How to Gain a Prospect's Trust
Tried and true methods to earn trust from a prospect
Trust:
1a: assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something
b: one in which confidence is placed
Those are just words on paper defining what trust is. Having someone actually trust you is heavy. When selling to larger enterprises especially, a novel concept or new product, you’ve not been tested or proven.
The main question that goes through a prospect’s head, especially one with influence is: Am I ready to stick my neck out for the potential upside?
The fallacy of “ROI”
I’ve written about status quo and indecision here. The takeaway is that our minds have two trains of thought:
System 1: (our animal mind) fast, instinctive, and emotional
System 2: slow, deliberate, and logical
What this means is that we can talk all ROI all day. There’s no disputing it’s importance in any business decision. However, the real movement will happen when you can relate and share stories that relate to the customer.
How?
Building out a preliminary ICP ie (company size, revenue, personas, their pains) is a good starting point. But it’s just that, a starting point. For reference, I’ve provided some resources below that help with really digging deeper into your ICP:
Credit: BowTiedSystems - Targeted Outreach
How to Identify your ICP - Lenny’s Newsletter
From there, you need to understand that winning happens when you can share stories that are related or tangential to outcomes you’ve had for similar customers.
Their Business, Their Language
Whatever you do, don’t use the language that YOUR product team uses. It’s native to your company, but foreign to a prospect.
At a startup I used to work at, our Chief Product Officer would play a game where we’d have to explain our product within the context of an analogy (ie a soccer game).
Doing this multiple times helped accomplished two things:
Simple and thorough understanding of your product
An ability to quickly explain your product in any context to any prospect.
You can even do this with ChatGPT or Bard. I’ve previously written about this here.
Bonus points if you have enough info about how they speak about their business. See previous article on how to become an insider.
Should I Stick My Neck out?
If you’re able to get this far the main question becomes, should I stick my neck out?
Consider that a prospect has capital or influence within an org, they’re not going to risk a blemish on their reputation if they don’t think you or your product can’t pull through and execute.
After you’ve done the work either from BowTiedSystems post or Lenny’s post - dig deeper.
How I’m approaching this
I’m currently doing work on a thesis of carving out an ICP even further, looking at characteristics of more forward thinking customers. Ones who DO put their neck out on the line and break down walls to get your product in the enterprise.
When I was building out a healthcare vertical, selling mostly to med device and pharmaceutical companies - it was never old guys who had been working with agencies that were going to fight for me. They were relationship based and never tech savvy. More often than not they wanted to cash their checks and call it a day. Nothing against that, they can do them.
The reason that I stumbled across this is because I looked at my current company’s key accounts and the characteristics there show patterns of people who don’t need to be sold on the value of the product I sell, they know what they need to execute and I’m able to come in with a product to help them achieve it. My previous experience helped me connect the dots.
This is extremely qualitative but my hope is that I can identify key patterns/trends of these personas, or change agents, to make it quantitive and see how that impacts:
sales cycle velocity
overall ARR
win rates
More to come on this front.
Questions I’m asking:
What is their background? Are there similarities or trends?
What positions did they have? Is there a track record of upward mobility?
What products have they been exposed to - competitors? our product?
Do they understand the overall implications of NOT doing what your product offers in an org? There are clues in their background and LinkedIn that point to this.
Hope that you can do the same and find trends that help to increase your sales cycle velocity,
The bottom line is this, it’s never just about product, ROI. Business logic is always trumped by emotions. In order to persuade emotion, you need to win trust. In order to make winning trust slightly easier, sell to the people that don’t need the educating, they just want the execution.
As Always thanks for reading, and see you next week.
-Andrew Kobylarz
