One wrong move and the entire trust tower comes crashing down
Perhaps it’s bad karma, but recently I’ve been on the receiving end of one unfulfilled promise after another.
I receive a sales call from someone, and she says she’ll call back tomorrow afternoon and then she doesn’t.
I schedule an interview with someone and am stood up.
I’m promised a written proposal by the end of the week, and I hear nothing. That’s right a proposal—one that I was ready to sign as soon as I got it in my hands—but the end of week came, and I had nothing to sign.
These are all real-life examples of things that have happened to me in the past month alone.
In each of those situations, the person I was interacting with broke my trust. It’s not like they did anything egregious or offensive. It was what they didn’t do that sent me a message. A message that they are the type of people who don’t deliver on promises. A message that I am not important enough to deserve a response.
Each person said he would do something and never followed through. Now, when it comes time for me to make a recommendation or choose a provider in each of their areas, how likely do you think I am going to be to do business with any of them? I’ll tell you right now it’s very unlikely that I’ll even consider it, and if and when they do end up calling I’ll let them know why.
Trust Killers
We work so hard to build trust in the marketing and sales process. Yet trust is such a delicate thing. Like in the game of Jenga, one wrong move and the entire tower you’ve built comes crashing down.
Here are five sure-fire ways to destroy any and all trust you’ve built with your clients and prospects:
1. Don’t meet your commitments. This happens more than you think. (It happened to me three separate times in one month!) If you say you’re going to do something (even the smallest thing), do it and do it when you say you will.
2. Pretend to be someone or something you’re not. Be honest and true to yourself in all of your marketing and sales communications. Don’t say you’ve worked with clients in a particular industry if you haven’t. Prospects and clients can smell a fake a mile away.
3. Hide any mistakes you make. We’re all human, and we all mistakes. Don’t try to brush your mistakes under the rug. Be straight with your clients and prospects. As soon as the mistake is made let them know about it, and tell them what you are going to do to fix it. They’ll respect you and trust you more because of it.
4. Blame someone else when things don’t go according to plan. Take responsibility for the sales process and interactions with your clients and prospects. If you miss the proposal deadline, don’t blame it on the fact that your child got sick (even if this is truly what happened). Instead contact them on the day you said you would, explain the situation, and ask if it’s OK to send it on Monday. It’s better to get buy-in on changed deadlines than to make excuses.
5. Talk all about yourself all the time. We all like to talk about ourselves, but when you do all the talking, you don’t give the prospect a chance to tell his story. You need to help your clients and prospects see that you have their best interest in mind at all times. If you don’t let them do some of the talking, they’ll have a hard time trusting you because they’ll feel you don’t really know them.
Don’t be another example of an unfulfilled promise. Avoid these trust killers like the plague because once you lose a client or prospect’s trust, it is very hard to get it back.
