Originally Posted by Rob.Singer View Post

Success in Sales & Marketing has less to do with the quality & need of the product and/or service--and a WHOLE lot more to do with you and your ability to develop the relationship. Doing what you said you were going to do, along with respectful communication throughout the process, are the #1 & #2 most important aspects of gaining your potential target's trust. IQ levels have nothing to do with this.

Trust=A Successful Endeavor. And this is why next to nobody has ever bought the concocted pile of bullshit that kew has been trying to sell.
I don't know what your sales background is and it could well be more years than mine, or that could just be in your experience, but mine is that trust isn't really relevant. I tend to think that it might depend on what it is you are trying to sell, also. Whether it be furniture, hotel rooms or credit cards and credit card fee products...most of my sales experience lies in one-time transactions, so you don't really establish a long-term relationship.

I would think the only time that long-term relationships were relevant to anything I was doing was when dealing with booking blocks of rooms to either groups coming in for a special event, or to companies sending in workers, when I was in the hotel industry. I will say that the hotel providing what it said it was going to provide is of the utmost importance when dealing with those entities, and also giving concessions in the event of any sort of dispute with an eye towards the long-term business you will get from them, but that's just that market segment specifically.

In the telemarketing world, my, 'Relationship,' if you even wanted to call it that, began and ended with that phone call, so the sale was just a single transaction. Granted, you wanted the contact to basically like you and find you pleasant, but there really wasn't much in the way of trust-building or developing a relationship with them. There might have been a bit of relationship building for the long-term furniture sellers, more so than with me to be sure as I knew I wouldn't be doing it very long, but I think even the long-term sellers viewed most interactions as a single transaction.

So, when it comes to the concept of, 'Trust,' I think that's just a matter of what sort of sales you do. For my type of sales, I tend to think making a quick and positive first impression was the most relevant factor. People were naturally distrustful of telemarketers, and rightfully so, even if they already had business with the company---so the biggest thing there was just getting the customer's guard down.