By Todd Duncan

When it comes to training for true sales success, it’s really a matter of learning the language of selling as opposed to learning clever selling lines. To close sales in an effective manner with out call reluctance or cold calling, you must communicate in the language that is most easily understood by your prospects and clients, and that language is trust. There is no better path to a sale than to communicate trustworthiness to your prospects and clients.

More than any characteristic, trust is the definitive common ground in the world of sales. If you communicate trust, your prospects more easily understand you, your clients more readily receive you, and you more fluently maintain your existing your relationships. And when you clearly communicate trust, trust is clearly communicated back to you in the form of positive responses, repeat sales, and solid referrals.

To communicate trust to your prospects, you can rely on five traits that can be explained with the acronym T.R.U.S.T. If you convey these five traits consistently, your prospects will be much more receptive to you and what you say. With T.R.U.S.T. in place your cold calls will heat up and your call reluctance will melt away.

1. Timeliness

So much of what the common salesperson communicates has to do with schedules and whims. As a result, when you make a cold call, prospects have to listen to long rants about product details that may or may not be important to them. They receive calls that they are not expecting. They don’t get call backs when the calls were originally promised. And what it all conveys is that the salesperson’s time is more important than the prospects’ time.

If you want to convey trust, don’t ever assume prospects have time to talk to you. Schedule only what you intend to maintain. Call only when your prospect expects it. And don’t ever assume prospects want to hear you say anything without first asking. With that being said, the best way to heat up cold calls is by not making them.

2. Relevance

“What does that have to do with my needs?” is a far-too-common question in the world of sales. And whether prospects verbalize it or not, many still think it. To communicate trust to your prospects, don’t ever go into a selling situation assuming you know what they need. Let them tell you what is relevant. Make listening your first priority when you deal with prospects. Then, with their permission, share proposed solutions based on what they’ve told you, not what you think they want. Through gaining relevance with your client you will achieve the confidence needed to overcome call reluctance.

3. Understanding

If you pose your way to a sale, your focus is on the performance. But when posing is not an option, you are forced to ascertain needs in order to provide a compelling presentation. If prospects don’t think you are trying to understand their situation before you try to to sell something to them, you might as well forget their business.

4. Sincerity

If you can’t be yourself in selling situations you shouldn’t be a salesperson. Nobody likes a phony. Nobody likes a poser. If you can’t stand it when a presumptuous salesperson invades your space, why would you ever think that others would enjoy it? But to be successful in the sales profession, you must get past your pretense and treat your customers with respect.

5. Thoroughness

To convey trust, be thorough in everything you do. Always cover all your prospects’ bases for them. Never make them ask you for a progress update. As much as possible, have everything they need to do in order to give you business—and more business—lined up and ready to. That’s not presumption; that’s professionalism. From your explanation of the contract to a simple phone call to apprise them of an order’s progress, nothing will make your prospects and clients more certain of your ability to meet their needs than being thorough.

To eliminate posing immediately, you must learn to communicate clearly in the language of trust. In other words, the five traits listed here must be evident by the way you sell.

After all, if you’re truly interested in lasting sales success, you can’t foster trust with one client and not another. Building lifetime relationships with every client must be your goal. And the only way to do that is to communicate trust consistently to every one of your clients on a regular basis. Speak the language clearly and regularly so that it remains second nature.

In closing, it all comes down to demonstrating High Trust through timeliness, relevance, understanding, sincerity, and thoroughness with your prospects and clients to heat up your cold calls and overcome your call reluctance.

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