(upbeat music)
- In order to earn the right
to ask status quo challenging questions,
it's important that you establish trust.
Now there are two types of trust, personal and professional.
Personal trust is all about your ability to be likable
through creating a genuine connection.
The characteristics that make up connection
are humility, authenticity, honesty,
and appropriate vulnerability.
Now professional trust is about your ability
to create respect
by demonstrating you and your company's credibility.
This credibility is made up
of knowledge, skills, and capability.
Let's take a look at what we call the sales trust matrix.
The sales trust matrix takes into account a combination
of both personal and professional trust.
Connection makes up the x-axis
and credibility makes up the y-axis.
Each letter represents a different type of salesperson.
Let's first look at salesperson A.
As you can see, salesperson A scores very low
on the personal trust axis in the mind of the customer.
Now, in thinking through the characteristics of connection,
they likely aren't very good at coming across
as humble, authentic, and/or honest
and appropriately vulnerable.
As a result, the customer feels uneasy around them
and doesn't trust them.
On top of that, they also scored low on credibility.
Somewhere along the line,
they were unable to come across
as knowledgeable and capable.
Now salesperson A is in the bottom left quadrant
of the trust matrix,
which is the worst possible place you can be.
The likelihood of the customer buying from them
is extremely low
and more than likely,
the questions they ask will be self-serving
and transactional in nature.
Now let's move on to salesperson B.
What you should notice about this person
is that the customer perceives them as very connecting.
They score quite high on the personal trust axis;
however, they don't seem to have a high mark
for their knowledge, skill, or capability,
at least as far as the customer can tell,
so they don't perceive them very much as credible.
Now this salesperson may be good
at asking more personal, relation-oriented questions
but not so good at switching gears
into the problem-centric, credibility-oriented questions.
Now, salesperson C is an interesting character.
They're the exact opposite of B.
They know all the answers,
they know the industry quite well,
and they're quick to demonstrate credibility
through their capability, but they're just not very likable.
They make little effort to connect
and they tend to come across as all about them,
no connection.
In this case, they likely jump right in with a series
of credibility-oriented, needs-analysis questions,
but because there's very little personal trust established,
the customer will give limited information
and likely be guarded and on the defensive.
Finally, you've got salesperson D.
Obviously, they're the complete package.
They do a great job of connecting to build personal trust,
they demonstrate great humility and authenticity,
while at the same time coming across
very knowledgeable, skillful, and capable.
Their questioning approach balances personal connection
with professional credibility
and they earn the customer's personal
and professional trust.
So here are the keys to remember.
Not until someone trusts you personally
or has a connection with you
are they open to how you can help them professionally
or your ability to demonstrate credibility.
Once you've established personal trust,
you're much more likely to get them to participate
in more of your credibility-centered questions,
assuming that you can wrap them around their goals
in the problems they're attempting to solve.
It's important to think about the questions you ask
and determine whose agenda you're on,
which type of trust you're trying to reinforce,
and if you're balanced in your approach.
If you are, you will create the type of engagement
that generates full cooperation from your prospect
and eagerness to learn more from you.
(upbeat music)