Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement

THE KEY TO SALES SUCCESS
In sales, trust is the foundation of all relationships. A person will not
buy from you until he or she trusts you completely. All top sales-
people invest a good deal of time building high-quality, trusting 
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relationships with their clients before they ever attempt to sell their
products or services.
An association to which I belong commissioned a $50,000 sur-
vey of customers last year. Since most of our organizations sell
forms of training and consulting services that are somewhat similar,
they wanted to find out what caused a purchaser to buy from one
company and not another.
One of the questions they asked the customers was what they
were most concerned with in making a buying decision. More
than 80 percent of the respondents to the survey said that the
honesty and integrity of the salesperson was more important than
any other factor.
When they asked them what they meant by honesty and in-
tegrity in a salesperson, the customers replied that this meant that
the salesperson put their interests first. They believed that the sales-
person would keep his or her word. They believed the salesperson’s
claims about the product. They believed that the salesperson would
do what he or she promised, and that the company would fulfill any
commitments that the salesperson made. They had a high level of
confidence in the word of the salesperson and in everything that he
or she did or said in interactions with them.
An interesting fact that came out of this survey was that the
quality of the product or service was hardly mentioned. When cus-
tomers were asked about their concerns over product quality, they
replied that they felt that most products or services at a particular
level were fairly similar and would achieve the results offered. The
key to the sale was how they felt about the character of the salesper-
son, and through the salesperson, the company itself.
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