Main points:

• effective sales professionals know that building trusting relationships are essential for long-term success
• building trust starts with honouring commitments
• we need also to honour our commitments to ourselves

One of the best ways to build success as a sales professional is through gaining trust.

Research into the Australian workplace culture

In a fascinating snapshot into the Australian workplace psyche, the Sydney Morning Herald in January 2004 reported that when asked about a quality workplace, Australians think “quality of relationships”. Our focus on people is perhaps unusual: when asked the same question overseas, the Japanese think “pursuit of perfection”; the French think “luxury” and the Germans, “standards”.

So mutual trust and respect are of paramount importance to Australians. Well, we knew that anyway, didn’t we? And in the world of sales, we’ve all dealt with sales people who act manipulatively, or don’t follow through on what they said they were going to do. How do we respond?

We react by losing a bit of our trust in that person, and if it happens again over time, that’s it. As the philosopher Nietzche said “what upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you.”

And here’s the interesting result of a study done in the U.S. - while the study looked at executives, it’s relevant to all of us in business - the Center for Creative Leadership in Colorado compared executives who were fired with those who made it to the top. The one major flaw of those who didn’t make it was that they couldn’t be trusted to keep their promises.

When our client can’t trust us

When clients lose faith in their relationship with us, a huge opportunity is lost. Obvious, but worth repeating!

Gaining trust, and two possible reasons why we overcommit ourselves

So, those executives studied at the Center for Creative Leadership didn’t keep their promises. Keeping our word can be a major challenge for some of us, used to navigating the treacherous shallows of over-work and over-commitment.

And what’s behind this inability to follow through? Well, we often simply overestimate our capacity to efficiently meet the work that we take on.

Sometimes too, if we have others working with or for us, what lurks behind over-commitment is a need for control, and unwillingness to delegate.

We start with ourselves

So, if a major way to gain trust is for us to be reliable and honour our commitments to others consistently over time, where do we start? We start with honouring the promises that we make to ourselves about our own lives. How often do we tell ourselves that we’ll do something in our own lives, and then not follow through? The new exercise regime, the evening off…..and we rationalize our lapses by thinking that it doesn’t matter, we didn’t promise something to another person, and things will be different tomorrow. But it does matter, and every time it happens our own “trust fund” is eroded.

The reverse is also true: each time we keep a commitment to ourselves, we tell ourselves “I am someone who can be trusted to keep their word.” That is a powerful statement of integrity.

Questions to ask ourselves

We could ask ourselves how others would respond if asked these questions about us:

• Will this person follow through and honour commitments?
• Does this person have a genuine desire to see me do well?
• Will this person tell me what’s important, both good and bad?

When we can’t keep our promises

The reality is that it’s not always possible to keep promises in today’s turbulent business environment. When this occurs, we need to be upfront about it and explain what happened. Our clients will forgive occasional lapses if the overall relationship is open and healthy.

To sum up

The higher the integrity bar that we set for ourselves, the great the impact we will have. Being trustworthy creates impact for long-term, sustainable success.

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Sarah Denholm is the founder of Dynamic Results Group, a training, coaching and consulting company who run presentation and listening skills workshops for sales professionals on how to create a persuasive and memorable message, together with advanced listening skills such as her “Say Less, Sell More!” seminar. Sarah is a popular speaker on sales, sales management and the art of listening and resonating with the customer.

Email: sarah@dynamicresultsgroup.com

Web: www.dynamicresultsgroup.com