The Unspoken Sales Objection
Losing sales and don’t know why? You may have trust issues.
Imagine you’re on a first date and you’re getting a bad vibe. Maybe your date has said something weird that raises a nagging doubt. Maybe they’re acting erratic. Or boorish. Or maybe you sense they’re hiding something, or have an agenda, or there’s a tan line on the ring finger of their left hand. Do you say something?
You can make an excuse and leave if you can do so safely, but you would never, ever say the words, “I don’t trust you,” unless you were just stepping into a cab on its way to the airport to move to another state.
According to a post on Leadingbytrust.com, “...trust is not a topic most people are comfortable talking about, and few are equipped to handle a trust conversation in an objective, productive, and respectful way that strengthens the relationship rather than tearing it apart.”
The same dynamic can happen on a sales call.
An unexplained “no” can leave the salesperson disoriented. Without a clear reason for the rejection, how can an individual or a brand learn how to improve? If the problem were product-related, your prospect wouldn’t hesitate to say so. Could it be price? You know you’ve offered a super deal and left the door open for negotiations. Are they otherwise ready to buy? Do they need what you’re selling?
With few exceptions, there’s no harm in giving useful feedback: “Our director prefers X brand.” “We’d hoped for more flexible subscription terms.” “Your competitor has a broader product line we can grow with.”
These are relatively easy objections to offer up. But, if they won’t cite a reason, their concern may be something less concrete, more personal, and therefore, more uncomfortable to state directly. This is a red flag that something else is going on.
Warning: You may have lost their trust.
Business writers are calling these times The Post-Truth or Post-Trust Era, because institutions we used to count on for information are covering up, refusing to take responsibility, ghosting, trolling, spinning, and downright lying to us. Some media, some leaders, and some businesses see trust as optional or else they don’t think about it at all. But, after the past year, filled with ongoing examples of blatant lying and coverups, when so many lives and so much trust has been lost, the perception has shifted from “it’s a few bad apples” to “I can’t easily tell the difference anymore, so I’d better not trust anyone.”
Generalized distrust leads to anxiety, which leads to “NO.”
There’s no quick fix for lost trust. The preferred route is not to lose it in the first place, but many companies have forgotten its importance in the cascade of unnerving events we’re living through.
Losing sales over trust can crash your business. It’s serious, and sometimes fatal. But losing sales is just one repercussion of trust-loss. There are many others:
Hostile social media feedback
Bad press
Lawsuits
Broken promises from vendors, partners, and others (because it takes two to trust)
Loss of employee morale
Productivity drops
Staff attrition
Recruitment struggles
Cultural challenges
Let’s do a quick reality check:
Do you think the general pool of people who could buy your product or services trust you implicitly? How do you know? Have you surveyed them on TRUST lately? Ever?
What steps have you taken to maintain your trustworthiness over the past year?
Has sales reported an uptick in “unknown reasons” for saying “no thanks?” Can you afford to lose sales you’ve invested so heavily in closing?
Have you empowered sales and customer service to be transparent with customer questions, or are you redirecting, stating the positive (never the negative), or forcing them to follow the script, no matter what the customer says they want to know?
Do you have a sense that any of your competitors are doing a better job at this?
Rebuilding trust in business is a new area of expertise with just a few practitioners. InfiniteEdge Consulting in San Francisco is one of these. CEO Mary Gilbert describes trust as “a brand’s most valuable commodity,” and “...the edge that can make or break a reputation, open or close doors.”
Infinite Edge devised a simple and free Infinite Edge Trust Assessment that lets businesses score their trustworthiness on five different vectors:
These vectors describe the primary ways companies gain and lose customer trust through their day-to-day interactions. Infinite Edge plans to compile the data and report on results, so companies who take the survey can compare their personal scores (which are reported to the company immediately) against others in their industry and across disciplines.
Who is responsible?
According to Gilbert, responsibility for building trust rests at the CXO level, but the drive and ongoing measurement, monitoring and maintenance of the actions that build it resides in Marketing. Sales, client services, and other customer-facing responsibilities conduct most of the day-to-day trust-building actions, while communications spreads the word to all employees and marketing delivers ongoing messaging to the outside world.
As you can see, it takes the entire enterprise to build trust, but just one employee to break it. So “trustworthiness” becomes a big deal in hiring, onboarding, training, and performance reviews.
Start yesterday.
Trust is earned and rebuilt slowly, from hundreds of micro-messages that, if delivered consistently, create a “cone of integrity” around your brand that customers can sense. Call it intuition, a gut feeling, a glimpse behind the curtain that reveals that your brand is what you say it is. You do have the customer’s back. Your transparency is real, and you are committed to regaining their confidence, because it truly matters.
Proactive trust re-builders will have many competitive advantages over those who continue to ignore the problem. So start building a trust reserve initiative now and track it. Let the instances of integrity, transparency, clarity, and truth pile up. At some point, a tipping point will occur and you’ll realize you’re slowly becoming one of the “good guys” in your industry. Don’t stop. Keep building. Keep putting the customer first, keep training, keep verifying and quantifying your claims, keep delivering over-the-top service, keep the checks and balances in place.
When your percentage of long-term, loyal customers starts to rise, order a cake, have a party, and keep going. Communicate constantly with employees, tap into customer feedback, repair every single faux pas, and make it easy for customers to actually reach a real human on the phone without getting frustrated. Follow up to make sure they’re satisfied.
When trust starts to feel like solid bedrock under your company’s foundation, give everyone a bonus and keep going. Because, having built trust and turned your company around, you can afford it.
(Takes 8-10 minutes, with instant scoring.)
About Us
InfiniteEdge is a consultancy of marketing and culture experts that helps companies build trust and navigate today’s rapidly evolving market environment while providing all the marketing services you'd expect from a top-tier integrated agency. Invite us in to help you transition your marketing operation from reactive to responsive and develop a roadmap to help you thrive through the coming unknown. Or email Mary Gilbert directly at Mary at infiniteedgeconsulting.com.
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