Giving Prospects the Confidence to Hire You

A western journalist visiting the old Soviet Union asked a worker if he was being paid well. The worker said, "It’s all pretend. We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. "Do you sell consulting? IT services? Accounting? Financial planning? Legal services? Then you too play a game of pretend, and it’s with your would-be clients. 
   They pretend to care about your qualifications. 
   You pretend to listen to their questions. 
   You pretend to write a unique proposal. 
   They pretend to read it. 
   You pretend to sell. 
   They pretend to buy.

What’s often missed here is that behind the game of pretending an unspoken and important vetting process is taking place. For example, a company about to spend big on a CRM system, or make an investment in leadership training, or change its sales approach, will ask about the benefits of what’s being sold. The prospect will want to know the answer and they will pretend it matters most.But what they really want to know is if they’ll have the confidence to sleep at night with the provider they ultimately choose.

Yet, this search for confidence, the thing that matters most, isn’t what’s actually discussed during the sales process. Instead, prospective clients have been seduced by the trappings of "hard business." They think "if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it," and they try to reduce decisions to metrics. That’s how we end up with clients wanting to know all about our qualifications. And so, we all pretend that buying and selling is about talking. About words and numbers. About qualifications. But it’s not.

The fact is people buy with the heart, and justify with the brain.
 
Clients make huge, complex, intangible decisions very much on the basis of gut, emotion, feeling, opinion. Call it what you will, it’s not about rational decisions, but about decisions rationalized.

The truth is this: people vastly prefer to buy what they need from people they feel good about. People they trust. People who they believe have their clients’ interests at heart, not just their own. People who make an effort to honestly listen to their clients. People who actually seem to care.

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