Charles H. Green says: Put your customers’ interests first and watch your sales increase.
People want to buy from those they trust. The best way to be trusted by your customers is simply to be worthy of their trust. Be trustworthy. That means truth-telling and transparency. Above all, a relentless focus on the best interests of your customers will earn their trust.
Pick one of these simple ideas:
- You get more sales by getting people what they want than by trying to sell them what you want.
- If you stop trying to control people, they’ll cooperate with you.
- If you listen to people first, they will then listen to you.
- If you help people you increase your chances of making sales.
- If you put your customers’ interests ahead of your own, you’ll end up better off than if you tried to achieve your own ends directly.
If you constantly serve your customers’ ends, you’ll gain a reputation for being trustworthy. When people trust you, they hassle you less about price, they refer you to others, you get fewer competitive and more sole-source bids, higher repeat rates and far more cooperation from your customers.
Successfully selling yourself on building a trust-based relationship is a win-win. Customers get their interests served better, and you get your interests served better. But this only happens when you don’t lead from your own self-interest.
That simple, internal sales job is not all that easy. But the very best salespeople in nearly all industries have managed to make that sale. They have convinced themselves that everyone, themselves included, is better off if their primary focus is serving their customers.
Put it another way: Make your own sales not a goal, but a byproduct, a byproduct of making customer satisfaction your primary goal.
Charles H. Green is the founder of Trusted Advisor Associates and a speaker and executive educator on the role of trust in professional services. He’s taught executive education programs at Kellogg and Columbia Business Schools. Author of Trust-Based Selling, and co-author of The Trusted Advisor, Charles has written for the Harvard Business Review, American Lawyer and the CPA Journal. He blogs at http://www.trustedadvisor.com/blog.
Via Entrepreneur
