Trust plays a HUGE part in the sales process. Matter of fact, trust plays a huge part in all aspects of our lives. Do we trust the person in the lane next to us to let us over? Do we trust the person driving us around to keep us safe? Do we trust a significant other with our heart? Do we buy from a person or are they just full of shit? Pretty much everything detail of our life, no matter how small or large, involves trust on some level. I wanted to shed some light on how trust has evolved and what you can do to earn it when you need it.
This whole story came to my mind this past weekend. I was minding my business, after grilling some kick-ass tasty steaks. After my family and I finished eating, we headed to the living room. After about 2 minutes all we hear is the sound of a dog (or quite possibly two) barfing its guts out somewhere in the home we just bought a few weeks ago. As I launched up over my couch, only to be cleared double front flip style by my wife, and ran into the next room I was shocked, pissed and disgusted all at the same time. I’ll spare you the details but my carpet is fucked. And the mess? Oh, my wife and I both threw up from the nastiness of it all. Needless to say I beat a dog’s ass that night. To top it off my dogs lost my trust. They now have to live outside for a while. In a instant 6 years of trust, gone. This incident got me to thinking…
Back in the day people where probably pretty cool in general. We all came to this great place called America to get away from wars and all the bullshit the rest of the world was involved in. When you watch old TV shows and movies the people seem to trust each other more than in modern featured films. My great- grandma always left her door unlocked in her home. They had skeleton keys, so what was the point. She would say “a lock only keeps an honest person out” But I’ll bet you anything that after leaving her door open for 60+ years, if she would have got robbed once, it would have been Fort Knox in there.
That older generation of trust is gone, just like my Great-Grandma. We’ve all been duped, screwed, manipulated, lied to and generally fucked over to the point that we are all now skeptics. When you pick up the phone and call someone to sell them something, they have a gatekeeper and all the other “security” stuff because they don’t trust salesmen not to peddle bullshit. I mean think about it. How many times have you bought something expecting it to solve a problem only to be let down? Did you feel lied to? I know I have and do, when it happens to me. If it happens to us, guess what? It happens to everyone. Including your prospects and potential clients. This makes the trust barrier harder to cross. You must first command trust, before you can demand a sale.
How can you build real trust with prospects fast?
What I am about to share with you is in no way any kind of “revolutionary” new shit. It’s gonna be my spin on how things work in regard to trust in a sales relationship. If you are one of those “oh he didn’t come up with that by himself” types then do me a favor and just shut the fuck up will ya? Now with that out of the way…
You can imagine life in the, let’s say 1940s when dudes rolled into a new town with a “magic elixer” or “the steam engine” and everybody jumped on board to buy stuff. If you could make a compelling argument to buy using your words, you could pretty much run things anywhere you went. Napoleon Hill is a great example of this. He was basically a traveling salesman that mastered a few small NLP tactics that changed his and many other’s lives. If you screwed one of the buyers over they would tell everyone. The neighbors, co-workers, other farmers and anyone they could. Hell, in some cases they would run you out of town or kill ya.
Fast forward to the 1960s and when the Vietnam war was going on. Ou citizens found out, for the first time, how our Gov was lying to them about all sorts of different stuff. From the war to drugs people stopped trusting the Government to the extend they had in the past. The 60s movement was like the no BS movement. This generation is often portrayed as dope-smoking hippies but the truth is they were and are wide awake.
Let’s fast forward again to the 90s. The 90s were the years when censorship really was tested. Gangster rap and death metal arrived on the scene and again, we had a generation that was BS intolerant. If we didn’t like a brand we cut them off. In some places like LA they had riots over lost trust with the police.
