Sales, TRUST, and a Little Bit of Pixie Dust
As our guest speaker, Coach DiDonato, focused on this past week is the trust of a sales person. Even if the person can be genuine, confident, a good listener, or any other quality that many think a good sales person have, it doesn’t ultimately matter unless the buyer trusts the seller.
The two focuses for a trustworthy seller is their intent and ability.
1. Intent: The seller needs to have the right or beneficial motivations for selling to the buyer. The center of the sell should be a win-win outcome, but if the seller is more focused on a win for only themselves then it breaks the trust for the buyer.
2. Ability: The ability of a sales person is the actual reliability of the product, service, or business. The item needs to fulfill the actual needs of the customer. If it does not have the ability to do so, there is no reason for the customer to trust them.
In order to successfully become a trustworthy sales person, you need to be able to understand the customer. To do this, you need to focus on and ask questions to the customer. Like Coach said, “You don’t persuade by telling. You persuade by asking quality questions.” The key is to ask open ended questions rather than close ended, YES or NO, questions.
BoweryJE22
This is a great summary of Coach’s lecture – thanks for sharing! I really like how he narrowed it all down to several points so we can understand that sales is not all that complicated if we’re authentic and knowledgeable. In this day in age, if you’re like a robot no one will listen to you.
He had great insight into the sales funnel. I never would have thought to compare trust and intent to God’s mercy and grace. I thought was very insightful. Thanks for the summary.
This was a great breakdown of the main point of Coach’s lecture. I really appreciated how simple he made the sales principles he presented. He could summarize it in just 2 words. Intent and ability-it’s really quite simple.
I think what I find most interesting about Coach DiDonato’s lecture was that he applied the same principles to his coaching/recruiting job. Even though he is not in direct sales anymore, he uses ability and intent to sell prospective students on Grove City College. Without that previous sales experience, perhaps our recruiting efforts for football would not be as strong. This really goes to show just how important selling can be in any industry.
Understanding this is crucial to executing a sale. These principles of the sales funnel being grounded in authority and trust are applicable in so many situations.