Sales Community - Building Trust with Your Customer
Randy Seidl
Board Member | CEO | CRO | Executive Recruiter | Sales Community Leader | Advisor | Consulting
Building Trust with Your Customer
A handwritten note along with Nick's best practices in building trust with your customer go a long way!
We're offering new members an opportunity to join the Sales Community free for a year with month of June promotion. Use the link below and join today!
_____________________________
Tech Sales Insights LIVE
We'll be live Wednesday, June 15th with guest Andy O'Brien, SVP General Manager at OpenLegacy. Join us live at 12PM EST, link below!
➔ This episode is sponsored by The Alexander Group, our GTM & Sales Compensation Partner. Alexander Group provides revenue growth consulting services to the world’s leading sales organizations. When clients need to grow revenue, they look to Alexander Group for data-driven insights, actionable recommendations and results.
Next up is Sean Foster, Chief Revenue Officer at Anomali on Wednesday, June 22nd at 12PM EST
Check out our previous episodes here: Tech Sales Insights LIVE
_____________________________
From Our Sponsors:
The Alexander Group
Upcoming Coverage Models Roundtable
As subscription and consumption models proliferate in this post-pandemic world, leading XaaS companies are embracing the opportunity to redesign or refine their coverage models. How is your leadership ensuring that you’re building the right coverage model and jobs for your situation to ensure profitable revenue growth?
Join Alexander Group and leading tech sales leaders to uncover our recent research on coverage model practices and the latest winning trends to create a successful 2022.
Recommended by LinkedIn
Gong
The #1 cause of forecasting misses?
Relying on the wrong metrics…
Which is why Gong turned to data to understand what stats impact forecasts the most. And after analyzing 10,332 deals – they found 6 metrics your forecast is (probably) missing.
The team compiled all of the learnings in the 6 Can’t-Miss Forecasting Metrics for Revenue Leaders.
You’ll find stats leaders can use to increase deal predicability and call their number down to the penny. Get all of the metrics here.
Sales Impact Academy
Sales Impact Academy is the world's leading GTM education platform and as part of our partnership they’re offering you and your team free access to their entire Academy for 30-days.
Sales and Leadership roles are hard. They’re also not considered in the higher-education system, leaving a gap in upskilling for success.
That’s why SIA have brought together leading industry experts, to bridge the gap and provide the ultimate primer for designing, building and scaling in your commercial role.
Join the Sales Community today to receive the exclusive 30-day free access to the entire Academy!
_____________________________
Randy's Tips to Sell More 👉 Excerpts from Your Go-To Sales Advisor
Building Trust with Your Customer
By Nick Oberhuber, VP of Sales at Fortanix
What the Idea Is: Building trust with your customer.
Why It Is Valuable: Building trust with your customer is absolutely critical before a customer will buy your solution. This is easier said than done.
How It Works: You can build trust in multiple ways. One that works well is to become a passionate advocate for the product you are selling. What does that mean? It does not mean learning the key messages that marketing tells you to learn. It does mean truly understanding how your product works technically, why it is unique, what problems it fixes, and how it is deployed. Without a deep understanding of these issues, you cannot develop a passion. You can try to fake passion, but a customer will sniff that out right away.
I believe good sales professionals should be able to run their own first calls and often their own second calls without help from systems engineering (SE). Some salespeople kid themselves into thinking they don’t need to understand the technology they sell that well because that is where their systems engineer fits in. Don’t let yourself be duped into having that wrong attitude. The SE will not be on the call when you finally reach the customer after many attempts at 5 p.m. on Friday afternoon on their way home, when they tell you the reason they have not called you back is they do not believe your solution meets their needs.
In addition to knowing what your product does, you should also know your key competitors and how they work, as well as adjacent systems and complementary products. And you need to know them well enough so you really understand your customers when they tell you about their challenges. Customers have been burned too many times by sales people who promise their product will solve their needs, but they over-promise and under-deliver. For a customer to even open up and share their challenges with you, they need to believe you will understand their challenges. If they do, they will share; and if they share, that goes a long way toward their beginning to trust you. One way customers test you to see if you are knowledgeable and trustworthy is listening to your responses. If you ask for additional clarification rather than just answering “yes” to their questions, it shows you understand where you fit and where you do not.
Another important reason to understand your product, your competitors, and your adjacent products is so you can ask intelligent questions. Trainers often say to sales people, “God gave you two ears and one mouth; use them proportionately.” Well, that works well if you show up and a customer just starts spilling their guts about what they want, what else they are looking at, etc., which almost never happens. You need to ask the customer questions. The quality of your questions will show the customer whether you know your stuff or not. The better your questions, the more likely the customer will open up and tell you about their challenges and goals. If you do not know your stuff, your questions will be weak and you will not be able to guide your customer toward your solution with the questions you ask. It is a virtuous cycle. The more you know, the better your questions; and the better your answers, the more likely you will be able to build trust. When the customer trusts you, your chance of winning business goes up exponentially.