If you’ve been selling for any time whatsoever, I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of being a trusted advisor. I’m also sure you’d like your customers and clients to view you as one of their trusted advisors.
Although the concept of being a trusted advisor has been around for centuries, Charles Green and David Maister in their book, The Trusted Advisor, began the popularization of the concept in the professional sales arena. Today Charles is still one of the leading advocates and counselors of creating trust-based relationships in business.
Since the publication of The Trusted Advisor the concept of being a trusted advisor has grown to the point that I suspect it would be very difficult to find a professional salesperson that isn’t at least familiar with the term. Just a few years ago, the concept of trusted advisor was new for many in sales. As more and more people became familiar with the term, it began to appear frequently in literature and in sales, marketing, and management training sessions and has now entered the marketing world as a sales tool.
The root of the trusted advisor concept is action-what we as salespeople do with and to our prospects and clients. How we treat our clients, how we relate to them, and who’s good we seek is paramount in developing a trusted advisor relationship. Developing the trusted advisor relationship has far more to do with what we do than what we say, and it certainly has nothing to do with how we describe ourselves in our sales and marketing materials.
Inevitably, the term is being hi-jacked by salespeople, marketing departments, and companies as a sales tool. Salespeople and companies refer to themselves as ‘trusted advisors,’ even to the extent that some companies have included the term in their company name. Marketing departments have worked the term into their marketing material and tag lines. It won’t be long and the term will appear in some company’s jingle-if it hasn’t already.
Many of these salespeople and companies believe the term accurately describes who they are or who they wish to be; others, however, simply seek to take a shortcut and proclaim themselves to be trusted advisors in hopes of attracting business without having to do the work. But whether used by those who seek to become a trusted advisor or by those who simply view the term as a marketing tool, they both are turning the term-not the concept-into meaningless marketing pap.
Many react negatively to a salesperson who proclaims themselves to be honest and truthful (“honestly, . . .” or, “to tell you the truth, . . .”). If you have to tell me how honest or truthful you are, I immediately suspect just how honest and truthful you really are. The same is true for those who proclaim themselves to be trusted advisors. Just as honesty, truthfulness, and trust are not things you proclaim but are things you demonstrate, becoming a trusted advisor is an earned position. If you have to tell your prospect or client what to think of you, you probably haven’t earned it-and they probably won’t think of you in those terms anyway.
It’s sad to see a great term turned into meaningless marketing mush. If you really want to become a trusted advisor to your clients, forget about marketing yourself or your company as a trusted advisor; instead, do the work, earn the position, and you’ll have a client for life.
I agree, if you stay focused on the concept and doing the right thing, you will succeed. Almost any phrase, no matter how fresh, can turn into a cliche with over use: ‘cloud computing’, ‘on-demand software’, ‘software as a service’, ‘sales 2.0′ … I think the concepts are still pretty fresh and valid, even though some of the terms are indeed starting to turn into mush.
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Comment by thourrirm — March 5, 2009 @ 12:47 am |