Are you losing sales because your customers don’t trust you enough to say yes—even when you have the right price, product, and service?
Trust is one of the biggest factors in getting a customer to move forward, yet many salespeople focus too heavily on proving what they can do rather than creating genuine confidence in the customer.
In this episode, you’ll explore a simple five-part framework for building trust throughout your sales process—helping your customers feel understood, confident in your ability, comfortable with your character, and reassured by your track record.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How asking better questions can make customers feel genuinely heard and understood.
- How to demonstrate that your motive is to help the customer—not simply make a quick sale.
- How to communicate your ability and expertise in a way that actually makes sense to the customer.
- Why honesty, transparency, responsibility, and integrity can make a huge difference in building confidence.
- How reviews, case studies, stories, and social proof can give customers confidence that you’ve successfully done it before.
Play the episode to identify the biggest gap in your trust-building process and discover one simple change you can make to turn more quotes into confident yeses.
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This podcast helps the entrepreneur, founder, CEO, and business owner in the trade, construction and industry segments, regain focus, build confidence, and achieve measurable results through powerful sales training, effective sales strategy, and expert sales coaching—guiding every sales leader, sales manager, and sales team in mastering the sales process, optimizing the sales pipeline, and driving business growth while fostering leadership, balance, and freedom amidst overwhelm, stress, and potential burnout, creating lasting peace of mind and smarter decision making for every California business and Australia business ready to scale up with excellence in sales management , through refined sales processes, proven trade sales techniques, and strategic sales leadership that strengthens sales process execution, accelerates sales team development, builds stronger sales teams, improves time management for sales, drives resilience and results, increases team results across the construction industry and wider industry sales sectors, and supports sustainable trading growth that continues to drive results through an effective management process in modern trade sales.
Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
The number one way I see great salespeople close lots of deals is by knowing how to build trust with their customers very, very quickly.
Intro:
Welcome to Trade Sales Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so that you can close more deals and grow faster.
I’m your host, Ben Wright and over the last 15 years, I’ve helped hundreds of trade and sales leaders grow their businesses and generate over $200 million in additional revenue by simplifying their sales processes.
Let’s get started.
Ben Wright:
Okay, so the inspiration from today’s podcast came from a friend of mine, George Bryant, the Mind of George podcast. Look it up.
I’ve been on there a few times now. Great podcast. We are almost like kindred spirits in how we think just across very different sides of the world.
And George actually introduced me to a framework around trust that I hadn’t previously heard of myself. Now, to intro this, trust without doubt is one of the most important elements that we must get right as a salesperson to get deals done. In my experience, the majority of salespeople don’t focus on building trust or they think that the best way for them to build trust is by showing customers what they can do.
Now, that’s certainly an element of trust in my experience, but there is more to it and there’s a really nice framework from Henry Cloud or Dr. Henry Cloud that George introduced me to that we’re going to run through today. It’s short, sharp, it’s five things and your aim or certainly my wish is that your aim for today is that you find one of those things where you don’t think you’re doing a great job at and roll that into your sales process. So, it’s not about taking that framework, memorizing the five steps and going, this is what I’m going to do with every customer, but it’s instead having to think about where you might have some gaps and what you can do to fix them.
Okay, so the five essentials for trust from Dr. Henry Cloud. I really like them and let’s run through them. Number one is all about understanding the customer and what I mean here is that your customer is feeling heard.
There’s a terrific model out there called the baseball model that works fantastically well to solve conflict and that also works around being heard and is as simple as making sure we’re asking questions. So, to ensure our customers feeling heard or they’re being understood, a great sales process or a great salesperson is actually going to understand what the customer needs, what’s their pain, what’s their opportunity, what’s their perspective on it before they go about trying to fix it. So, the first of the five essentials is understand your customer and make sure they feel heard.
So, the question for you, are you doing a good job at it? If you are, fantastic, keep moving. If you’re not, take a moment, pause, have a think about what you’re going to do to simply ask questions of your customers. Number two is motive.
Right now, this is not so much about the motive of the customer, but this is the motive that you have, right? So, what are you doing to show your customers that your motive isn’t in there for a quick sale? Now, in my experience, most salespeople who ask a question, i.e., what do you need and spend a little bit of time to understand their customer are going to work through this one pretty quickly. So, if you’re ticking that off, if you think you’re generally asking your customer questions and you’re truly wanting to understand a little bit about them, great, tick off motive. All right, number three, we move into ability.
So, this is all about your ability to deliver. So, in my experience, most salespeople will talk about what they do really well. Here’s what we offer.
Here are the great products, features, service skills that we can bring to what your project needs. However, where they fail here is to make sure that that ability is articulated in a way the customer understands. Because in most instances, the product or service that we’re selling, we’re the experts on and our customer knows very little.
A classic example is solar and battery storage. There is a boom, an unprecedented boom in battery storage in the Australian market at the moment. But I see far too many retailers in the market get complex, go into the detail to show they have actual skills rather than simplifying it and talking through how they can roll out a project and bring outcomes to their customers.
So, when we’re talking about trust, have a think about if you’re showing your abilities in a way that a customer actually understands and something that has meaning to them. So, just to recap five essentials from Dr. Henry Cloud. Number one is understanding.
So, making sure the customer feels heard, i.e. asking questions. Number two is showing that your motive is good and you’re not in there for the fast kill. Number three is all about ability, being able to demonstrate that you have the ability in a way that the customer understands to complete whatever they need done.
Number four is character. That is less about your ability and more about some of the key things that most people look in those that they want to do business with. They’re generally things like honesty, responsibility, transparency, integrity.
Easiest way that I’ve seen great salespeople do that is to slow down the conversation and talk through exactly what the customer wants with some real honesty around where you’re going to deliver a great result and where they might want to think about doing things different ways. For me, the character piece of trust can be really built by simply slowing down that process and talking through with the customer what they need. Then into number five is all about track record.
So, where ability is about talking through what you can do and character is about demonstrating some of the most important traits that the customer is going to want to see from you to work with them, track record is actually giving them some confidence that you’ve done this before. And they’re simply things like Google reviews, case studies, a little bit of storytelling and being able to articulate to your customer, hey, I’ve done this before and here’s how you can have some confidence that I’m going to be able to do it for you. So, to recap that, at a broad level, trust, in my experience, is one of the most important things to get right in any sales engagement.
You can have the best price, the best product, the fastest service, but without the customer trusting you, the deal will not move forward because at the end of the day, particularly in a beta C space where we’re dealing with the end user, they need to know that if they’re going to have you in your home or around their family that you are a trusted person. If you’re going to be coming in and cleaning their windows inside and out like we had in our studios last night with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment and product in there, that that window cleaner isn’t going to take that key, copy it and come back and steal everything later on. I don’t care how much they cost.
There is a far bigger piece of play when we’re trying to make sure we’re looking after our house, our business, our product or our family. So, trust, super important. Dr. Henry Cloud’s five essentials of trust I think is a great way for you to think about where are the areas you have gaps.
And so, to recap those, as I go through those, again, just ask yourself, what are you doing well and what aren’t you doing well and perhaps where could you improve on. But number one is understanding. So, making sure the customer feels heard.
Number two is making sure the customer sees your motive, your main intent is for good. Number three is you can do the job. Write your ability and you can articulate that in a way the customer understands.
Number four, character. You’ve got the right traits like honesty, transparency, trust, integrity, right, that the customer will make sure that they are happy to have you in their home or business. And number five is showing that customer that you’ve done the same thing for others.
So, that’s your social proof piece, Google reviews, storytelling, case studies, those types of things. So, as we’re closing out today’s podcast, the key question I ask you is where are the gaps? Where are the things you’re not doing right? Because if we don’t fix those gaps, you’re going to keep spending time quoting and not win enough of those deals. Without changing that, you’ll keep getting those same stressful results.
You hear this from me really regularly, right, but if we don’t have trust with our customers, we’re going to work long hours and not get enough money in the bank to show for it. So, our programs are launching in the coming months. We have a whole refresher programs.
The current ones we’re doing are not stopping, but these are just bigger and better programs. They’re going to be running off a wait list. Some of them won’t actually cost you a cent, but if you want to make sure you get notified about these when they come online, all you need to do is click on the link in the show notes.
It’s quick. It’ll take you 30 seconds. Do it now.
You simply will get notified when they come. No hard sell, right? Nice easy process for you to do. Please go and do it.
But then, between now and next podcast, please make sure you keep thinking about being 1% better each and every day. It does make the difference. Bye for now.