Promise Selling is a truly customer-centered approach that empowers sellers to build trust and credibility, create customer value, and help customers make progress to achieve their goals.
It’s time to STOP dragging customers through YOUR sales process and START enrolling customers in THEIR buying process.
Practicing the art of Promise Selling helps sellers:
Build & Maintain Trust
Foster deeper customer relationships faster, be seen as a trusted advisor, and act as a true partner
Make Future Selling Easier
When your customers trust you it’s easier to renew, upsell, cross-sell, and earn referrals
Create Trust Trajectory
Customer relationships based in trust shorten deal cycles, expand deal sizes, and lessen the risk of deal loss
Customers as Co-Creators
Work WITH your customers to help them make buying decisions – whether they end up working with you or not
Sell Authentically
Show up as yourself, focus on building trust and honoring your promises, and sell with integrity
Make Purposeful Progress
Helping your customers make progress in their lives transforms your purpose, enjoyment, and fulfillment as a seller
The problem is, customers assess how much they can trust YOU through the lens of their past experiences with OTHER sellers.
With only 3% of customers trusting sellers, it’s clear that customers are keenly aware that they are taking a risk any time that they make a buying decision.
When a customer uses their company’s money to purchase a solution, they have to worry about:
- Whether or not it will work for them
- How much it will cost
- If there will be any obstacles or additional expenses
- If their deadlines will be met
- How to juggle other internal stakeholders with different competing priorities
- The shifting needs of the business
- Their own professional reputation
Customers face so much complexity and pressure when trying to solve their problems!
This is why it’s so critical to build and maintain trust with customers by helping them make progress toward their goals.
This requires a fundamentally different posture and approach, which is why we developed Promise Selling.
The primary goal of Promise Selling is to build trust with your customers.
Part art, part science.
Promise Selling is rooted in behavioral psychology, research, and proven methods, however, the practice of Promise Selling is an art form – a craft honed and refined through intentional experience.
Promise Selling is NOT:
- A prescriptive, linear sales process
- A replacement for solid product and industry expertise – you still need that foundation!
- A way to persuade your customers to buy your product
- A series of tips and tricks
- A silver bullet for sales success
Promise Selling is building trust and enrolling your customers in the buying process by making and delivering on a set of promises about who you are and how you’ll behave.
Five larger promises create the overall “posture” of Promise Selling.
They are designed to help you serve your customers by aligning to THEIR buying cycle.
Promise Selling Pillars
Bringing Promise Selling to life as a seller focuses on three core pillars
Credible Character
The promise of who we are, including our overall “posture” and way of being, our habits and personality, how we communicate, and our level of credibility and trustworthiness
Core Habits
A series of behaviors that establish and maintain our identity, credibility, integrity, way of being, and ability to lead Creative Conversations, make Responsible Promises, and Restore Trust
Creative Conversations
Leading Reconnaissance, Pathway, and Milestone Conversations that create space for your customers to literally speak their futures into existence
Promises create certainty in an uncertain world.
When we make promises, we guarantee that something will happen, creating a sense of certainty. Through making promises, we can make the future more tangible and clear, reducing uncertainty and stress for our customers.
Making Responsible Promises
A promise is something that you make AND it is something that your customer expects.
Responsible Promises
= doing what you say you’ll do
+ doing what your customers expect of you
+ maintaining a credible and consistent way of being
+ letting your customers know if and when you are in danger of not being able to deliver on your promise as soon as you think this might happen
