I came to a realisation recently that the biggest deals of my career all had one similarity. At some point in the sales cycle, the buyer started trusting the seller. Every single one, there was a strong relationship between either me, or someone on my team (SE / my boss / my boss's boss) and someone on their team.
I then started thinking about the largest purchase I have ever made (buying a house). The same thing happened. I went around maybe 50 different properties. Some of them I liked, some of them I didn't like, but I got sick and tired of playing cat and mouse with the estate agents. "Right, what's the actual story on this house, please just be direct with me, if there is an issue with it, please just tell me, because I will find out eventually, but if you tell me now, it might not even be that much of an issue for me...."
You can never know every little thing about a house. You can survey it, question it, investigate it, speak to the neighbours, but at some point you have to take a leap of faith. I'm not good with figuring out houses. But I am good at figuring out people. So when I met an estate agent who immediately told me, "here's what's wrong with this house, I'm going to be upfront with you about X, Y and Z" - a level of trust started forming immediately.
I realised - THAT is the pattern. When the decision is a big one, the buyer can never work out every single thing. Replace houses with cybersecurity. Will the platform detect X? Well - yes during the PoC it did, but what about detecting Y, Z, A, B, C. What about detecting something that there is no precedent for?
They can verify qualifications, do reference calls, trial the platform, but no matter how much due diligence they do, there are certain things they just cannot verify. Will the best people work on the account? Will they pick up the phone at 11PM?
At some point, with big purchases, a buyer has to take a leap of faith. That leap of faith is based on trust in the person who is selling to them.
Therefore your job as a salesperson isn't to just transfer information. It's to transfer the confidence you have in your company to your prospect. Your job is to make that leap of faith feel safe.
People make decisions emotionally and then justify them with logic. This is a case in point.
so how do you create "trust"?
The buyer can't see "trust". However, what they can see is your behaviour & from this, they infer everything else. Trust is not a personality trait that some are born with and some aren't. It's a set of signals: you can learn to send good ones:
Competence: Do you know what you are doing? Are you asking pertinent questions or basic questions? Are the comparisons you make informed based on experience?
Benevolence: Do you actually want a good outcome for them, or do you just want something from them? They figure this out based on whether you genuinely understand their situation, and whether you ever say something that actually costs you. If you genuinely understand their situation, you should be able to explain it in your own words, not theirs.
Integrity: Do your words and your actions match, including when it is inconvenient?
Reliability: Do you keep the very small promises? The follow up sent when you said you would. The answer found by Thursday because you said Thursday. Trust is promises kept / promises made, and most of the promises in a sales cycle are very small ones.
Going first: Trust is reciprocal, and somebody has to start. The salesperson who admits, "if that's what you actually want, then maybe we are not right for you" gives the buyer permission to admit their real fear. More on this below, because there is real science behind this.
don't take my word for it
Psychologists argue that trust is the willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another party. Others state that trust = (credibility + reliability + intimacy) / self-orientation. What that means is: everything good you do gets divided by how much you appear to be in it for yourself. This is why saying something against your own interest works so powerfully. It does not add to the top of the equation, it shrinks the divider.
Others say that people judge warmth before competence and actually weigh it more heavily. The buyer decides where you are on their side before they decide whether you are capable. That's why rapport is not a warm up, its the foundation.
My favourite finding is called the pratfall effect. In the original experiment, a person who made a clumsy mistake actually became more likeable, but ONLY if they had already shown they were highly competent. Someone who isn't competent who makes a clumsy mistake actually becomes less likeable. Flaws build trust only after credibility is established. The order matters.
an example
A well known objection handling technique is the three F's (Feel, Felt, Found)
"I understand how you feel"
"To be honest, many others felt that way in the past"
"But what they found was...."
I would take that up a notch. I'd actually say, before I joined this company, when I interviewed, I felt the same as you. In my experience, none of my other companies had done it this way. I thought it was crazy. But then I realised that this was a much better way of doing things, and here is why
They have an objection and you literally empathise with their own objection with your own experience. Whilst building credibility with them based on your prior experience.
You're revealing the truth in an order which makes sense.
what this means for your team
If you are a founder, you do this naturally without thinking about it. You have the stories, you genuinely care, it just flows. Then you hire salespeople and you wonder why deals are stalling whereas yours are progressing. It's because they aren't creating trust in the way you are. Anyone who has run a sales team, or has seen better sales people than themselves at work, KNOWS this is the truth.
So: break it down into a process. Ask the following questions about the deals:
- Have we established credibility with this person and if so, how?
- Do they feel understood?
- Have we said one true thing that might actually cost us?
- Have we kept our promises this week?
It sounds quite counter intuitive. But as the late, great Shane Warne used to say:
"Sometimes you have to risk losing a game of cricket, to win a game of cricket"
The reason Warne said that was because he didn't want games to finish in a draw. He would rather lose trying to win, than not try to win at all.
The same logic applies to your deals. It's better to try and win the deal and eventually lose it, than have it sat in your CRM at "Stalled" for 200+ days.
You built something great. Now let's sell it.
James Irving is the founder of Emotive JLI, a sales consultancy for technical founders. He learnt to sell the old school way: 50 cold calls per day in a Manchester boiler room, then enterprise cybersecurity, then ThreatSpike, where he joined as the first commercial person and left with a £10M sales engine. Tell him what you've built or watch the stories.