Trust-Based Marketing Dos & Don'ts

In the last few years, there's been a shift in whether or not we trust somebody and what it is that we trust and whether or not you've recognized it, it's changing the way we do business. Welcome to the Magnific Marketing Podcast. Today, we're going to be listening to Steve Clark. Steve Clark is a sales training wizard. And at the time of recording this, he had been selling for nearly three decades not to mention running his own sales training consulting company. Now, we're talking about trust in this episode because there are a couple of secret triggers that in today's world, we need to be hitting. Now, this is something that Steve Clark goes into a lot of detail about and it's things that we miss even today. And how do we generate the type of trust that customers need in order to be able to take action? What are they actually looking for? And then how are you able to build that type of rapport, that type of authority, that type of trust with your customers? This episode is already going to be jam-packed, but Steve goes one step further and talks about the nine gates to customer commitment. How do you weave in, Brandon? How do you make sure that you are perceived appropriately so that way you get past the salesman red lights that go off in people's minds? Let's jump in to trust-based marketing do's and don'ts with Dan Kennedy and Steve Clark. I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really the lessons, they're kind of laws that you'll live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name. The world we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Hey, good afternoon everybody. Welcome to the Diamond Call. I have with me sort of to run the show here in a minute or two. Sales wizard, sales training wizard, longtime member Steve Clark, who undoubtedly many of you know I believe fairly recently if you didn't know him before you encountered Steve on a gold interview if I'm correct and so in just a minute I'm going to let I'm going to let Steve guide our conversation about trust-based marketing. I do want to remind everybody if you have not obtained it the new no BS book, no BS guide to trust-based marketing has been on the shelf, been in the stores and so forth for a little while now and should be in your hands. So Steve I'm going to hand this off to you and out of curiosity maybe for everybody just a the quick thumbnail of who the devil you are and might have invited you to do the call and maybe also your point of origin your Kennedy origin story. I think that's always interesting to folks. Great, well as you mentioned I own a sales training consulting company called New School Selling. I've been at this selling thing nearly three decades and then my introduction to Dan Kennedy was in December of '07 when I attended an event in Baltimore and walked away from there with several ideas and actually purchased some resources and then immediately after that joint peak performers in January of '08 and attended my first super conference in April of '08 and became an IBA in April of '08 as well. So in the in the first six months of my glacier Kennedy at that time introduction I invested some $60,000 in resources and have invested at least another 2,000 hours in study and the implementation of the programs and and philosophies and strategies and in the first year of doing so I increased my personal income over $100,000 and continued to be an IBA for four years. I just recently sold my IBA and now I'm concentrating exclusively on area exclusive licenses for folks who might want to join forces with me and become a certified new school selling trainer and consultant in their local marketplace. Cool, all right, well as as you know and people will discover you and I share a lot philosophically about how selling ought to be approached and what selling is really all about so I'll let you lead. Well as I mentioned I have read nearly everything that you have written that's for public consumption in a way at least that I know of. I've read all of your books not only have I read them I've digested consume them the most recent one the trust-based marketing book has already been dog-eared I've been through it so many times and in this particular book I think it's of course all of your books are great and different ones have different points and this one particularly to me struck a nerve because of the relevancy of the topic which is the whole idea of trust and I I have certainly seen that in my own business and in my clients business that it is much more difficult to extract money out of the marketplace today than it has ever been before and people are much more jaundiced and scared about letting loose of money so I really appreciate the book and if the folks listening to this don't have the book they all need to go get it and not just read it once but go through it several times and take notes in it because there's a lot of great stuff in there and it wouldn't be a stretch to say that by doing so it might fundamentally change their entire mindset about really what business they're in but I want to jump into the very beginning of the book and the in the preface of the book and this is a very powerful thing that you talk about you made to statement or you asked the question what if everything you were taught and believed about successfully conducting with clients were wrong so would you take a little bit of time and explain that question to the youth? Well so if you think about it and of course you're you're a student of sales training so if you went back into the late 1930s and 1940s and into 1950 and you took a look at the popular books that were written at the time about selling the manual labor sales trainers so this is you know if you go back to lineage from Tommy Hopkins to J. Douglas Edwards to before J. Douglas Edwards to before the guy that J. Douglas Edwards learned from and you looked at all that stuff and then you went and got a random sampling of sales books from the Barnes and Noble shelf today and you took one or two or three or four of maybe the most popular broad-based sales training programs or you looked at a lot of corporate sales training programs you would actually see very little difference either in process or in content in substance or in tone so the process is still really a hunt the prey process a lot of process still taught is you are playing a numbers game so play it harder and go through more numbers and that's how you get to more income the substance the content is still you know very much about fighting your way to a sales opportunity be that one-to-one presentation getting people in a room for a one-to-many presentation driving people to the web for presentation so getting to a presentation and then pushing product and service I had a client on the phone this is my phone day so this and a tele seminar and a radio interview the rest of the day is private client calls and that I have with the same people every month and I was on the phone earlier a day with one who is a very smart marketer and a good salesperson and still they had faxed me ahead of time their latest video script that people are being driven to online to watch this video for what it is that they are selling and it starts right at with no foreplay if you will it starts right at product it starts with I've got this really cool blue box let me tell you all about what's in the box. And as you rightly point out, at the moment, people are more skeptical, less trusting. Every day they're getting beat around the head was something that seemed like solid ground beneath them that turns out to be extremely unreliable. I mean, everything from going to a movie theater to see a movie in peace, we think differently about that than we did maybe a month ago, thanks to the dark night episodes. To just about every place we've put our money to gee, what are hamburgers really made out of? What the hell is pink slime anyway? I mean, on and on. So you have this ever more distrustful, for good reason, population confronted with the same sales approach that they were being confronted with in 1940 and 1950, which is a time when you had a remarkably trusting population. I mean, you probably share with me, I mean, when I grew up, people, I can't recall my father locking the car, often the keys were left in it. The back door of the house was left open, so if neighbors were coming over and you were running an errand and they beat you there, they could just let themselves in and start to pot a coffee. I mean, you sent your kids out in the morning and said, "Go play and be back home by dinner." You know, that was the environment then. The environment now is completely different and yet we're still selling as if it was 1858. All about pushing product and I call it vomiting on the prospect, just pitching product information to them and then trying to close, as opposed to developing relationship before we even attempt to do anything like that and I would agree we did 100% of, I see that going on with everyone, dead matter with the small companies, large companies, they all want to push product and talk about their product and how great it is. Yeah, I had two very interesting meetings within the last few weeks, I spent a day consulting with a money undermanage, but Guy, he specializes in dealing with people who've recently sold or are selling their companies, he has 1.1 billion undermanagement. And he basically said, all of the financial products, what's actually going to be done with the money, is the least important piece of acquiring and satisfying a client. And the most important piece is really relationship building. And I had virtually the exact same conversation with a business to business slash industrial sales representative selling fairly expensive and complex equipment to a particular industry and he arrived at the same conclusion, but if you really examine the way, most companies advertise in market and the way most sales people sell, you find default to 5 things. So everybody tends to default to talking about product or service, features, benefits, imperative superiority and price, and in part it's because how everybody's been trained to sell and to write copy and to present advertising. In part it's because that's how they've been conditioned to do it, in part it's because what they see when they look around, that's how everybody else does it, and in part because that's what they're comfortable talking about. But these 5 things, products or services, features, benefits, comparative superiority, and price are rarely what a buyer of anything but a base commodity is really trying to figure out. What they're really trying to figure out is who do I trust with this need problem, desire or opportunity? Who the heck do I trust to be on my side, to be my ally, to give me the right advice, to help me make good decisions because in most product or service categories, the truth of the matter is we're all buying stuff we're not qualified to buy. So if I go to buy auto repair, I am the least qualified human being on the planet to buy auto repair. I never opened the hood, I wouldn't know what I was looking at if I did open the hood, I've changed one tire in my entire life, you know, I don't understand that. But really the same thing is true with my healthcare decisions, my financials I know a little bit more about the financial stuff that I do anything else, but still for the most part you and I are buying things that we actually are not qualified to make intelligent decisions about buying. So most buyers know that and they are, they're instantly in a defense mode when hurriedly confronted with the five things about which they're not qualified to make judgments and they are really trying to find somebody that they can trust to assist them with making the judgments they are not qualified to make. And that places this enormous burden on somehow getting to the trusted person in a relationship position rather than the sales person or marketing person role. I think you would agree that most buyers don't know that that's what they're looking for consciously, that this whole idea of trust is an unconscious thing that they're trying to figure out. No, I'd actually differ with you to a degree. I think that a significant percentage, perhaps as many as half, of all prospects who either set out to buy something, to solve a problem, find a solution, find an opportunity, satisfy a desire, who set out to buy something or who are presented with and then intrigued by a particular product or service. I think they are consciously aware of their own shortcomings in making those decisions and are at least as consciously interested in the who has they are, the what. Now I think there's also a significant percentage, perhaps as many as half, who now fit your description, who are not really consciously aware of this. But are at least subconsciously sensitive to their own shortcomings and will be greatly reassured by the appearance of someone they can trust into category in which they're operating, if and when it occurs, and remain anxious, skeptical, price-resistant, timid, procrastinating buyers in the absence of the appearance of such a person. I'd also say that the further up the affluence, latter you go. The further up the life experience, latter you go, so when age 50 plus converges with affluence, at that point, this thing is probably weighted 80/20 in favor of conscious awareness and deliberate search for a trusted person in this category before a selection of a product to service, a concern about features, benefits, comparative superiority or price. So when you're down in, let's say, blue collar, 2030/40, maybe even $50,000 a year income range, and a need or interest in many categories arise, let's say, I don't know, there's a big cracked it's a. you're driving away and you need to get it fixed and you are a $50,000 year guy in an ordinary neighborhood and you live in a $200,000 house. The odds of you being product service convenience price oriented are pretty high. You might schlep over to Home Depot and ask some questions to somebody to find some stuff you can do it with yourself. You might have this problem hanging around and suddenly a flyer arrives, a Valpa coupon arrives, a TV commercial pops up in front of you for guys who fix driveways and foundations and concrete work and so forth and you might respond to them. Now let's say you make $250,000 a year and you live in a $2,000,000 house. You are much less likely to do any of those things I just named and you are more likely to go in search of the go-to guy who fixes driveways for people that live in $2,000,000 houses. The first thing you're going to do probably is you're going to go to peers, so you're going to ask a neighbor, you're going to ask a friend, you're going to go to other vendors you already have an established trust relationship with, so if there's somebody who takes carrier house and one and does that work you might ask them. You may still be susceptible to direct marketing and to advertising but it is going to have to be more about the person, the company, the expertise than it is about those five things that everybody defaults to. So I think there's a great deal of conscious awareness and desire to be tapped by the person who advances themselves based on trust rather than the person who advances themselves based on the big five everybody defaults to. But let me follow up on that then and if the buyer in fact is consciously aware of this whole issue of trust and they're seeking to find that person that they can trust, let's get inside the buyer's head for a second, decode how they figure out if this person is trustworthy or not, so. Well that's an ugly mess, it is, it's also a key. So yeah and it's an ugly mess and it's somewhat of a magicians key if you want to use the key analogy because it doesn't happen in a rational and logical manner in an analytical manner as it should in most cases with most people and so if you think about the category of financial fraud, so if you think about made off, Stanford, the guy named Paragreen who left the suicide note and is now in jail and I saw crawl on CNN yesterday or the day before that there's some firm in Michigan or Indiana or someplace where financial advisors have apparently been running a big Ponzi scheme. So if you think about the category financial fraud which the Ponzi version of it has existed since Charles Ponzi for whom in his name invented it, made off is one of the biggest known, it's possible when all the dust settles and MF global turns out to be really nothing more than this, there's still, yesterday was the one year anniversary of the collapse of MF global with politically connected core sign and there's still two billion dollars that is just missing, nobody can seem to count for where it is, where it went, etc. And unlike made off, Mr. Coresign is still walking the streets but so if you look at financial fraud you often see, there's a great book about the home stake oil swindle which is now ancient history but it's instructive. You often see people you would think way too smart and way too sophisticated and way too knowledgeable about money, including professional money managers, people managing endowment funds at hospitals and universities, getting taken in by these things. And you think how could this happen? And when you hear it after the fact in condensed form, so all these people gave their money to this guy to manage, because he had a mystical process, he wouldn't explain. He had offices on a floor in an office building that nobody was ever allowed to visit. And he never failed to deliver a consistent and satisfactory return with hardly any ups or downs. Now when you hear it said that way, you've got to be like a functional moron to buy into this and a whole lot of people who hand over money are not functional morons. So how does that happen? It's because often we get to trust through all sorts of irrational and non-analytical and non-critical ways. One is we like the guy and likability is an enormous factor in everything from how America chooses its president which may be the worst way ever to choose a president, to who you let babysit your kids without doing any background check, any on the parents or on the babysitting kid, to who you let house sit, to who you let work on the brakes on your car. It is often likability is often a big factor. So if you, so for example, if you look at a member of ours, if you look at Darren Garments business and Darren sells heartland of American investment real estate to out of state investors often site unseen never meeting them at best talking with them on the phone. And one of the profound biases in his investors is some family connection or they went to college in somehow they grew up in they have family connection in they went to school in Iowa or one of the surrounding states and because he grew up in and went to school in and lives in Iowa they have affinity with him. Every veteran to military veteran doctor to doctor peer to peer, neighbor to neighbor. So affinity enters into this picture. Authority which is not the same as credibility, credibility takes time, authority does not. Authority enters into this picture, breaching someone's defensive wall. So that's how made that's how made off ran up the money is if you take a group of very affluent people who know each other well and hang out together. Let's say all the members of a country club that their defensive wall is very strong. They do a lot by peer-to-peer referral they in everything they buy for every purpose. They do very little from direct overt marketing. The wall is high, the wall is strong, the wall has no holes in it unless you somehow get inside because if you get inside with one the very thing that makes the wall so strong, the over reliance on peer-to-peer referral now makes everybody vulnerable. It's somewhat akin to you doing everything right with your health and being a food freak and you know health food freak and exercise freak and pretty much on every indicator scoring 20 years younger than your chronological age. But if you get locked in an airplane with 100% recirculating air with four or five really, really, really sick people carrying the flu of all flu's, you're a great candidate to be carrying that flu when you get home. If you make it worse, if you make it tuberculosis, you're a big candidate to be taken tuberculosis home. So you penetrate that wall, one person gets sick almost overnight, they all can get sick. So there are all sorts of reasons that people come to trust and very few of them are properly rational and analytical and so a great deal of what you see in the Trust Base Marketing book is about the leverage of irrational and non-analytical pathways to trust. you talk about that in actually the chapter four on what client really want to know and you talk about something called the nine gates to customer commitment and and as I you know as I look at those almost all of those are emotional things like the guy for real is he telling me the truth and am I making the best choice here so those are emotional issues which you know kind of goes back to that old thing about people buying emotionally and then justifying logically or rationally but would you say that that developing a buyer developing trust with a prospective salesperson that it would be purely not purely but mostly a comfort level an emotional feeling they have for that salesperson because they truly don't understand the complexity of the product or service they're buying in most cases yeah I mean I think we support are we support our response to someone with facts so you know information has a role in all of this however we actually tend to make our decisions about another person and then welcome the facts that support our decision as opposed to collecting facts and information and using that to make a decision about the person and in instances where we have an opportunity to do so we will tend to make our decision about the person and then that person guide our decision about products and services and price and so when you think about it in these terms everything that you can do to arrive at use the word comfortable with that you can use to arrive at a position where the person is predisposed to accept your recommendations so there's all sorts of ways that happens and can be accelerated I mean if you go for your physical today so one is you know established brand that's the one everybody understands most so if you go to get your physical today from your regular doc who also is at the Cleveland Clinic and he says you got a heart pouloup and if we don't get you into surgery in the next half hour and start cutting your debt you get on the gurney if you go over here to the neighborhood urgent care center because you were out cutting the grass and you ran over your big toe with the lawnmower and while they're fixing your toe the doctor working in the urgent care center for low wages who you don't know from Adam's house cat and you went to the urgent care center for the first time in your life just because you remembered where it was and it was close to your house and he says hey not only do you have this toe problem you got this heart pouloup going on and if we don't get you in an ambulance and get you to hospital and start cutting in the next half hour you're going to be dead you don't necessarily jump right in the ambulance and so brand can matter watch Disney's cell time shares versus a no name placed down the street cell time shares you'll see the difference so brand can matter and it doesn't have to be your brand it can be affiliation with a brand again affinity can matter um um shared philosophy expressed can matter age gender um and so there's a whole host of these referenced in the book and and none of them have to do with really establishing the benefits of a product or a service and these even come in advance of establishing traditional expertise and traditional credibility one of the things that that uh that i've often taught is if you act like a salesperson the stereotypical salesperson you're going to get treated like one and not get a whole lot of respect and you you talk about that in the book when you talk about uh you know uh top 10 ways people know that you're a salesperson so would you talk about a couple of those and uh you know well i will but i first want to go to your point which is an important overarching point which is that you really control how people respond to you and treat you by what stereotype what role um you present yourself in and i'm pretty sure it's in the book uncensored sales strategies if not it's certainly in the home study course the recordings that i did with Sydney Barrows and it's an example a lot of people won't like but nonetheless it's incredibly instructive um she explains that in her old former ancient history life um of running at the time manhatton's most expensive escort service that one of the uh techniques that she taught all her ladies was on arrival at a at a client uh a gentleman's space which more often than not would be a hotel room uh the young lady always wore a jacket coat or a wrap and always turned back to client to be assisted in removing coat jacket or wrap because that's how ladies behave and if you can get the gentleman to treat you like a lady at the beginning the gentleman will treat you properly all through the entire encounter now i have no idea intuitive instinctive where she got it from but it's brilliant and it speaks to how we convey to people that they are to see us uh pigeonhole us decide who and what we are and then treat us accordingly and we have you narrow that to salesperson who ranks fairly low on the uh social respect power uh ladder in life not as low as politicians perhaps not as low as women of the evening um but certainly you know down in their area um and and that's what a person views you as and that's how you present yourself to them you can be pretty sure you're going to be treated um like they treat any other low level person in their life and specifically they're going to treat you like they treat all salespeople right which generally speaking is badly um disrespectfully distrustfully skeptically um negotiate negotiate negotiate negotiate so like there's three different car commercials on right now that all depict the customer in negotiation with the car salesman now by the way if i'm a car salesman working for any of those brands i'd like to put my hands around the neck of the advertising people and strangle them to death um because what are we telegram what are we what expectation are we creating but so that's that's now how people treat salespeople right and we know that's how they're going to treat us if we present ourselves to them as a salesperson so if you didn't know anything now about what to do about that uh it's fairly simple to figure out how people identify somebody as a stereotypical salesperson and know that you can't do any of that um you don't dare and and so now the flip side of that is to decide what role you want to play how you want to be perceived and how you want to be treated figure out who gets treated that way who gets that kind of response from the prospects you're going to deal with and what do they look up. like, present themselves as, talk like, sound like, how do they conduct business. And there's your model. You don't have much time to do it. It has to be done pretty quickly in the interaction before they have a chance to pigeonhole you. Just as that lady doesn't have much time when she walks into the room, her first move has got to be to position herself that way from the very beginning. And if you don't do that, if you default to that stereotypical behavior, it can be pretty much all over at that point. Yeah, that's both true and false. So if you think about it, essentially when we replace prospecting with marketing, we buy ourselves some time to create the right aura before a phone call or an in-person meeting. And even in that example, that person had to see an ad, they had to respond to an ad, and they had to talk to somebody on the telephone before the person arrived at their door. So there's always some opportunity to set the stage, if you will. And any piece of that that is wrong will sabotage whatever you might do right after it. However, having said that, you're also 1,000 percent correct in that in almost every place or business or environment where we finally do get to the sales opportunity. So whether that's the phone call, the in-person appointment, the person arriving in our store, office showroom, seminar room, however we now, the sales event could occur. Those first 30, 60, 90 seconds, those first 3, 5, 7 minutes are very, very important that they are congruent with the role we want to play, the way we want to be perceived, and the way we want to be treated. We joke that if you're buying a car and you walk in, and you're taken into the sales guys cubicle, and his back wall is full of trophies and plaques, that identify him as best salesman of the month, best salesman of the year, a million dollar producer, you might as well have a bloody sword mounted on the wall, four or five heads hanging from strings dripping blood, and a big sign that says killer, I mean because not only have I instantly been told, uh oh, this guy's a salesman, I've been told, uh oh, this guy's a really good salesman. Well, that's not the guy I want, if I'm going to go buy a car and I am thinking in terms of being a negotiator or I'm fearful and skeptical of salespeople, I walk in a cubicle, the only trophy I want to see is a bowling trophy. So you know, we are often identifying ourselves to people in ways and in roles that are not particularly helpful. So you got a last thing on your hot list you want to talk about? I do, I want to talk about the how people underestimate the difficulty of establishing this whole trust relationship and try to shortchange it by thinking that their superior product of service is good enough for them to thrive. Well, for that reason or any other reason that they might underestimate the difficulty of the task, very few people understand how scary they are to other people to their prospects. So you and I get up in the morning, we're guys, so we only examine ourselves in the mirror from the waist up. We're going to look at us generally, we'll take that last look after we got dressed and we're ready to leave and when we look in the mirror, no disrespect intended toward you, but neither you or I are going to look in the mirror and see Brad Pitt. So it's not like we're walking out the door thinking that people are going to go into a swoon over how gorgeous we are. But we also don't look in the mirror and see Frankenstein. We don't really see a frightening, scary monster. We have no expectation that as we walk out into the street children are going to run screaming to hide behind their mother's skirts. And so it's hard for us to understand that what we take for granted that we do is routine that the role we play, that the discussions we have with people that all this is intimidating and scary and frightening, even to successful people, competent people, financially successful people, but it is because in our category, we are expert, they are not. As we said a number of times on this call, they are either consciously or subconsciously very aware that they're really not qualified to get to good judgment in the category in which we are. So they are the very adept, very skilled college football ref suddenly being asked to be an NFL ref on Monday night football. And it's not a comfortable and reassuring position to be put in. So we need to know that we're frightening to them and that that makes the hurdle pretty high to get to relaxation, distress, comfort and ultimately trust. So any underestimation of how high that hurdle is and how difficult that task is is both unrealistic and hazardous. And what underestimation does is it causes people to rely too heavily on one asset. Now that might be brand, that might be a product superiority, you know, might be something like that. It will, underestimation will cause people not to pay close attention to minute details like turning around and having the coat removed. And underestimation will cause people not to prepare thoroughly to practice, rehearse to really master the craft of what it is that they present. It will cause them to under invest in establishing authority through the media that they present to prospects before and after the sales opportunity. So the underestimation of the task is a very, very big factor and books like the Trust book and other books, I mean, make this point, other books might make this point many, many times with many different examples that ultimately the person arrives at yes, no, through a very complex neurological, intellectual, emotional, conscious, subconscious, five cents plus spicy sense process and every little thing and any little thing can matter. Thanks for being with us today. Thanks again Steve. Bye now. Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing it on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow and the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. 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