Building Trust in Sales Conversations
I’ve really been enjoying teaching my Selling with Soul Masterclass. If you haven’t yet registered, come join me here. This week someone asked, “How do I really build someone’s trust in a sales conversation? Because it feels like people come to the call and they’re really suspicious about the conversation, and they feel like I’m just gonna sell to them.”
This is a great question – one of the most important aspects of having a really great sales conversation is building trust with the person who’s on the other end of the line or sitting in front of you.
There are a couple of ways that I like to build trust.
The first way is to have your sales conversations over Zoom so that they can see you and you can see them. There’s just something really amazing that happens when the two of you can see each other.
Second, make sure that you’re not passive in your sales conversation. What I mean by “passive” is you’re following a script, and then you let the person just talk and talk and talk, and you’re not asking clarifying questions.
One of the best ways to build trust in a sales conversation is to ask questions. Questions show that you are actually listening and show that you understand what the person is saying.
Oftentimes, the reason that somebody comes to you is that they’re unclear. They’re unclear about what they want. They’re unclear about where they eventually want to go. When you ask them questions like, What are you struggling with? What do you want to have a year from now? they answer in an unclear way – not because they’re trying to be difficult, but because that’s part of their problem. They just don’t know.
Your job is to be like a detective and to ask them questions that create clarity.
For example, say someone comes to me and I ask, “What are you struggling with?”
They might say, “Well, I feel like I’m doing all the things and nothing is working.”
I could just keep going to the next question on my script and write down, “They feel like they’re doing all the things but nothing is working.”
But, instead, I come back and say, “Tell me the activities that you’re doing.”
And they’ll say, “Well, I’m posting on social media.”
And again, I could just move on to the next question on the script. But it’s still not clear what is not working.
So I’m going to ask again, “What does it mean that you’re posting on social media? What are you posting? How often are you posting?”
They answer, “Oh, I’m posting once a week on Instagram and I’m posting inspirational quotes.”
I then know that social media is part of their problem – they’re posting things that aren’t going to get people’s attention. And I tell them so.
I can write that down in my notes, but I have only gotten to that point because I asked the questions.
More often than not, people will say to you, “Oh goodness! That’s a great question! I had never thought of that before.”
Often after a really good sales conversation, people will say to me, “Monica, I’ve never had somebody spend so much time helping me get clear with my answers and what I want. I really appreciate your degree of listening.”
That is why it is crucial that you’re not passive in your conversation and just let people talk. It’s important that you’re interrupting in a nice way and asking questions to make sure you really have total clarity about what they want, the obstacles in front of them, and the reasons why they’re not getting their desires.
This also creates powerful trust between the two of you.
My invitation to you right now is to try doing your sales conversations on Zoom if you can’t do them face-to-face in person. And while you are on those convos – pretend that you are a detective. Keep asking questions until you have total clarity.
I also want to invite you to register for my virtual Selling with Soul Masterclass. I’m going to teach you how to create connection, authenticity, and trust with the person on the other end of the line so that people are inspired and say, “Yes! I want to work with you!”
You can register for FREE here: www.SellingwithSoulClass.com.
