“Credibility, trustworthiness, and rapport are three behaviors that you can focus on to make sure your buyer knows how much you care about them.” – Julie Thomas in today’s Tip 1181
Do you build credibility, trustworthiness, and rapport with your buyers?
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ValueSelling Associates
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Julie Thomas and since she’s self introducing, I’m just going to let her take it from here, Julie:
Julie Thomas: Hey everyone, this is Julie Thomas coming to you from ValueSelling Associates, where we are the catalyst that enables organizations and individuals to achieve business results they never thought were possible. And we do that through providing simple tips, techniques, tools, and processes to help organizations compete on value and not price.
Last year, we conducted a study with 460 sales leaders across the globe. The study was conducted in partnership with training industry, and we asked them a couple of questions. We wanted to know, what are some of the key attributes and behaviors of your high-performing sales reps, and how do you measure that? So the interesting component really had to do with what are the virtual sales skills today that matter to sales reps, to sales reps, and to sales leaders? And they distilled it to three key areas.
The first is credibility. The second is trustworthiness, and the third one is rapport. And we started to dissect what each of those things are. So we know that top-performing sales reps are really good at interpersonal skills and specifically, this whole concept of credibility, trustworthiness, and rapport.
In the context of value selling, we believe that credibility is established by telling stories. Stories sell. And it’s not a story about you and your products and services. It’s a story about how your customers or potential customers benefit from a relationship with you in using your products or services, whatever you’re selling. Those stories are short, they’re sweet, they’re impactful, and they’re about the prospect and their world, not about you, your products, and services. So it’s really the opposite of an elevator pitch, if you will.
Credibility is important to get in the door. Trust is critical to stay in the conversation. We can all think of situations where people have let us down and we don’t think they’re trustworthy. Maybe they said one thing and they did another. Maybe they committed to do something and they never followed through. Maybe they are not capable of doing what they said they can do, but they keep overpromising anyways.
Trustworthiness means that we establish ourselves, that we are capable, we are dependable, we will do what we said we can do, and we’re transparent and not hiding information that the other person might be interested in.
And the third key element is rapport. I see the world the way you do. Do we look at things the same way? Are we similar in our understanding and our approach to the world? That’s really what rapport is, and there’s lots of ways to try to establish rapport, but it’s really understanding the world from your buyer’s point of view and then putting yourself in our shoes.
So we build rapport by listening. We build rapport by confirming what we heard, what we understood and sharing that back which are critical components of any communication that we have. And we also build rapport by leaning in and matching the mannerisms of the people we’re selling to. If we’re building rapport in a virtual world, we’re matching the speed, the tone, the volume of the speaking skills. We’re matching the physical that we might be able to see on a video. If somebody is leaning in, you want to lean in. No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
Credibility, trustworthiness, and rapport are three behaviors that you can focus on to make sure your buyer knows how much you care about them.
Scott Ingram: For a link to Download the ValueSelling Associates e-book, “The Behaviors and Skills Sales Leaders Care Most About – and How to Measure Them,” that provides sales leaders with actionable insights on how to accurately measure the behaviors that build credibility, trust, and rapport with buyers at each stage of the sales cycle. just click over to DailySales.Tips/1181. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!