Marc Hansen was an influential mentor for me and I had a ton of respect for him and his ideas. When he spoke about strategy, I listened.
The first time we met I was a new salesman for the company and he was a seasoned professional with 10 years of experience. We met are a conference in Indianapolis at a sports bar. We got into some interesting conversations about sales philosophy. I quickly found that we were on the same level and we played off each other with ideas.
Not everyone agrees on philosophy or even the psychology of sales. I have read a couple of books that are in direct opposition to my perspective. Ultimately your style will depend on your experience and where you are comfortable. During our conversation, the topic of customers liking you came up. We quickly agreed that we were both right! That conversation sparked an idea that I couldn't leave out of my book.
Here is the passage from my book, Get Good At Sales
Being a trusted advisor is something to behold. You will need to be trusted to be a trusted advisor, and you need to be able to provide advice to be a consultative seller. Knowing your market and backing up your claims to the advice are two ways to gain trust and provide advice. The purpose of this section is to get you over being liked.
Prospects do not need to like you in order to buy from you. They need to trust you. Like and trust are two very different things, and they are miles apart. Can you like someone and not trust them? Yes. Can you trust someone and not like them? Yes. These two factors, like and trust, are not mutually exclusive. You don’t need one factor to be able to have another. People don’t buy from people they like; they buy from people they trust. Like is a byproduct of trust, not the other way around.
I’m not gonna dazzle you with a bunch of fancy charts or empirical data provided by a global research firm to prove my point. This is a low-budget organization! Instead, I’m going to discuss my twenty-five-plus years of experience and how people work. This would be called anecdotal data or hearsay. In other words, common sense. Science has indeed backed these theories up, however. But this is how people work, and it’s important to know when you develop strategies in order to contact people you have never contacted before.
For example, a girl is hired for an hourly position and needs to show up at a certain time. The hiring manager has no idea of the work ethic of the person they just hired until the person starts working. It doesn't really matter if all the questions are asked. The proof is in the pudding, and it’s a risk to hire somebody new, but she is well-liked and seems like a good fit for the team. After a few weeks, her work ethic reveals itself, and she starts to slip. She starts to show up late and her excuses are running thin. When she does show up on time she often has to leave early. She just can’t seem to put in a full day’s work, but she is well-liked, and when she does show up, she does her job. So the manager keeps her on for now, but her manager addresses her tardiness and explains that being late is starting to affect the team. Her workload is getting pushed off on other team members, projects are not getting finished or missing deadlines and the backlog is getting bigger. She was hired to do a job, but she was also hired to show up on time for that job. Although everyone likes her a lot as a person, she couldn’t be trusted to do her job. Ultimately she was let go.
Perhaps this isn’t you. Do you think that your likeness will keep you around the office? Just another pretty face who gets paid to sit around just to collect a paycheck? I hope not. I hope you are another pretty face who is trusted and gets paid to do what you are supposed to do. Likeability might get you in the door, but trust will keep you in the building.
In my early career, my sales manager set a goal for me to become best-friend level with five clients. This was important to building relationships, and I didn’t disagree with it. But being best friends with somebody in the industry doesn’t necessarily get you the business. You must be trusted. Trust is more than being friends; trust is more than being liked. If you are not trusted, people will not buy from you. When you are friends with people, they may not buy from you either because you may not push the sale and because you take the friendship for granted. When people like you, they may not buy from you either because perhaps you can’t deliver the product or don’t follow through consistently enough to be trusted. I’m sure you mean well, but that doesn’t earn trust.
You might be trying to be liked too much during the sales process. Because of this, you avoid challenging your prospect to get to a better state, and you forget about trust. You can challenge your prospect without being challenging. It's better to be trusted than liked because although your prospect may not like what they hear, they will trust what you say.
Thank you Marc! I appreciate your mentorship and our continued friendship.
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