with our clients.
Transparency in All Things
Being trustworthy means, above all else,
having the client’s best
interests at heart.
One
way to demonstrate this is to be open with
them in all mutual affairs. Conversely, the
biggest reason a client might suspect we don’t
have their best interests at heart is a sense
that we are hiding something. So make sure
your policies are right and then don’t hide
anything.
In particular, be willing to discuss sensi-
tive issues like pricing policies, reasons for
discounts, leverage models, overhead models,
staff assignment models, even billing rates.
And be prepared to insist that if you share
such information, the client will give you
adequate time to do a good job of putting
that information in its proper context.
Most firms find transparency the most radi-
cal principle of all: “There’s no way we’d tell
them our billing rates. They’d freak out!” But
they already know you have billing rates and
make their own guesses without any context
to understand them. Remember your feelings
when you first heard your billing rate? Most
likely initially you were overwhelmed with
Being
trustworthy
means, above
all else, having
the client’s best
interests at heart.
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take the tq diagnostic testnew are you as trustworthy as you think?
Charles H. Green, 2006
Don’t Treat Clients Like Competitors!
The Four Principles of Trust-Based Selling
responsibility. Later, you started wondering
where all that money went.
It’s the same with clients. The solution isn’t
to keep secrets from them; it’s to explain real-
ity to them. You gain three benefits by being
transparent:
You show you’ve got nothing to hide;1.
You distinguish yourself by so 2.
doing;
If your policies are weak, 3.
wrong or inconsistent, you’ll
find out fast and have to fix
them so they’re stronger—in
which case, repeat the first
two benefits.
Why do we resist transpar-
ency? Again, the culprit is the com-
petitive mindset we bring to bear in selling. In
this case, we are afraid that if we share certain
information, the “other party”—in this case,
a potential client—will use that information
against us, or we will lose advantage. That is
the language of competition, not of trusted
relationships.
We must stop viewing our clients as our
competitors. What we fear, we
empower.
If
we treat our potential clients as competitors
during the sales process, we will end up with
competitors.
The cycle has to stop with us. We need to
sell from principles of trust, rather than from
principles that create more competitors in the
very process of gaining clients. Trust begins
in the sales process, if we have the courage
to put it there.We must
stop viewing
our clients as
our competitors.
What we fear, we
empower.
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