Don't Burst the Bubble of Reliability

“Sorry Jim, we really liked your proposal but the price was too high.”

“Sorry Ann, you guys were in the running but your competitor had this other feature that management really liked.”

Sound familiar?

Anyone who’s been in the sales arena has felt their bubble burst with statements similar to these.

It would be easy to take them at face value.

Don’t.

The cold hard truth is that people are human and it is human nature to generally avoid conflict.

So when it comes to telling a provider bad news, buyers default to non-emotional, highly rational reasons.

Why?

Because it’s less personal, less confrontational, and less hurtful.

It’s easier to tell you that you lost because of something tangible and objective, like prices or features, than because you weren’t trustworthy.

According to trust expert and author Charles H. Green, trustworthiness (that being how others perceive our level of trust) is comprised of four components: credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation.

Now in the scenarios described above, any four of these components or combination thereof could be at issue. But if we explore the area of trust we missed in their minds in terms of reliability, what it comes down to is that we simply weren’t dependable or predictable.

Think about the last deal you lost and consider the following questions.

1. Did you come to the table with your homework done? (Or did you show up with little or no knowledge of what they do or who they serve?)
2. Did you have a point of view to engage the client? (Or did you show up with no ideas about the areas they might need help in?)
3. Did you make and keep promises? (Or did you just talk about what services your company provides?)
4. Did you check and double-check your work before presenting it to the client? (Or did you scramble to get it in before a deadline?)
5. Is it possible that price or features weren’t the real reason you lost the deal?

Amongst the four components of trustworthiness, most people rate themselves highest on reliability. They do this in part because it’s the easiest one to measure and the easiest one to do.

Yet, let me suggest that many of us need to peel back another layer in reviewing our reliability to become more trustworthy and to win over more clients.

Mark Slatin is a VP of Sales at entreQuest who is outsourced to a wide variety of companies to coach their teams, improve their client experiences, and raise their revenues.