The most valuable resource salespeople have isn’t their network, their experience, or even the notes in their CRM.
According to Jeff Goldberg, who has been in the field of sales and sales training for almost 50 years, the most valuable and under-appreciated resource salespeople have is their integrity.
Fortunately, integrity is something every salesperson can leverage as an asset no matter the size of their company, the length of their sales cycle or their experience in their industry. The 2021 LinkedIn Sales Report ranks trust as the #1 factor in sales success – yet so few sales teams are putting prospect trust in salespeople as their primary goal with prospect interactions.
The moment we make a commitment a prospect, we’re putting our integrity on the line and it’s up to us to deliver on it.
Because we’re trimming hope from our sales strategy, we’ll use the acronym TRIM to guide us through creating a system with a trigger, ensuring it’s repeatable, building in ways to improve it and of course, ensuring it’s measurable and getting us results.
T – Trigger: The trigger for maintaining our integrity happens immediately after a prospect conversation. Waiting even a few minutes, according to Jeff, allows other items to enter our world and take precedence. A great way to do that is to take immediate action on the conversation even if you don’t have the time to research, compile or deliver what you agreed to deliver to your prospects.
What does that look like? Immediately recap the prospect conversation with an email. ‘I agreed to do this and this, and get it to you by this date, and you agreed to get that and that back to me by this timeframe.’
R – Repeatable: To make protecting our integrity repeatable, we want to ensure we don’t forget about any of the commitments we’ve made. Jeff advises that the best way to make any sales system repeatable is to make it a habit. That means, starting today, every prospect conversation where something was agreed to is followed by an email recapping what was discussed. Next, a note should be entered in the salesperson’s calendar/CRM to ensure the time is set aside for delivering on the commitments made to the prospect.
I – Improvable: Getting better at maintaining our integrity with our prospects means making the commitment to get better in our response time to prospects and the value we deliver in our emails and follow-on conversations.
How do we learn what that looks like? Jeff says to regularly ask past and current clients what we could have done more/better/differently in our sales process. As a bonus, we can also ask what they like best about working with us. The answers provided will be worth their weight in gold in maintaining our integrity in our rapidly changing world.
M – Measurable: To measure the excellence of our integrity, we have to measure how effectively we’re using our follow-up systems. We could measure how many prospect conversations we’ve had and how many recap emails we sent after each conversation, for instance. Next, we could measure how long it takes us to get the prospect the information we’ve promised.