Credibility: The Bedrock of Sales Success

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by Stephen E. Heiman and Diane Sanchez with Tad Tuleja

Credibility is the bedrock of sales success. This means not only your personal credibility, but your company's too. In establishing it, we've found four techniques to be especially effective. These are like-rank selling, the advertisement of past successes, executive briefings, and bringing in the services of an expert or "guru."

Like Rank Selling

Although it's your responsibility as the orchestrator of your sales objectives to see that every buying influence base is adequately covered, you may not always be the best person to sell to each of these key individuals yourself. That's why we encourage our clients to practice team selling, and to set up meetings between buyers and sellers of like rank. Since executives and other business people are often most comfortable talking to their peers, your own boss (to use just one example) might find it a lot easier to establish credibility with your economic buying influence than you would.

Your job is to be sure that each buying influence base is covered by the person best qualified to do so. Economic buyers are seldom reluctant to exchange ideas with management peers. If you can arrange for your economic buyer to visit one of your company facilities where that's possible--or, even better, if you can bring one of your company executives to this key player--you'll be using like-rank selling effectively.

Putting executives together like this has the added advantage of showing the economic buyer that your company is committed, from senior management on down, to your proposal. This in turn has a significant spin-off effect: It provides a public demonstration of your personal value, thus establishing your credibility for future sales.

Advertising Past Successes

You can also arrange for your economic buying influences to visit a customer installation where you have a successful track record, and where by definition you'll be immediately distinguished from the competition. By showing how your product or service has worked well for another client, you demonstrate credibility, and also bring the economic buyers the one thing they most want: direct information about how to improve their own businesses.

The Executive Briefing

The executive briefing is used frequently in the fields of packaged goods and consumer products. Many of our Fortune 500 clients in these fields give such briefings once or twice a year to executives in their national accounts. At these periodic presentations, they review with their economic buyers the results and wins they've provided in the recent past, and suggest future joint ventures that will ensure that the customers will continue to win. Even when there is no specific proposal on the table, the selling firm is thus still able to reinforce the satisfactions that its customers have enjoyed as a result of their previous associations.

Bringing in a "Guru"

A guru is someone with expertise in an area that exerts influence on business trends. This expert may or may not be from your company, and may or may not be well versed in your particular business.

Economic buyers achieve their positions of authority in part because they're receptive to new ideas. The advantage to you of arranging a meeting between a guru and your economic buyer is that it will introduce that person to new ideas. Not so incidentally, the credit will go to you, as well as to the guru, because of your part in making the expertise available.

In addition, employing a guru can allow you to bring the economic buying influence knowledge that you have, but that will be more believable coming from an impartial expert. For example, having an R&D expert tell an economic buyer that your company is at the cutting edge of a certain technology may be a much more effective way of getting your message through than your saying, as a sales representative, "We've got the best stuff on the market."

The guru technique is used with some frequency-and with extraordinary effectiveness-in dealings between major firms. It's a way not so much of facilitating specific sales as of establishing a history of healthy interaction, in which key players at both the firm that supplies the guru and the firm that receives new knowledge see themselves as having won.

These four techniques are only samples. You may come up with other techniques that are also effective in improving your position with economic buyers. Use anything that works, of course, as long as you're sure that you're delivering what the economic buyer always needs--knowledge to improve his or her forecasting ability--and that you're delivering it in a win-win manner.