It's simple. In sales, you need to make enduring connections with your buyers.
But you cannot form solid connections without a firm foundation of trust. Trust brings buyers and sellers together and keeps them together. A lack of trust inhibits buyers, and a breach in trust shuts them down completely. Trust is vital to forming buyer/seller connections.
When it comes to establishing trust, sellers start with a disadvantage. It isn’t fair, but it’s an unavoidable reality. The profession of selling has a blemished reputation. Buyers have been conditioned to proceed with caution when entering into relationships with sellers. Buyers assume sellers are money-motivated, tricky, slick and self-absorbed. All too often, sellers prove these perceptions to be true. So the rest of us have to compensate for untrustworthy ones who burn our buyers.
In order to gain and maintain the trust of buyers, sellers must act in a trustworthy manner at all times. Trust is so fragile that a 90% rate of being trustworthy simply isn’t good enough. The buyer will remember the one out of 10 times you did not deliver in a trustworthy way.
100% trustworthy is a mighty high standard. On top of that, there’s more to being trustworthy than you might expect. There are 12 different dimensions of trust that come into play. Knowing and being responsive in all 12 areas is what it takes to build and preserve trust.
Suddenly, it doesn't seem so simple anymore.
That's why we spent over 20 years researching how buyers responded to sellers. We asked buyers what sellers who were successful did differently to build trust.
Buyers told us (and others, as is abundantly evident in research) that sellers who asked purposeful, high quality questions were sellers they could trust.
So the next natural step, of course, was to figure out what kinds of questions led to buyers perceiving sellers as trustworthy. From there, we identified the eight purposes of asking questions and how buyers respond to each of the eight. We developed the acronym D-I-S-C-O-V-E-R, with each letter representing a different purpose for a question. Then we wrote a bestselling book about how sellers can differentiate themselves by asking purposeful questions to build trust and make more sales.
