Insight Selling: Surprising Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently

Chapter 7On Trust

Think about the experience you had when you bought something and you felt good about it. It can be the person who mows your lawn. It can be the person you bought the lawn mower from. It could be the cable guy that came to fix something and stayed 20 minutes to explain things. It typically involves some human interaction where somebody said, “Have you thought about this?” “That might not work for you,” or “I don’t think you need this size. I think you need this.” Doesn’t it make sense that you’d rather understand what you’re buying? That you’d rather buy something from somebody in the future because you trusted their advice and their counsel? That’s who we want to be.

We’re trying to build relationships and we’re trying to do the right thing by the customer. Why? Because it works.

—Gerry Cuddy, chief executive officer (CEO), Beneficial Bank

Becoming Essential

Because your relationship is only so strong, and your trust is only as deep as the most difficult conversation it survives, trust is essential for insight selling success. To reframe how a buyer thinks, and influence what a buyer does, sellers must guide them out of the calm sea of the comfort zone and into riskier waters. Leaving the comfort zone, however, can be, well, uncomfortable for buyers. If they go there, they prefer to do so with people they trust.

Perhaps the most cited part of our What Sales Winners Do Differently research is the list of the top 10 factors that separate the winners of major ...