Selling without selling; the extraordinary value of trust in professional services.

In a world of excessive outbound marketing, sales quotas, pop-ups, re-targeting and transactional selling, people are starting to push back more, and engage less. Every platform you visit, every time you open your mailbox, it’s a barrage of generic mails crudely disguised as personalized messages, all pushing you to buy something from someone. We all experience it often, sometimes several times a day.

My personal all time least favorite is the “happy birthday” or “happy work anniversary” email, quickly followed by a four paragraph message filled with links and stats and next steps to sign up to something that you apparently can’t do without. For me, that’s the end of this and any future conversation.

Not only is this not effective selling, it also makes it more difficult for those actually trying to build real networks on the same platforms. There is too much focus on targets met, without enough focus on the relationships lost in the process of hitting those numbers.

Relationship building with a truly non-transactional approach is incredibly rare in the business world and in my experience, the most valuable tool we can develop. The goal is not to “convert” every conversation and move people through some sort of a funnel. People are smart, people know when they are being primed for the cash-in stage of a conversation. Unless you are ideally positioned to fill an immediate need state with a potential customer or client, you are likely just annoying them and closing the door on any future engagement.

The game changer is developing trust and no, I’m not talking about some salesy buzz word for fooling someone into believing that you’re really interested in the conversation. I mean being truly interested in the conversation with no other motive than the value of the interaction itself.

Doing this over long periods of time creates trust and equity within your network, while also delivering exponential growth of that network, as trust leads to referrals and the cycle continues.

Enjoy the interactions, learn from people without trying to “close” them. Help people where you can and don’t see this as lost “selling opportunities”. Give more than you take, the network is not a bottomless well, or one way interaction. The network is a collection of intelligent people, who communicate and share experiences and stories. In the long run, you can have more insightful conversations, with more interesting individuals, that dive far deeper than any short-term sale. Then out of the blue, people start to come to you, as a result of the network, trusting and valuing that you can bring to the table.

The more recent years of my career have been by far the most enjoyable and I know for certain it’s the result of those long-term relationships flourishing. I get to talk with some of the most interesting and inspiring individuals, from every corner of the world, at the top of their game and overflowing with innovative ideas, whilst also representing some of the most disruptive, category defining organisations on the planet, helping them to grow and transform and attract that 1st group of individuals.

One thing I know for sure, if I had gone the other direction and become a salesy, transactional recruiter, I’d be on a very different and less interesting path.