Soft selling is becoming more popular and as more businesses embrace soft selling an increasingly important factor is the level of trust you build with your customers.

A rather clever chap called Charles H. Green co-created the trust equation:

Trustworthiness = (Credibility + Intimacy + Reliability)/Self-Orientation

You can increase your trustworthiness by increasing your credibility, intimacy and reliability or by reducing your self-orientation.  It’s elegant, simple and fully functional.

Remember in our last blog about soft selling we said it’s about adding value?  An extremely effective way to add value is to talk about the problems that your customers want to solve.  The key here is to focus in on the problem that they really do want to solve and ask some more about it.  Some term this as the “what’s keeping you awake at night” technique, which does describe it to a tee.  Applying this approach, you’ll be seen more as a problem solver who understands and offers great advice.

Share your ideas with your prospects and customers.  You live and breathe your products and services; you see how they are applied in the market in subtly different ways.  Your customers won’t normally have this view so by sharing what you know (without breaching client confidentiality), you automatically increase your own value.

You’ll know you’ve got it right when there’s no need to employ exotic closing techniques.  You know, the ones with fancy names.  Yes, you still want to sell but the close does not now need to be an abrupt, “So are you going to buy it, or what?”  At most all it’ll take is a gentle nudge and increasingly you’ll have your customers asking you to get the ball rolling on the deal.

So there you have it a few more simple tips on the art of soft selling. Put these into play and you’ll see new results as well as new reactions from your customers.