Meet the MasterMinds: Charles Green on
Who and Why Clients Trust
 Charles
H. Green is founder and President of Trusted
Advisor Associates, author of Trust-based
Selling ®, and coauthor of The
Trusted Advisor (with David Maister and
Robert Galford). Green is also a speaker and seminar leader for
major consulting organizations, and spent nineteen years with
the MAC Group and Gemini Consulting.
Green sees a link between a seller’s level of self-orientation
and sales success. We talked to Green about how consultants
can reap the benefits of client relationships based on mutual
trust.
MCNews: How do you define trust-based selling,
particularly as it differs from traditional sales approaches?
Green: I would point out three contrasts.
First, trust-based selling is a practice, not a process.
Second, it’s about relationships and not transactions;
and third it’s about serving clients, not serving
the seller.
Selling is usually taught as a business process. That is,
you follow the left-to-right arrow from step one to step
two and so on. The next-to-last step is always closing,
and then there’s a feedback loop.
Trust-based selling, on the other hand, is all about values,
mindset, attitudes, and why you’re in the business.
And it’s process-neutral. I like to say you can graft
trust-based selling onto any other sales approach as long
as it is not self-serving and greedy.
As to the second point, if you focus solely on the transaction
with a client, you will choke off the relationship. Often
the approach to selling is what’s in it for me? How
do I get the sale, win the deal, or close the transaction?
That ends up being overwhelmingly about you, not the client.
But if you really focus on serving your client, you will
in turn be more than fairly rewarded for doing that. You
have to trust that, if you keep doing the right thing for
the client, in the end, that will be in your best interests
too.
MCNews: Is it your sense that consultants don’t
use a trust-based selling approach?
Green: Too many consultancies focus on
the micro-level, for example, how to align business processes
and interactions to achieve greater profitability. That
works great when you’re talking about supply chain
management, but it backfires on you when you apply it to
dealing with human beings.
If you examine every aspect of your behavior vis-à-vis
your clients in terms of how profitable the next minute
of conversation will be for you, that turns people off.
Selling complicated services requires a different profit
model.
MCNews: Trust is a central theme of the book, and
we do want clients to trust us. But don’t you also
have to be able to trust your client?
Green: Yes, trust should be a two-way
street. Trust is a relationship noun. It can’t exist
by itself. There has to be another party. It can’t
be I trust you but you always take advantage of me.
Somebody has to take the first step, though, and it’s
got to be the consultant. If you’re interested in
developing a relationship, you have to be to willing to
take the first risk to offer something up.
There’s a catch-22 at work in trust: you get back
what you put out. If you’re really afraid of some
bad outcome, that’s what you’re going to get.
If you behave as if you trust somebody, you’re more
likely to get trust back.
So I’d say you have to lead. If you are extremely
cautious and careful, you’ll get somebody on the other
side reacting exactly the same way. Personally, I have found
this to be true, and most people nod their heads when I
say so.
If you behave in a trustworthy manner, including putting
yourself somewhat at risk emotionally, something like 80-90
percent of the time people respond in kind. Very few people
are actually out to get you.
MCNews: Are there situations when a trusting relationship
works with a client and other times it just doesn’t?
Green: Yes. And there’s nothing
wrong with that. Some clients may say look, I just want
a commercial relationship, particularly for a small, retail
transaction.
Consultants still need to step out across the line and,
where it’s appropriate, offer a more substantial relationship.
If the client responds with “appreciate it, but no
thanks”—there’s nothing lost. Now if the
response is mean or evil, wish that person on your competitor
and walk away.
Most people are not like that. I think about three-quarters
of clients in the consulting world prefer to work with us
on a relationship basis rather than a purely arms-length
transactional one. That’s true for government markets
too, by the way, not just private companies.
MCNews: Some consultants try to build relationships
by wining and dining clients. Do you think such interactions
lead to trusting relationships?
Green: No, I don’t think so. You
can do all the drinking you want with people or spend afternoons
on the golf course with them and it doesn’t necessarily
create trusting relationships.
I think there is a useful distinction between what I call
personal and private activities. Private stuff would include
sports tickets and even things like memorizing your client’s
kids’ names. That’s completely up to the consultant
and the client and what works for them. I don’t have
anything to say about that, good or bad.
Trust is built on the personal: You must connect with others
as individual human beings. You should not view a client
as just a wallet with legs—somebody to fill out your
sales quota.
If you view clients as objects, or sources of financial
compensation for you, that will come through and they will
not trust you.
MCNews: Do you have any thoughts about how consultants
ought to think about trust-based selling when there’s
a procurement officer between the consultant and the decision
maker?
Green: Yeah, absolutely. That’s
clearly becoming more and more of an issue. The procurement
officer is the new client.
Think about it from the procurement officer’s perspective.
First of all, you’ve got a lonely job. Every vendor
is trying to get around, over, or through you—to bypass
you with all the connections they have. Worse yet, internally
not only do you have pressure to get the lowest cost, you
have a huge amount of pressure not to pick the wrong vendor.
And I think we as consultants forget. We think we’re
getting beat up for price. They get beat up a whole lot
worse if they make the wrong decision on the vendor they
choose.
The simple answer is to treat the procurement person right.
You should be thinking about how to make that person’s
life easier just as you would for any client. That includes
not only being responsive to questions and respectful of
the person’s requirements, but also freely and genuinely
offering them useful advice.
MCNews: Consultants are often advised that it’s
best to quote a price only after they understand what needs
to be done and the value they will generate. What is your
perspective?
…a sales approach that says you shouldn’t
quote price until you’ve established value is
rooted in the misguided psychology of control. |
Green: It’s true that clients can’t
make good decisions until they understand both the price
and the value. But a sales approach that says you shouldn’t
quote price until you’ve established value is rooted
in the misguided psychology of control.
From a trust perspective, price is the biggest bugaboo—the
topic we’re all afraid of broaching. That sets up
the psychological dynamic of everybody talking around things
and waiting to hear the big number at the end of the report.
That causes more damage to the creation of trust than the
mention of the number itself.
I suggest that you get price out in the open sooner rather
than later. One way you can do that is to humorously provide
a reality check. My preferred line is, “Before we
go too far and one of us embarrasses ourselves, I have the
sense that this is a low six-digit number. Are we within
the right range or are we off by a couple of orders of magnitude?”
You can make light of it but you’ve gotten it out
there, which is the point. Every once in a while, the client
will say, “Six-digit…I was thinking four-digit,”
in which case both parties are glad I mentioned it. Then
you can say I must have misunderstood, talk to me some more
about what you need.
Price is the first thing clients want to talk about and
the last thing consultants want to talk about, which means
you are in conflict right away. It also means you’re
destroying trust every step of the way. The antidote is
to get it out there.
MCNews: You’ve said consultants should replace
qualifying leads with marketing. Could you elaborate on
that?
| Most
approaches to selling are rooted in efficiency more
than effectiveness. |
Green: Most approaches to selling are
rooted in efficiency more than effectiveness. When you put
efficiency and transactions together, you get the qualification
approach. The objective of that is to get through leads
as quickly as possible to maximize the number of leads you
get to and focus your scarce resources on the few that give
you the biggest payoff.
That is completely self-oriented and pays no attention
to the impact of blowing off people in the qualification
process. Let’s say somebody calls you and it’s
clear you are not a fit for the project in question. Instead
of saying, “Sorry that’s not what we do, have
a good life” and hanging up, be willing to give a
few minutes of your time.
Ask the caller to explain a little bit more about the situation,
and offer to help. Maybe you can provide a few names or
suggest items to research further. If you’re willing
to invest five or ten minutes, you create a marketing opportunity.
Even if the person is not a potential client for you in
the future, he will have good things to say about you and
your firm to someone else who might be. What would you pay
for somebody to hand you a set of one-step-removed leads
where all you have to do is talk off the top of your head
for ten minutes? That’s powerful marketing and yet
we blow it off with this efficiency-obsessed focus on qualifying
leads.
MCNews: Many experts coach consultants to create
a rehearsed elevator speech. You have said that is not the
best use of someone’s time and effort. What’s
the alternative?
Green: Well, you should have a rehearsed
spiel down for certain circumstances, but this particular
notion, the elevator speech, has become such an iconic example
that we almost do take it literally. Imagine you are a CEO
going up in an elevator and some egocentric, obsessed stranger
comes up to you and starts babbling about her expertise.
How would you react?
MCNews: I’d want to get off the elevator.
Green: Absolutely—push the next
button to get off as soon as possible. I can’t imagine
a more egocentric, non-client focused mentality, even if
it isn’t literally the situation of riding up in the
elevator with a CEO. After all, that is meant to be somewhat
metaphorical. Nonetheless, that attitude carries over and
you see this behavior all the time.
All my clients, bar none, spend way too much time blathering
on about themselves in presentations and pitches. One of
the fundamental things that we must learn as a profession
is to remember that they don’t care that much about
us; they care about themselves.
The antidote is to design, not just the elevator speech
but all of your conversations, to turn the topic around
to them, understanding them, and asking them questions.
MCNews: If you could give a consultant one piece
of advice about the trust-based selling approach, what would
it be?
Green: Cultivate an attitude of inordinate
curiosity. You can train yourself to become more curious.
Make a list of questions for all your clients, and have
them in your back pocket.
| The
most powerful component of trust is your low level of
self-orientation, and if you’re curious, self-orientation
approaches zero. |
Go through one or two of those questions every time you
interact with a client. Good things happen when you’re
curious. Of course, you learn more about your client because
self is everybody’s favorite subject. You also begin
to get more insights. You generate answers, opinions, or
points of view, which are valuable in their own right and,
in turn, lead to more opportunities.
The most powerful component of trust is your low level
of self-orientation, and if you’re curious, self-orientation
approaches zero. Then your orientation is the client, not
only in business but in your personal attitudes.
MCNews: Thanks for your time.
Find out more about Charles Green at www.trustedadvisor.com.
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