How Trust Actually Closes The Deal
By Lauren Burton
Buying is an emotional process, even when we tell ourselves we are making perfectly logical decisions. The final decision, the one that actually gets us to part with our money, is always an emotional one. When we look back at the last thing we really bought, not the tube of toothpaste but something that genuinely mattered, we can usually see the emotion sitting underneath it. Perhaps it was the trainers we didn't need but couldn't stop thinking about, or the course we booked at 11pm because we were quietly ready for something to change, or the kitchen we finally said yes to because we knew it would improve our family's lifestyle. We tell ourselves we made a logical decision, when really it was always emotional, which means that selling is always emotional too.
Of course, when we are closing a deal we need to be able to handle objections and help our client believe in the value of our products, but more than anything we need the emotional intelligence to understand what is actually going on for the person in front of us. Selling is a relationship, and that is where the real work lives, in the work of truly understanding our clients.
We are trying to understand what this person actually wants, not what their company wants, but what they personally want, why this matters to them, what it gives them personally, and the part they wouldn't say out loud in front of their boss. We cannot get anywhere near any of that without trust.
There is a formula I love for trust, which goes like this:
(Intimacy × Credibility) ÷ Risk = Trust.
It is mathematical, which sounds odd for something so relational, and yet it works.
Intimacyis about knowing our client properly, not on the surface "and how is your week going?" kind of way, but in the deeper sort of knowing where we understand what they are worried about, what they care for, what their business goals are, and the personal ones sitting quietly underneath them. It is knowing what success actually looks like for them, rather than what it looks like on the slide deck. We build intimacy the way Brené Brown describes trust, ‘in the smallest of moments, when we ask the question nobody else asks, when we listen properly to the answer, and when we remember the thing they mentioned six weeks ago. It is rarely built in big gestures, and it is almost always built in lots of small ones’.
Credibilityis about doing what we say we will do, about showing our work, our wins and our scars, and about showing up the second time the same way we did the first. Brené calls this reliability, and she pairs it with accountability, which is the bit most people quietly skip. When we get something wrong, and we all do, we say so quickly and honestly, without spinning it into something it isn't.
Risk is about understanding what our clients are quietly scared of, whether that is wasting money, looking stupid in front of their boss, or choosing the wrong partner and having to defend that choice six months later. Our job isn't to pretend the risk isn't there. Our job is to understand what the risk actually is for them and then to lower it, whilst at the same time reminding them of the value of the work we do and why they got in touch with us in the first place.
When we multiply intimacy and credibility, and then divide that by the risk our clients are carrying, what we are left with is trust.
Without trust, we don't really know why our clients are buying, and we are largely guessing our way through. We might still close a deal occasionally, but it will be the kind of selling that lives inside one off transactions, rather than inside the long term client relationships that last for years. We won't be the person they call in two years when they have a different problem and a bigger budget, and we won't be the person they recommend to a peer at another company. We will simply be a transaction, rather than a relationship.
The deals that turn into long relationships don't close on tactics. They close because the person on the other side of the table believes you.
This is exactly the work we explore on Client Chemistry: how to build the kind of trust, connection and emotional intelligence that turns good client conversations into lasting relationships.
If you want your teams to get better at understanding what is really going on for their clients , and become the people those clients want to keep buying from , get in touch.
Lauren x
