The great Zig Ziglar said every sale has five basic obstacles. No need, no money, no hurry, no desire, and no trust. As a dedicated closer I pasted that quote on the wall in front of me and stared at it on every call. Like a Buddhist disciple.
Over time I turned it into my own negotiation acronym. DEBUT. Decision maker, Entrusted, Bank, Urgency, and Timing. Five parts. One framework that has taken close rates from two percent to over seventy percent in a matter of months.
This is part four. Entrusted.
Part one on Timing: https://www.outsold.com.au/debut-part-1-time/
Part two on Urgency: https://www.outsold.com.au/debut-part-2-urgency/
Part three on Bank: https://www.outsold.com.au/debut-part-3-bank/
Trust Is Jenga
Trust in sales is like the game Jenga. Slow and painstaking to build. Gone with one bad move.
It’s a hard concept to communicate accurately because it is not really a technique. It is someone else’s perception of you.
My father taught me that ‘if anyone ever calls you a thief or a liar, you leap across the boardroom table and break their jaw.’
His point was not about violence. It was about the importance of integrity to everything else in life and in business. I say to my staff, and one of our company values is that ‘if anyone ever badmouths us or our clients, I expect them to stand up and fistfight.’ Don’t let people throw mud on your name, especially not yourself.
Zero Theft Means Zero Theft
In the army I had two mates who shared a room across the hall. They came back from field exercises. One had camouflage paint on his face. Without asking he took a tissue from his roommate’s box and wiped it off. An officer saw it and asked whether he had asked permission to take the tissue. He said they were mates, it was fine.
He was marched out and dishonourably discharged over stealing a tissue.
Zero theft means zero theft. Not mostly zero. Not zero except in circumstances that feel reasonable. Zero. And the best place to start building trust in any relationship, personal or commercial, is simply by not doing anything that loses it.
Common courtesy goes a long way. Use please and thank you, basic customer service stuff. Be upfront that you are a salesperson and you are pitching. If you promise to call someone back, call them back. These are not sophisticated trust-building techniques. They are the baseline. Most salespeople do not clear it consistently and then wonder why the relationship never develops.
Walk the Walk
I was working in outsourced medical sales covering all of NSW and ACT. Two thousand clients across the patch. Cardiology clinics were the big spenders and there was a large one in Newcastle that had been a dyed in the wool 3M customer for five years. I had tried everything. Nothing moved them. They bought cardio gel from us and that was it. The ECG electrodes were 3M’s and no amount of relationship building, pricing conversation, or product comparison was going to change that.
One day I had eight back to back meetings in Blacktown. My phone rang. It was the Nurse Unit Manager and Operations Manager from that Newcastle cardiology clinic. 3M had let them down badly and were telling them to wait four to five business days for ECG electrodes.
They had seven cardiologists at seven hundred dollars an hour doing nothing. Waiting rooms full of patients reading magazines. No electrodes.
She was trying all the possible vendors to see if anyone could get her something by hopefully tomorrow. I did a quick mental maths, an hour to get back to the office and two and a half hours to drive to Newcastle. I said I would be there at one o’clock.
I jumped in the car and called the warehouse, then I rang all eight clients in Blacktown and stood them up. In medical sales that is about as taboo as it gets. A rep cancelling on a doctor or medical specialist is a serious professional transgression. If you are lucky enough to get five minutes with a specialist every few years that is considered good work. I cancelled all eight.
I stuffed my car with product. Maybe five thousand dollars worth of ECG electrodes. And I drove to Newcastle.
When I arrived the NUM looked at me and said where do I sign and how much are you going to gouge me for this?
I said you do not need to sign anything. We are not charging and we are calling it cost of sale, or promotional stock. I have a budget allocation per year for discretionary spend. It was covered in the ‘cost of sale’ no need to pay anything, I just want to demonstrate I actually care about you. In my bluff offhand way ‘Maybe just buy me a coffee next time I visit.’
She looked at me and said ‘you have our business for life, I will never buy a 3M product again’.
That is trust in sales. Not a technique. Not a tactic. A human decision to do the right thing, without a contract, without a guarantee, and without asking for anything in return except a coffee you probably never collected. That is what customer service in sales looks like when it is real. And that one decision, made in about thirty seconds on a phone call in a Blacktown car park, was worth more to the sales relationship than five years of product presentations ever produced.
Words That Destroy Trust Instantly
There are certain phrases that should be permanently removed from every salesperson’s vocabulary.
Honestly. To tell you the truth. I’m going to be straight with you.
Every time you say any of these you are telling the buyer that every other sentence you have spoken was potentially not honest, not the truth, and not straight. You are flagging the exception, which implies there is a rule. It is absolute cancer in a sales conversation and most salespeople use these phrases constantly without hearing what they are actually saying.
Think about the nice guy. The one who hides behind a social mask and tells people what they want to hear, agreeing with everything, sharing all the same likes and dislikes. It feels pleasant in the moment. But it is a tangled web.
Shitty salespeople try to close a deal. Good salespeople try to open a relationship. Closing a deal concludes the arrangement. Opening a relationship has long term consequences. You can’t start a relationship on lies. Some of my best clients started with screaming matches and actual fistfights, because they were built on honesty.
You being pleasant is the reason you are losing deals.
Obtuse honesty wins deals. False niceness wins nothing but contempt. No you ain’t just following up to say hello. You are calling to discuss our negotiation. Say it upfront.
Being falsely nice with a prospect is not just sickening to even be in a room with, it’s ethically wrong. It is commercially stupid because it is easy to read and it destroys the one thing that makes every other part of DEBUT work. Trying to build a long term business partnership on lies is like trying to build a tower on sand.
Tonality Is Everything
The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, is a masterclass in building rapport and trust quickly. His great lesson is tonality. The way in which you say something carries more weight than what you say. Confidence is not a personality trait you are born with. It is a signal you transmit through your tone, your pace, your certainty, and your expertise.
Trust is so subtle, just try smiling on the next phone call, the person on the other end will hear your smile.
Think about selling steel bridge repairs. Two salespeople, same problem, completely different conversations.
Salesperson one: “Yeah mate, I’ll weld that up good, she’ll be right as rain, I can get that done tomorrow for a thousand bucks.”
Salesperson two: “I have a double masters in structural and civil engineering, and thirty years specialising in steel infrastructure repair across Australia, Japan, and the United States. I have seen this failure pattern before on the Story Bridge in Brisbane and on a suspension crossing in San Diego. In both cases it came down to low carbon content in the original steel combined with long-term saltwater exposure accelerating the oxidation at the load-bearing joints. What we are looking at here is not a surface weld. We need to close the bridge, remove two subsections of the span with a crane, rebuild the steel components off-site to current Australian standards, and reinstall with a full structural certification. That is a three month project and it will cost five hundred thousand dollars.”
Same problem. The second quote is five hundred times the price and the job takes ninety times longer. And yet the second salesperson is the one you trust with your bridge. Because the tonality was that of someone who has seen this before, knows exactly what they are dealing with, and is not remotely uncertain about what needs to happen. My dad always said ‘your client only wants to go, where you have already been.’
Confidence in the initial contact creates the first impression that everything else is built on. References, referrals, social proof, case studies, repeat buyers, long-term clients. All of these build trust over time. But none of them get a chance to work if the first impression does not land with authority.
The Logical Fallacy of Sales
One of the many reasons that sales is a completely unique skill set is there is a logical fallacy in sales. What can seem logical, is not correct.
For example: It takes one woman nine months to have a baby. The logical fallacy is that it takes nine women one month to have a baby.
Mathematically it should work. It does not.
Sales has a gestation period and no amount of additional resource compresses it. Trust takes time to build. Relationships take time to develop. A buyer who met you three weeks ago is not ready to hand over a significant budget regardless of how many times you have followed up or how many people from your team have been in contact. The deal matures when it matures. Throwing more follow ups, people and resources at it does not accelerate the process. It leaks trust. Think of Gil the needy sales rep in the Simpsons. He’s always begging for a deal. It’s repulsive. There’s no confidence. In some parts of the process, volume helps. But we are not in a volume sales phase, we are swamped with AI sales rubbish. A buyer who receives three calls from three different people in the same week does not feel pursued. They feel harassed. And harassed buyers actively avoid you.
This is why short run sales campaigns fail almost universally in longer sales cycles, complex sales and high ticket items. A six week blitz into a market that has never heard of you will not produce enterprise deals. It will produce a list of people who now know your name and need another six months of consistent, trust-building contact before they are ready to have a serious conversation. The campaign ended before the crop was sprouting.
I see founders make this mistake constantly. The sales function is not producing fast enough so they double the headcount, shorten the timeline, increase the call volume, and wonder why the results do not improve proportionally. Or they have success with one rep and then double down. I pointed out to one client recently that it took ten years to get their rep to the point of Entrusted Advisor. Adding three more reps would not give 4X the results.
The businesses that build sustainable pipelines understand that the timeline is largely set by the buyer, not the seller. Your job is to be consistently present, consistently credible, and consistently valuable across the full length of that timeline. Not to compress it with resources it cannot absorb.
One woman. Nine months. There is no shortcut.
The Entrusted Advisor
The highest level of trust in a sales relationship is when the buyer stops treating you as a vendor and starts treating you as an advisor. When they call you before they make a decision rather than after they have already made one. When they refer you to their network not because you asked but because they genuinely want to. When the relationship has moved beyond the transaction entirely.
That does not happen because you closed a deal well. It happens because you behaved with integrity across every interaction, delivered what you said you would deliver, told the truth when it was uncomfortable, and stayed present after the sale in the same way you were present before it.
If you are selling a transactional item in one conversation you need to learn to build trust with your confidence quickly. If you are building long sales cycles and maintaining customers for a long time then you need to have unbreakable integrity, customer care, account management and keep delivering above expectation.
Part five of the DEBUT series covers Decision Maker.
