What factor influences a customer to want to do business with you the most? That they like you, believe you, have confidence in you, or trust you? According to sales/business authorities Jeffrey Gitomer and Tim Sanders, it's being liked. Being liked leads to the rest. But if you are not liked, the rest doesn't matter, because the customer won't want to engage with you. In order to become a trusted advisor, you need to be liked first. Become a friend.
According to Tim Sanders, the 4 factors of being liked are:
- Friendliness - the threshold of likeability
- Relevance - how you connect with another person's wants or needs
- Empathy (not sympathy) - can you make them feel you understand their situation
- Realness or authenticity - lack of realness, like lying, hypocrisy, or insincerity can suck your likeability down.
Many of us in the sales profession spend time and money learning ways to create trust, confidence or belief, but how many of you work on your likeability factor? I can attest that once I started working on my likeability factor, business became easier because it was easier to create relationships.
Check out these videos by Gitomer and Sanders.
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