Don’t Like Me? Who Cares? You Will Buy Because You Respect Me
A lot has been written about building rapport and getting prospects to like you when selling them. This is all well and good, but it has led to, in my experience, an excessive swing towards being all buddy-buddy with total strangers.
What is my problem with this? It is the fact that for most people, this buddy-buddy stuff simply comes off as insincere, and it feels wrong and false if you are not naturally all sunshine and rainbows.
Also, if you have any sort of integrity, it feels pretty gross and demeaning to be kissing the posterior of someone whom you simply don’t like simply to get an order.
The truth is, at the end of the day, I find that respect is a far stronger influence in closing deals and building loyalty for re-networking and repeat sales than being a “friend” to any buyers you are targeting. This is backed up by the stats presented in The Challenger Sales, which demonstrates that the “Challenger” sales personality way outperforms “Relationship Builders,” and any other selling style for that matter.
The key to developing respect is creating a prospect-centric approach while still maintaining control of the sales process and discussion. As mentioned in The Challenger Sales, “A Challenger is really defined by the ability to do three things: teach, tailor, and take control.” These Challenger actions all have one trait in common—they build respect through authority.
Think about it. When it comes to growing your business and potentially making millions of dollars, who are you going to invest your money with — the person who shares pictures of the grandkids and brings you a latte, or the person who cuts the fluff and tells you straight up what you need to know to fix your business?
Get to the point, control the sales process and grab the respect you need to close the deal.
Four Ways to Build Respect with Prospects
Sales don’t happen instantly. It is common knowledge that, on average, it takes at least 12 contacts to close the deal. Part of this is building the respect and trust to drive the sale. Each time you touch the prospect:
1. Elevate your own status: You are a professional offering a service or product that your prospect needs. Even if you are pitching a Fortune 500 CEO, put yourself on the same level as your prospect and trust that you know what you are talking about. This requires you to ACTUALLY do your research on the prospect and his or her business, so you don’t hem and haw and can answer the questions intelligently.
Be competent and professional in your communications. Lead them to the next step. Command the process and gain the respect. Tom Searcy reports in Inc that, “the top sales representatives see themselves as problem-solvers worthy of equal respect with their customers. Respect always, deference rarely.”
2. Respect their time: In B2B sales, your prospect’s day could be an endless stream of sales appointments. Acknowledge the value of their time, show appreciation for their willingness to discuss your offer and get to the point. While rapport is important, succinct, well-targeted presentations hold the keys to respect, and show that you are obviously busy and successful because you don’t have time to dawdle.
3. Be authentic: Bring yourself into the sales process. Sell human-to-human. You can match your tone and body language to the prospect, and you should because that is smart selling, but you don’t have to put on an entirely different persona.
The moment that you appear fake, respect ends in most prospects.
Note that this does not condone showing up in sweatpants and sporting a nose ring to a B2B meeting because you are “keeping it real.” That is disrespectful and stupid. If you cannot figure it out, think harder, because it ain’t that hard to be yourself while being professional at the same time.
4. Be authoritative (but not too cocky): If you have qualified this prospect properly, you should be completely confident that you have what he needs, and he can afford it. The only barrier to getting the order should be whatever objection he comes up with out of fear, unless there is something you missed in your research and discovery phase which is a bona fide stop.
This gives you the right be a bit authoritative and confident in your offering. Insist on the correctness of your solution, and simply work to solve the objections, most of which are actually illogical. There are a zillion techniques for handling objections, but they all boil down to getting the prospect over his fear (loss of money, status, power, prestige, benefits, whatever).
None of the above means you should be obnoxious, aggressive, rude or bossy. It pays to have people like you, it really does. But I think you will find that they’ll really like you most if you know your business and solve their business problems, even if you are naturally a smelly, pig-headed boor.
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