In this season of raising the bar to the max, most of us are trying to do more presentations to earn more rewards before the holidays start but the problem is there are only so many hours in the day, right?
So another strategy is to work smarter not harder by building better relationships with customers and prospects.
Picture this, Kannan meets a new prospect at a café, an electrician named Amir who did some work on Kannan’s parents’ house recently.
The pair chat and Kannan presents QNET, the compensation plan and Bernhard H. Mayer® watches that he thinks Amir will like.
Amir asks many questions and closely inspects the Bernhard H. Mayer® Spitfire which Kannan removes from his wrist. But at the end Amir rejects the offer saying the watch is too expensive.
This may sound familiar but Amir’s rejection has very little to do with the price of the watch.
He no doubt would love the striking orange Spitfire on his wrist as well as the opportunity to develop a new source of income but he also needs also to protect himself from undue risk.
How does he know the watch will arrive? How does he know the watch won’t break after a few months? How does he know Kannan is telling the truth? Is it a scam, or not?
The concerns people have are many but they are all resolved with one thing – trust.
Unless you have super-human powers of compassion, you and every other direct sales person will have encountered this problem of trust, or a lack thereof.
I hear you ask, ‘I’m a good honest person and I know QNET is the real deal, so how can I make people trust me?’
Well, don’t take this personally but there is a good chance they aren’t all that fond of your sales oriented and subtly money-minded approach.
But you can be forgiven for being perceived in this way because in network marketing, your only compensation comes from selling a product; this pushes you to work very hard to sell. But unfortunately, this hinders the building of trust and without it; people won’t take the leap of faith.
Three Legged Stool of Trust
To help you look at your relationship with a new prospect in a different way, think of trust as a three legged stool with each leg of the stool being a different but equally important element of trust.
1. The Past
How your prospect views independent sales people before they meet you will impact their willingness to trust you now. Yes, you’re selling great QNET products from a company with a physical presence in over 20 countries and a vast global distribution network; but if your prospective customer was told last week about someone who was duped by an unscrupulous direct sales person, then for sure, they will be more cautious toward you.
2. The Brain
As an Independent Representative, from the moment you interact with someone, they will examine you to decide how willing they are to accept your competence and reliability.
For starters, you’re not an employee, you have no fixed business location and often people cannot see the products you are selling. Compare this to other methods of sales, like in a store, and you can see that the perceived risk and uncertainty is undoubtedly higher.
One way of building ‘brain trust’ is to present stories from others like your prospect that are enjoying both the products and the opportunity. You might also want to check out our story about looking smarter and influencing people too!
3. The Heart
This critical element of trust seems naturally strong for some but is the most difficult to develop for others. In essence, a prospect’s confidence in you is also based on feelings produced by the level of care and concern you show them. ‘Heart trust’ is characterised by a feeling of security and a perceived strength in the relationship between them and you.
Your task is to reduce your prospect’s perceived risk and uncertainty by building a strong stool of genuine trust to upon which your new relationship can sit.
This calls on you to show credibility, honesty, reliability, predictability and benevolence. And as a genuine QNET Independent Representative, you will already have many trusting relationships through which you will have exemplified these traits every single day.
Draw on those experiences to make your personal interactions with all people more productive, both for you and for them.
Finally, we cannot talk about trust without stating the most important condition of all – Once built, a trusting relationship carries the immense responsibility to never ever violate that trust.
Abuse of trust is like knocking out one the legs of the trust stool causing the relationship to fall to the ground.
Some examples of abuse of trust include overstating a product’s capability, exaggerating earning potential or understating the amount of work required to succeed.
This kind of behaviour is unethical, is not tolerated by QNET and damages the reputation of the Company and the entire direct-selling industry. It’s always a good idea to regularly refresh yourself on the QNET Code of Ethics.
Share your thoughts about trust below.
Reference: Poon, P. et al. (2012). Managing trust in direct selling relationships. Marketing Intelligence & Planning.