This year, I launched a new business, which often puts me in a sales role.  And for any seller, the number one objective is to gain trust.

Considering our prior discussions, I find this a bit ironic. Both buyers and sellers share the exact same goal of establishing trust….so why the hell is this so damn hard? 😂

Ignoring the immutable fact that most people have a fundamental distrust as salespeople -  people still buy from those they trust.

And we trust people who have the same model of the world as we do. This means that we believe in people who speak our language and understand our problems.

Here, "language" doesn’t mean English (although, admittedly, that’s very important). I’m talking about the ability to constructively contribute to nuanced conversations on technical topics full of jargon. This “language,” like all languages, is most often learned through years of exposure and context.

This fluency is critical. It gives you the ability to build trust by:

- Demonstrating your knowledge of the buyer’s business.
- Establishing a shared understanding.
- And listening empathetically, confirming their feelings.

Too often, I see sellers (especially in games) simply present out-of-the-box solutions or services. I admittedly fell into this trap myself when I first started CDR. I was so excited to share my concept for what I believe is a much-needed and high-value service that I forgot the very basic tenet of sales.

And that is: people are motivated for their reasons, not yours. Your objective as a seller is to uncover the motivations of the buyer (motivation = a problem + a desire to change) and identify why they should want to partner with you.

Which means your job is to not only demonstrate to the buyer that you deeply and intuitively understand their problem, thereby building trust, but also to show that your solution or service addresses their problem with unique value.

Successful selling depends on having a personal relationship with your buyer, because trust and rapport are essential for encouraging potential buyers to share their motivations.

Sales, or if you’d rather call it Customer Development, and the resulting feedback you receive when asking good questions (and especially when asking people to pay for your services, since money never lies) is the core reason why founder-led-sales is critical for ANY early stage B2B business.  So, get out there and make some friends.