Trust – yep, that wins over anything else.
It’s interesting how sometimes just talking about what you do can lead to insights. I had coffee earlier this week with someone I met at a networking event – he was interested in knowing more about Chicago Sales Strategies, and more specifically – Value Based Sales.
What’s interesting here is that he came from the government contractor world. Because of this, the majority of my ‘value’ discussion fell on deaf ears. The typical government procurement process is: issue RFQ, receive bids, and award lowest price – not much room for ‘value’- or so we both thought. It wasn’t until I went into more detail about potential value drivers that he recalled an incident where his company won a government project – without being the lowest bidder.
In his example, although the lowest bidder met all of the RFQ requirements, my friend dug a little deeper. He found two issues that had the potential to negatively impact their ability to actually meet the commitments. This created enough doubt in the buyer’s mind that he decided to go with the second lowest bidder.
This got me thinking about the origins of value and the real value drivers in any given purchasing process. I came to the conclusion that in the end, it all comes down to trust. Even price can come down to trust in a project based business – I’ve seen ‘low-bidders’ disappoint clients time and time again with change orders.
My point here is that Chicago Sales Strategies can absolutely help many businesses. However, we can only develop and teach successful strategies – it is up to you, the individual, to decide whether you want to be known as trustworthy or not. And make no mistake about it, no matter how strong your business is elsewhere, without trust in the customer’s eyes – you will never be as successful as you should be.
