The Trust Model

>> T H E

OWNERS MANUAL

the trust model for hiring

Seen in:

CONSTRUCTING LONG-TERM EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIPS When screening salespeople for a position within your company, you are looking for someone trustworthy. After all, your prospects will only buy from someone they can trust. But what is trust, and can it be measured? Is trust a gut feeling – or is there science behind the psychology? Regular readers of this column know what I will say to that. Over the past months, we have explored the benefits of leveraging both science and mindset to improve hiring results. Today, the focus is on building a stronger relationship between the sales professionals you will ultimately hire (and retain) by using what we call the Trust Model. According to the Trust Model, trust is the confluence of three qualities: reliability, sincerity and competence. Reliability is akin to integrity. It means doing what you say you will do, when you say you will do it, and it can be measured. As you progress through the stages of the hiring process, does the candidate take on some responsibility and deliver on time? Sincerity is a quality that, like charisma, is hard to quantify. A function being present, sincerity is a genuineness that just seems to come naturally. When people are sincere, you believe that they are being open and honest with you. This is tough to fake. Competence is being the right salesperson for the job: having the ability to discover the real client need and to identify the best solution, whether or not you happen to be selling that solution. Listen for examples of this quality as candidates describe their past experiences. Competence has many flavors. I mentioned last month that a major factor in my company’s hiring decisions is how well prospective salespeople try to discover our ends needs. This is a form of competence in sales. Do they go into rote presentation mode, or do they use the Socratic Method to help us discover the deeper forces driving us? If they are sincere and reliable and can demonstrate that they understand what we need and why, we are more likely to feel good about trusting them in front of our clients. The basis of a mutually beneficial, longterm employment relationship is trust. Identifying the components of trust can give you the power to understand why, in a given sit-

JasonPapas&JoeMechlinski uation, you might not trust the people you are dealing with, and why – gasp! – they might not trust you. When separated into its core elements, the Trust Model is a powerful tool for analyzing others – and yourself. Think of sales situations you’ve been in. As a sales rep leaves your office, and you’re standing there feeling a bit queasy, you now have the power to ask why. Did he fail to deliver on some promise (reliability)? Did you sense that he did not have your best interest at heart (sincerity)? Or did he simply fail to convince you that he understood what you wanted (competence)? And, on the flip side of the equation, take a look back at some of the deals you didn’t win and the clients you couldn’t enroll. Compare your list of sales accomplishments and failures against the Trust Model, and you will find again and again that when trust exists, so does the relationship that brings in the sales.

Reprinted Content from Volume 3 Number 2

February 2007

2400 Boston Street, Baltimore, MD 21224 Phone: 410-342-9510 Fax: 410-342-9514 www.smartceo.com

Publisher: Craig Burris Editor: Timothy Burn

Throughout the hiring process, you need to be able to assess each person objectively using the Trust Model. It is important to resist the urge to look for trustworthy candidates among your friends. Remember, people buy from people they trust. Unfortunately, you may not be the best judge of whether or not that is true about your friends. Someone once said that the main reason that we like people is because they like us. For this reason, we tend to hold our friends to much lower standards than we do our business associates. Our friends typically only have to demonstrate only one of the three: sincerity, reliability or competence. For example, your workout partner may be a major BS artist, but you love him because he makes you laugh. Or your lady friend may be hopelessly late to every date, but terribly sincere, and therefore all is forgiven. Hiring friends in the role of sales is almost always a bad idea. Though your friend may meet the three criteria of reliability, sincerity and competence, you are putting your friendship at risk by entering into an employment relationship. There are just too many factors outside either of your control. Again, it is far more likely that you will be fooled by your friend’s good qualities. He may be reliable with you, but is he reliable elsewhere? She may seem sincere to you, but would others be so charmed?

Identifying the components of trust can give you the power to understand why, in a given situation, you might not trust the people you are dealing with, and why – gasp! – they might not trust you.

Take the case of two friends, Bill and Larry. After high school, Bill went off to college, and Larry took a job in insurance. Over the years, Larry developed special expertise and a small but loyal client base. He decided to start a business packaging complicated insurance products as financial instruments in mergers and acquisitions. Around the time Bill was finally leaving school with a Master’s degree in English, Larry was ready to hire his first salesperson. Right or wrong, we see what we want to see in our friends. Bill was sincere and reliable as always. Larry liked his air of academia. He thought it would give him a competitive advantage when speaking with business prospects. As we all know, intellect does not necessarily mean smart in the high stakes world of consultative sales. Bill was thoroughly indoctrinated in the company’s solutions, but as soon as he met clients, he foundered in deeper water faster than Moby Dick. Unlike Larry, the company’s prospects had absolutely no reason to give Bill the benefit of the doubt. Trust breaks down when expectations are not being met. Conversely, when things are running smoothly, no one questions trust. But when things fall apart, it is usually because someone was either: unreliable, insincere or incompetent. Knowing why something fell apart is important, because it presents an opportunity to get back into integrity with each other and move forward together – or not. I walked away from my first sales job because I didn’t believe in the product. How could I ever be sincere? By knowing where the breakdowns are, with the other person and within ourselves, we are in a position to make choices. We can choose to make a change in our environment, meaning the people with whom we are doing business, or we can make a change in ourselves. We can choose to be more diligent in the execution of our deliverables, be better with our word or be more sincerely involved in the outcomes that our clients – or our potential hires – are trying to achieve. Trust is the integration of all three attributes, but many companies focus only on competence. We are living in a time when competence often passes for excellence. In our quest for yes, let’s commit to being excellent. Let’s commit to hiring for reliability and sincerity, as well as competence. And let’s trust the power of trust. Jason Pappas and Joe Mechlinski are principals of EntreQuest, a Baltimore-based sales and leadership development firm focused on productivity and profitability.