—Sir Winston Churchill

(LINK TO AUDIO RECORDING BELOW.)

Building Relationships of Trust

All sales start with a simple conversation. It may be a conversation between you and a potential client or customer, between one of your clients and a potential referral, between one of your colleagues and a potential referral, or between your website and a potential client. An effective sales cycle is based on turning these simple conversations into relationships of trust with your potential clients over time. We know that people buy from those they like and trust. This is never truer than for the professional service provider.

If you don’t have trust, then it doesn’t matter how well you’ve planned, what you’re offering, or whether you’ve created a wide variety of buying options to meet varying budgets. If a potential client doesn’t trust you, nothing else matters. They aren’t going to buy from you—period. If you think about it, this may be one of the main reasons you say you hate marketing and selling. You may be trying to sell to people with whom you have not yet built enough trust. All sales offers must be proportionate to the amount of trust that you’ve earned.

What are your potential clients thinking?

• Do they really believe you can deliver what you say you can?
• Do they trust you to hold their personal information confidential?
• Do they like the people who work for you?
• Do they feel safe with you?
• Do they believe hiring you will give them a significant return on their investment?

If you want a perpetual stream of inspiring and life-fulfilling ideal clients clamoring for your services and products, then just remember—all sales start with a simple conversation and are executed when a need is met and the appropriate amount of trust is assured.

You might find value in this audio recording of an interview I did on how to create your own sales cycle process. It should help you turn strangers into friends and friends into clients. Oh, I also attempt to bust some social media myths on the recording.

Uh-oh.

Would you like to get that kind of response when you tell someone what you do? This can happen to any service professional, not just to a yoga teacher. Say a stock broker meets someone whose only introduction to stock brokers has been the movie Boiler Room (a movie that came out in 2000 about stock brokers who try to swindle innocent people out of their life’s savings). Not a pretty picture.

How much more are you than your professional title? Your Book Yourself Solid Dialogue will allow you to set yourself apart from everyone else whose professional title is the same as yours. It provides you with the opportunity to highlight the ways in which you and your services, prod­ucts, and programs are unique—and do so with passion—and without using an elevator speech. Yes, you heard me, without using an elevator speech.

The elevator speech (AKA: the elevator pitch or 30-second commercial) reflects the idea that it should be possible to wow someone with what you do in the time it takes an elevator to go from the 1^st to the 5^th floor.

I’ve been polling audiences of thousands for years on this issue. During each speech I ask, “How many of you love, love, love listening to someone else’s elevator speech?” No hands go up. I then ask, “How many of you love, love, love giving your elevator speech?” Same thing. No hands. So what gives? If we don’t like listening to or giving the speech, why is it still being taught? Because, of course, we need to be able to talk about what we do—I get the concept. However, in this case, the elevator speech has been inappropriately appropriated by the service professional. Not only does it not work well, it makes us look foolish, or worse yet, obnoxious.

The elevator pitch was born so that the entrepreneur could pitch an idea to a venture capitalist or angel investor in the hopes of receiving funding, not for the service professional to try and build a relationship of trust with a potential client. Venture capitalists often judge the quality of an idea on the basis of the quality of its elevator pitch. Makes perfect sense, in that situation. But this is not how a relationship develops between a client and a service professional. You’re trying to earn the status of a trusted adviser not trying to raise money to create some new product like metal detecting sandals. Totally different context. Totally different dynamic.

To support my beautiful community of service professionals, I’m on a mission to kill the elevator speech, to remove it from the business vernacular—for the service professional. I hope you’ll join me on this mission and learn how to talk about what you do without ever resorting to an elevator speech. So, what do you do instead?

Use this crazy concept that I call a conversation. Weird, I know. But go with me for a second here and consider using the Book Yourself Solid Dialogue, a creative—but not scripted!—conversation that will spark curiosity and interest about you and your services, products, and programs.

The Book Yourself Solid Dialogue will allow you to have a meaningful conversation (conversation being the operative word) with a potential client or referral source. The dialogue is a dynamic, lively description of the people you help, what challenges they face, how you help them, and the results and benefits they get from your services. It is intended to replace the static, boring, and usual response to the question, “What do you do?” “I’m a business consultant, “I’m a massage therapist,” or “I’m a graphic designer.” Answers which often elicit nothing more than a polite nod, comment, or awkward silence and a blank stare. Once you get that response, anything more you say about yourself or your services will sound pushy. Worse yet, you could supplement the rote answer with an overblown, high-highfalutin, hyperbole-laden elevator speech that’s supposed to make you look like a rock star in 30 seconds. Unfortunately, I doubt the one-two punch of boring answer, followed by excessively exuberant elevator pitch is going to compel the listener to whip out their credit card right then and there.

Instead you’ll learn the Book Yourself Solid way to create a meaningful, connected dialogue with a potential client or referral source. Think of it as a conversation between two people each of whom actually cares about what the other has to say. The beautiful thing is that the interchange is based on successfully understanding why people buy what you’re selling.

And because you read Book Yourself Solid (Hint. Wink. Wink.), you already know why people buy what you’re selling.