Appeal to your sterling character

Before your buyers are ready to hear the airtight logic of your arguments, before they can accept a stirring emotional appeal from you, they must receptive. They must be paying attention. And, most important, they should like and trust you.

Trust is more than finding you to be a likable person. Your buyers must also believe in your judgment. Companies do business with each other where deals are measured in five, six and seven figures, where relationships can last for years, where organizations depend on each other.

When you ask a company to trust you, you make a statement to the buyer about

• what you will do when the customer is far away
• something you will do that cannot be verified
• what you will do at some point in the future

Business buyers need see you as “a good person who wants to do the right thing and will not use them for your own nefarious purposes.” Persuade buyers that you deserve their trust by demonstrating the three essential qualities of character: virtue, practical wisdom, and selflessness.

Virtue

You demonstrate virtue in an argument when you persuade the audience that you share its values. Like decorum, the virtue you demonstrate can change from audience to audience. Meeting with a group of engineers? Be prepared to show that you value logic and problem-solving. Financial executives on the other hand will appreciate seeing the importance you place on growth and profit.

The key is to understand the beliefs of your audience and show that you live up to them. You can do this by bragging on your own account, though most buyers will not find this credible. Far better to find character references who can brag on your behalf, especially if your references are other customers.

Practical wisdom

It’s not enough for your audience to believe that you share their values. They also have to believe that you will know the right thing to do at the right moment. You have to be seen as a practical person in the domain you share with your buyers, knowledgeable and experienced at solving the kinds of problems that your customers face.

Sales people who sell technical solutions are not always technical themselves. That’s why they often bring a pre-sales technical consultant along with them, a person who can represent technical experience and leadership on behalf of their company, someone who has practical wisdom.

You can demonstrate your practical wisdom by telling about your experiences (experience always beats book learning), by showing your ability to bend the rules when necessary (especially if it’s bending your company’s rules in order to get something done for the customer), and by a willingness to take a middle course between two extremes (unlike for example your competitors who you show to be hopelessly rigid or pathetically unorganized compared to your practical approach).

Selflessness

The old joke says that buyers are only listening to one radio station – WII-FM – “What’s in it for me?” Of course buyers know that you are selling a solution and that you have to be compensated for the value you provide. But mostly they are thinking about whether you have their interests in mind. Consequently, you have to demonstrate your selflessness. You can establish your goodwill by appearing to be completely objective or nobly self-sacrificing.

You can come to a reluctant conclusion. “Yes, like you I used to think that the deluxe model was more than most customers needed. But then I learned about the productivity gains our customers were seeing with this model and I finally came around.”

Or claim a personal sacrifice that will help the buyer more than it will help you. “I shouldn’t provide you with a day of free consulting, and my boss is probably going to hand my head to me on a platter, but I just can’t in good conscience let you install this equipment without one of my technicians on site to guide you through the process.”

And finally, you can demonstrate selflessness by showing doubt in your own rhetorical skill. People find a plain speaking and ingenuous communicator very persuasive. I knew a broker once who said that he always knew he was in trouble when he would get someone on the phone who would start the conversation in a Southern drawl by saying “Well, I’m from down here in Texas, and I don’t know too much about these fancy financial packages you boys in Chicago put together, but it seems to me…”

Virtue, practical wisdom, and selflessness. If you can demonstrate your character by showing these qualities, you’ll have an audience that trusts you. They’ll be receptive and attentive to the logical case you are about to make.

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