Sales Hacks: the Trusted Advisor

 

Sales Hack Friday
The Trusted Advisor

May 27, 2022

 

On my mind today is David Maister’s classic book, “The Trusted Advisor”.  The book did not coin the term, but it popularized it in the same way that Mack Hanan’s book popularized “Consultative Selling” (a now-out-of-print book).  Maister and his co-authors published theirs in 2000, and it’s still in print.  It paints a substantive picture of what a Trusted Advisor looks like and how to become one, based on their experience and research among clients and consultants.

 

With the term now in vogue in CE, it’s probably helpful to take a peek at what the words mean, less to us as the advisors in question than to our clients who will be the beneficiaries.  Make no mistake: our sales team will also be the beneficiaries.  But getting inside the head of the Client to understand what they are looking for is probably a more reliable path to becoming one than merely asserting that we are. 

 

The TL|DR is this: if we truly aspire to be our Client’s trusted advisor, we do not become one simply by claiming the title.  We must earn it by the way we interact with them.

 

 

What is a Trusted Advisor?

 

Maister describes of progression of business relationships along two axes.

 

 

The research around these Trusted Advisor relationships is that they are RATIONAL and EMOTIONAL.  This should resonate with any of you who have been through CE’s Sales Onboarding (e.g., look at Daniel Kahneman’s research from “Thinking Fast and Slow” and how our brains are designed to make decisions). 

 

The book is worth the read, both because of the theories behind what trust looks like and the practical application of how to earn and keep it.  But for me, what makes the book so worthwhile is a simple way to measure how trustworthy you are in your advisory role.  Trust can be measured by four factors: three of them trust-building (they form the numerator) and one trust eroding (it forms the denominator).  Maister calls this the Trust Equation (again, if you have been through our Onboarding over the past two years, you have seen this). 

 

TRUST	=	CREDIBILITY	+	RELIABILITY	+	INTIMACY
		SELF-ORIENTATION

 

 

The book spells it out in some detail, using research from clients and advisors.  And those definitions elaborate the concept quite helpfully.  However, they are also fairly self-explanatory. 

 

Imagine this as a scoring system, with each factor rated on a 1 to 10 scale.  Add up the numerator score, divide it by the denominator score, and you have a Trust score.  As a self-assessment, the Trust Equation – imagined through the perspective of someone whose trust you value, such as an important client stakeholder or even a colleague or friend – can give you an enlightening (or unsettling) jolt.  Even more powerful would be to ask someone else to rate you!

 

Do you want a simple trust hack?  Let’s look at how to improve your Self-Orientation score (which means to lower it). 

 

Ask yourself: why do we see anyone as self-oriented?  What do they do to give off that vibe?  For one thing, they talk about themselves…a lot.  They turn every story back to themselves, every narrative arc is about them, and they are the protagonist – the hero.  Selling Narcissists have a slight variation to this theme: they talk incessantly about their solutions and company.  Chances are, Selling Narcissists are doing this with good intent: they want the Client to LIKE the solution.  And they want to persuade the Client to BUY the solution.  They might even be successful in selling stuff.  But the chances of a Selling Narcissist becoming a Trusted Advisor are very slim.

 

Here’s a sales hack you can use to avoid a high Self-Orientation score: listen more; talk less.  And how do you do this?  This simple sales hack is:

 

Ask more – and better – questions.

 

Think about it for a second.  Where is the spotlight shining when you’re asking questions?  It’s on your Client and their issues, not on you and yours.  By shining the spotlight on them, not you, you inevitably give off an Other-Oriented vibe and improve the Trust Denominator.

 

In a future post, we will look at how this works and what you can do to ask more and better questions.  But for now, remember this mantra: ASK, don’t TELL.  Do this more habitually and