Rule #1 Purchase means trust. Sell trust.

Juan Montaner
Sep 9, 2018 · 3 min read

Either you buy a drink or you invest in a startup, every selling process will have a happy ending if there is trust between both parties. But how an effective sales professional can create trust? In my experience, trust is a chain of small things that all add together creates a compelling sales machine.

I like to define trust as an exchange of confidence. For instance, you sell some shares to investors because that investors trust in making profits. Or you sell a software because a buyer is confident that with it he will be able to make money, save money or mitigate risks.

From the functional perspective, people buy products because they can make money, save money or mitigate risks with them.

Point of view

Imagine that there is a product with zero errors of concept, so how you can make trust? In other words, how people believe that that product has zero issues and will guarantee to achieve their needs with zero risks.

The only way is to understand buyers and create a point of view. A point of view is a collection of specific questions that you must have before you meet a prospective customer. Those questions can be related to markets, the prospect itself or even decision makers.

The more questions you will get answered, the more trust you will transmit.

Let me share some examples of questions:

1.-What are current industry challenges and trends?

2.-What are 3 goals they trying to achieve?

3.-What challenges are they facing?

4.-How do industry challenges and trends impact in the questions above?

5.-How do they make money?

6.- Snapshot of influencers

7 .- What are their growth trends, projections, and plans?

8.- How do these compare with their competitors?

For instance, you are dealing with VC,

Where do they invest?

What success experience do they have?

What are their profitability trends, projections, and plans?

Building trust is about designing a compelling picture of your concept.

The network effects

In today´s startup, an easy way to create the trust to let people use it and afterward to create testimonies or develop satisfaction surveys.

Probably, the most powerful trust builders are “the network effect” concept. This concept used by companies like Facebook, Workday or Whatsapp develops a positive effect of using an application in a collaborative way with parties of a network. Because every member gets benefits from the application, members tend to recommend or prescribe their adoption.

The network effect can create a wave effect as the network becomes more valuable and more people join, resulting in a positive feedback loop.

Here is the Uber example of network effect concept

Great customer experience by design

I had a boss who used to say “buyers are willing to find a reason for not buying”

We are now in the era where customers have power because markets are saturated with product. There is more offering than demand.

People do not want only a product that works. They want a product with a superior experience to be used. It is called customer experience (CX) by design.

A simple example is Airbnb. Do you remember how complicated was to rent an apartment? Airbnb introduced many small things such as credit card payment, rating to guests and host, calendar booking, hose rules, reminders. Those things make an easy to use and easy to manage platforms for hosts and travelers.

CX is about to create a loyal customer that promote the products within its network. If you want to design a CV product, you have to micro-segment experience of usage, every click, every form and every interaction matters to use or discard a product.

TAKE AWAY

Develop trust with segmented experiences. Those experiences could be product design, customer references, onboarding process, pilots, commercial benefits, product support and business case.

salestribu

The #1 geek community for sales learning

Juan Montaner

Written by

Tech innovator and business builder | www.juanmontaner.com

salestribu

The #1 geek community for sales learning

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