Use the trust equation to work out why a buyer does or does not trust you yet.
Hui Min is a financial adviser in her first year. Her clients like her and she knows her products well. Twice she promised to send illustrations "by tomorrow", and both times they went out three days late. Two prospects have gone quiet since. To understand what went wrong for her, it helps to break trust into parts.
Think of two people who tried to sell you something in the past year. You would happily call one of them back. You would screen calls from the other, even if that person was selling exactly what you need. The difference is unlikely to be product knowledge alone. Something else made you trust one and stay guarded with the other.
Trust is easier to work on once you break it into parts. The clearest model for doing this comes from David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford, in their book The Trusted Advisor, published in 2000. They wrote it for consultants, lawyers and other professional advisers, and it works just as well for anyone who sells.
The trust equation is:
trust = (credibility + reliability + intimacy) / self-orientation
Use it as a way of thinking about trust rather than as a precise formula. Any numbers you put into it are rough. Its main use is showing you which part to fix. The three parts on top are added together, so a gap in one can be partly covered by the other two. Self-orientation sits on the bottom and divides everything, so it does the most damage.
Credibility is about your words: whether what you say about your subject is accurate, honest and believable. Buyers judge it from your answers. They notice whether you know the details, whether you admit when you don't know something and then come back with the answer, and whether your claims match what they have read elsewhere.
Reliability is about your actions over time. Say you told a buyer you would send a comparison by Thursday, and it arrived on Thursday. You said a call would take fifteen minutes, and it took fifteen (both invented examples). Each small promise kept is a data point, and buyers collect these without thinking about it. Reliability is the only part of the equation that needs time. A new seller can't have a long record, but you can make small promises early and keep every one.
Intimacy in this model has nothing to do with romance. It means whether the buyer feels safe telling you what is really going on. A buyer can trust your knowledge and your punctuality and still hold back the real reason they asked to meet. For example, they may not mention a S$20,000 credit card balance (an example figure) because it is embarrassing and they are unsure what you will do with that information. You build intimacy through how you react to small disclosures. When a buyer says something slightly awkward, respond calmly, don't judge, and don't pounce on it as a sales opening. They then learn it is safe to say more. Module 3, "Listen more than you talk", is largely about intimacy: how to make a buyer feel safe saying more.
Self-orientation is how much of your attention is on yourself: your commission, your target, your next line, or looking clever. Buyers pick it up from small signs. You steer every topic back to your product, finish their sentences, glance at your phone, mention your quarter-end, or recommend the option that pays you most without explaining why it suits them.
Because self-orientation sits below the line, it works like a divisor in arithmetic. If the buyer senses you mainly want the sale, it can cancel out strong credibility, a good record and real rapport. Lowering self-orientation is often the fastest way to raise trust, and it costs you nothing except attention.
When a buyer is not opening up or not moving forward, go through the four parts (credibility, reliability, intimacy and self-orientation) and ask which one is weak. Then fix that part. Working on a different part won't help. For example, extra product training does not fix a reliability problem.
Hui Min's credibility is fine. Her clients like her and she knows her products. Her problem is reliability, shown by the two late illustrations and the two prospects who went quiet afterwards, so more product training won't fix it. What will fix it is a diary reminder and a habit of promising only what she can actually deliver.
Her colleague (also invented) always delivers on time and knows the products as well as she does. He opens every meeting with the plan he wants to recommend. His problem is in the denominator: self-orientation.
Honest self-scoring is harder than it sounds, because most people rate themselves high on everything. Before you start the activity, think of one buyer who did not trust you as much as you hoped, and keep them in mind while you score. Remember that for self-orientation a higher number is worse.
For your current role, give yourself a score from 1 to 10 on each part of the trust equation. Pick the weakest part and work on it this month.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).