The questions buyers research first. Answered first.

It comes down to trust. This is the single most important thing. If you don't trust someone, you're not going to buy from them, whether it's a product, a service, or whatever it might be. In some situations you may have no choice but to buy from someone you don't trust, but that's the exception to the rule.

The buyer now is much different than 25, 30, 40 years ago. There used to be a guy named Tom Hopkins, a great sales trainer, and he'd teach different sales techniques. One was the puppy dog close: you let them take it home, play with it, try it out, and they like it so much they just buy it. Another was the Benjamin Franklin close. You'd sit with your prospect, take out a piece of paper, draw a line across the top, and write "pro" and "con." You'd say, "This is how Benjamin Franklin would make a decision," and list out the pros and the cons.

I remember somewhere around 1998 or '99, I had done that very thing. As I pulled out the piece of paper and started to write, the customer said, "Oh, I know this. This is the Benjamin Franklin close." At that point I knew I had to change what I was doing. The market is always changing, and marketers have a hard task, because they have to stay ahead of the curve if they're going to try things like the Benjamin Franklin close.

But when we start to focus on trust, and on how trust is built, and we look at the modern-day buyer, what we find is that they typically already know 85% to 90% of what they need to know about you before they ever speak to you. In surveys, 85% of people, once they have their shortlist together, the three or four companies they've researched and decided they want to talk to, already have a preference for who they want to do business with, even though they haven't spoken to anyone yet.

So this means your website, the material you share across it, and the way you handle your marketing is where they're deriving their feelings from. That's what we focus on. We create trust inside the information they're going to find when they research you.

We make it very clear and transparent on the website what the pricing is. We help define the big eight, the eight questions that come up on every sales call, the ones everyone asks. We put those on the website so people can read the questions and the answers before they meet with you. That way the call becomes more efficient. We also put disqualifiers. We look and say, "Okay, who isn't your customer?" and we put that on the website, because it shows people we're not just trying to sell to anybody. We've recognized our ICP, and this is who we're best for.

Pricing is a big one. When I tell people they should put their pricing on their website, they get very nervous. A lot of websites have some call to action, like "get a quote or an estimate," but you get there and you have to hand over an email address or a phone number, and you still don't get the information you wanted. I don't know about you, but I never hit that button. The feeling of having someone call me or email me, solicited, is just as uncomfortable for me.

Maybe you can't put the specific price on your website, but you can show the math on how it comes about, so they can at least get a good idea of what it's going to cost. This does a couple of things. One, it contributes to the sense of transparency, which contributes to the feeling of trust. But it also qualifies the person when they reach out. If that information is available and they've done the research, they understand your price range. Now you know they're within range, and they've qualified themselves before they even call. You don't have to run the budget qualification during the sales call.

Those are a few examples of the things we do that make a difference. But the overarching idea is that we want to build trust into the relationship before they call. The website, the social media, the places where you make information available about your company, that's what they're absorbing before they get on the phone with you. We want to make sure that material is geared in a way that increases trust before they get on the call. And then we do training and other things to continue that trust all the way through the contract.