I’m British and Selling’s Not Polite – How to Create Trust With Your Customers, So That They Want to Buy From You

A couple of days ago, we sent out a survey to our customer list about newsletters. The purpose of the survey was to find out what kind of help people need when contemplating sending a newsletter to their customers. The results were very interesting, as they always are – your customers will always come back with a different answer to the ones you were expecting. Please take note – it is always worth surveying your customers before you launch a new product so that you can get it right for them.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this blog post. The point is to tell you about one specific response that we had. It brought up a hot potato. The gentleman in question pointed out to us that we had omitted the one true barrier to his contacting his clients on a “proactive” basis.  And I quote:

‘I’m British and it’s pushy and not nice’. He went on to say that “[when] someone does it to me, I trust them less”.

This all needs unpacking and is probably beyond the scope of a blog post, but I’ll give it a go!

I don’t need to tell you that we are a pretty cynical bunch in this country. We filter for ‘how is this person trying to rip me off’ more often than we filter for ‘how is what this person has going to be useful to me’. We have very sensitive antennae to smarmy sales people and people who we don’t want to trust.  I have been in sales for well over 20 years and a great deal of those years have been spent teaching sales people to sell in such a way that their customers truly want what they have. Why wouldn’t you want to do it that way – it’s so much more rewarding than trying to force your products down people’s throats.

In a nutshell, your customers and potential customers need to know, like and trust you BEFORE they will buy from you. That can happen all in one transaction, but usually doesn’t. And the key word there is TRUST.  So what creates trust? There is really ONE thing that creates or breaks TRUST above anything else: YOUR INTENTION. If your intention is to provide your customers with products and services that will really help them get what they want, and you make that your focus, then they will be happy to buy from you.

If on the other hand, your FOCUS is on making money without focusing on your customers, they will learn not to trust you.

You will have longevity in business if you always set out to provide your customers with what they want.

GIVE your customers great information that will help them and they will learn your intention and learn that you are trustworthy. But when you give them some information, just give it.

Then, MAKE IT CLEAR when you are going to sell to them. We don’t like surprises and we definitely do not like being led down one path only to find that in fact we have been ‘tricked’. We only lose trust when someone tells us one thing and we find out that there is another agenda.  We are suspicious of anything FREE because we think it must be too good to be true; or we don’t want to accept FREE stuff because we might feel obliged to buy something later. That’s why your intention is so important. If you give free information that is crap, it won’t build relationships. Give great information and you will build loyal customers.

Remember too that you are in business. It is absolutely necessary to sell to your customers so that you have a healthy business; there are just ways and ways of going about it.

So, to answer our very British customer: Giving your customers information that will help them in their lives in the form of a newsletter is not pushy. You are not selling, you are creating and maintaining a valuable relationship. If you want to sell to them at another time, then great. If not, you are missing out on income from a group of people that probably want to spend their money with you.