Brian Tracy says customers buy from salespeople they trust, not because of product features. A survey showed trust was the main reason people chose a vendor. He recommends asking questions and building relationships before talking about what you're selling.
If you really want to increase your sales and make a lot of money, you have to remember, relationships are everything. Theodore Levitt of the Harvard Business School, who wrote the book Marketing Myopia why It Is that Salespeople Fail, talked about the fact that in the 21st century, relationships are everything. In fact, all selling will be relationship selling. Now, why is this? Well, if you're a normal customer, you've made a lot of mistakes. You bought things that didn't work out, turned out to be inappropriate. You couldn't get them serviced, couldn't get them repaired. You wished you'd never bought them at all. So now when you go in to see a customer, customers are naturally suspicious. And what you have to do is focus on building a high trust relationship. What we found today is that customers consider the relationship to actually be more important than the product or service. Because I hate to tell you, your product or service is available somewhere else. They don't have to buy from you. They can buy from your competitors or not buy at all. And the only reason they're going to buy from you is because they like you and they believe in you and they trust you and they feel that what you say is true. I worked for a large sales organization some years ago that did a $50,000 survey of customers, and they asked them, what is the major reason you decided to buy with our company rather than with some other company? And, you know, over 80% said, because I trusted the salesperson more than I trusted the salesperson of the other companies. So remember this, that because of product or service complexity, I don't know how your product or service is made or serviced or built or your back end or your management or anything else. Because of all that, I have to hang my hat on something. So I make my decision based on how I feel about you. As far as the customer is concerned, the relationship comes first. So when you go into a sales situation, instead of talking about your product or service, instead of jumping right into the subject, take the time to ask a lot of questions about the prospect and the prospect's situation and get to know and understand the prospect and what he or she needs, wants, and is concerned about before you ever start talking about your product or service. That's the key to building great relationships. That's the key to building great sales.
