Stump The Guru Podcast
Got a tricky sales situation you just can’t seem to solve?
Maybe you’re chasing a potential client who’s gone silent. Or you’re hearing those dreaded phrases like:
- “I’d like to think about it.”
- “I’ll get back to you when I’m ready.”
Whatever sales challenge you’re facing, join Ari Galper, the World’s #1 Authority on Trust-Based Selling and creator of Unlock The Game®, on Stump The Guru.
Every month, Ari coaches guests... live and unrehearsed!! on their toughest, most complex sales roadblocks. The goal? To stump Ari!
But Ari’s mission is bigger: to overturn the outdated notion of selling by building trust between buyers and sellers.
Stump The Guru Podcast
What Is Trust Really? And How Do You Build It?
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Trust isn’t about what you know -- it’s about how your prospects feel with you.
I’ll share actionable strategies to build trust by creating emotional safety and understanding their deepest concerns.
In this month’s Stump The Guru show I will dive into the essence of trust. What is it, really?
I've made it my life’s mission to create the clarity that is missing in the traditional sales process, through decades of working with thousands of business owners all over the world, refining Trust-Based Selling into a true art form:
· Stop "chasing" ghosts (leads that never call you back!)
· Make the sale in ONE conversation, without pressure
· Stop selling, create deep trust instead
I’ve taken my mission one step further and created a livestream show called “Stump The Guru’” -- where you get the opportunity to jump on live and ask me your toughest sales questions that you’d love an answer for.
Get Ari's latest best-selling book "Trust In A Split Second!" for FREE along with a Complimentary Lead & Sales Growth Consultation (Value $995.00) at http://www.UnlockTheGame.com/FreeConsult, and join him as a guest on his podcast "Stump The Guru" and get your chance to ask Ari one-on-one questions, fill in the form to be clickable to this link: https://links.arigalper.com/widget/form/rh5YanDqzZqPHVBCKlKG
Hi everyone, welcome to Stump the Guru podcast with your host, Ari Galpa, the world's number one authority on trust-based selling and the creator of Unlock the Game. This monthly podcast will bring you guests from virtually every industry unrehearsed to try and stump Ari with their most difficult sales challenges. This podcast is for business owners, financial advisors, entrepreneurs, and sales executives. The guests on this show have only one goal in mind: to stump Ari. And Ari has one goal in mind: to overturn the notion of selling as we know it today by building trust between buyers and sellers.
SPEAKER_01Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Stump the Guru Show. My name is Ari Galper. As many of you might know, I specialize in trust-based selling. Now on two decades of this specialized work, and this is our live show where we have folks who are uh can come on live, ask me a question they might have about their situation, uh, where we share our insights on our unique approach around how to approach the market, how to move someone forward without having to chase, follow up, do free consulting, the opposite of what typical selling is all about. And uh, for those of you who don't know, we have a whole body of work around this, uh, multiple books. Uh, you're welcome to join our community for free, by the way. You'll see on the screen there it says rekalper.com forward slash free. You can join our community, access my Master of the Mindset course for free, understand how we think, what our philosophy is, and some tips to help you uh with your process as well. Um, if you don't have my latest book, you can grab a copy of thetrustbook.com and get a copy of that mailed to you for free, along with a consultation that comes along with that if you'd like. And so, yeah, this is our chance to really kind of brainstorm ideas together, whoever comes on. I usually have Sam with me as well, our head coach. We chat about things and um I usually start the the show around a theme. And the theme today is around sort of what is the definition of trust in the sales process, because it's a bit confusing. Most people believe that trust is all about relationship building and then meld it all together into one unit. And what I have figured out in my work over the last two decades is that relationship building and trust building are two different concepts that can be separated. Um, and the traditional models of selling have always been relationship-based starter points, where it's always been about the relationship. You meet someone for the first time, you get to know them, they get to like you, you get to like them, then over time they get to trust you, then they work with you. And that's fine if you're happy to wait a very long time and in the hope they uh come back to you when they're ready or they trust you at the end of the process. But what we figured out is if you can eliminate the relationship piece of this and only use the trust piece of this pre-sale, then you shorten and compress your sales cycle down to a very short amount of steps. Um, and you know, pre-COVID in the old days, I call it old days, pre-internet days, pre-COVID, um, relationship building was what it was all about because they didn't people didn't have much choice, many choices back then. There's no internet, no social media, uh, no information pre-consultation. You met somebody, you liked them, you trusted them. They're the they were the sole source of information at the time. So, of course, trust was pretty quick back then starting with the relationship. Now we're in a commoditized market. Now you're being shopped. Now your potential clients have seen what you do online and they're comparing you to somebody else before they even get to you. So starting with a quote relationship is counterproductive because they aren't coming to you to build a relationship with you, they don't even have to like you. They're coming to you with a problem they want to solve. And the irony of all this is that we have been so conditioned to train when someone comes to us in a lead or first meeting, we think that they want a relationship from us. So it makes us feel good to know that they like us. So, what do we do? We we do the charm offensive, right? We do the whole social rapport thing. How's it going? I like your shacket. Um, nice to meet you. Let me tell you about me and let me tell you about you. And now it becomes sort of the social engagement that is not structured around their problem. And it goes way off the reservation. I call it off the ski trail in the forest. And that's the problem with traditional selling is that we've been trained and conditioned to bring forward everything we knew from the past, assuming the market was the same, but the market's changed. So, what we have figured out is a way to systematize and scale up trust in your business to be able to build trust with a new opportunity quickly, almost in one meeting with them called the one-call sale, where you do not have to build a relationship with them at all. Instead, you build trust with them. And that means a behavior change from your side. That means less chit chat, less chemistry that you feel you have to make with them, less need for you to like them. I'm sorry, for them to like you, right? They don't have to like you, they have to respect you. So respect and trust are different, the relationship building. Okay. So to build trust with somebody, you want to engage them like a doctor and a patient around their problem at hello. Okay. Not trying to have them be friends with you and say, you know, let's see if we're a fit today and that whole sales thing, everyone knows that a mile away. So you want to remove all the languaging and all the behavior that puts you in a spot where you're now having to create a social connection with them to like each other first. So our process, and I'll summarize this quickly, uh, is around the one-call sale, is this concept where your job is to have empathy, yes, bed side manner, yes, in your ability to unpack the detail and depths of their issues. Um, and it's often hard to do that if you have what I call the expert syndrome, where you know your material so well over the years that when you meet someone new and they tell you I'm looking for X, your system goes, I can help you. Because you heard that request so many times. But that then means you're assuming what they're telling you is true. So it's like going to a doctor. If the patient says, My shoulder hurts and I want some help with this medicine, using the medicine that you have on the shelf there, the doctor will say to you, Well, hold on a minute. Let me take you through a diagnostic process first. Let me assess the level of seriousness of your problem, and then I'll let you know where we go from there. So, in essence, your job is to add a structure on top of the relationship there, so to speak, that diagnoses their issues at a very deep level using trust-based languaging. And not to qualify them, for them to feel comfortable trusting you. And let me kind of end this with this is that trust is when someone feels that you understand them. They are hiring you emotionally in many cases, not logically. They're hiring you on your approach. If they feel you're doing typical sales behaviors like free consulting, education, relationship building, and all that stuff like that, they're gonna sense right away that you're up to something. So instead, you want to strip all that away and you have a structure where you go deep inside their world, inside their issues, and you unpack it. And you are able to then reverse engineer their problems and help them see the impact and losses and risks around that in the first meeting and ask them this question Is this a priority for you to address once and for all? Then it goes to our next taste from there. So I'm giving you a quick structure of how to put trust in your business, in your model, in your sales process to eliminate all the sales behaviors out of that that you're used to. Why? Because the old way leads to lower conversion. The trust-based way increases the conversion because there's less time involved with them thinking about things and they can make a decision with you on the spot. So that's a quick summary around this whole notion of trust versus relationship building. So hopefully that provides some clarity and we will um see who's who's here today for the live show and uh see if we have a question. See, who do we have back there?
SPEAKER_02Sure. Hey, what's up, everybody? And listen, for some people that are struggling seeing us live right now, if they're posting anywhere, they could just go right to the community. And I've got the YouTube link up with the live feed for anybody that's having a problem with the live page. I got a couple support issues there. So if you see it somewhere else, join us on YouTube. I'm gonna bring Larry on right now. Hey Larry, what's happening, man? How are you? Yeah, it's good. All right, if you could uh let Ari know a little bit about your problem and uh what's going on in your universe, and also a little bit about yourself for everybody that's watching today. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Uh yeah, Ari, uh wanna bring uh I guess we want to uh get a little uh more into the uh the trust factor of the of the almost the immediate uh feeling of trust that someone will find with you. Um how how do you go about getting that almost instantaneous trust connection with someone?
SPEAKER_01Well, it starts at hello, obviously. So let's just assume that you have a new opportunity and they're willing to meet with you. Um the thing with that is you start obviously with nice to meet you and nice to meet you as well, right? You don't try and say, how you heard about me or uh or go backwards. Then it's here's the opening phrase that that immediately starts the trust process. You say this. If you wouldn't mind, uh Michael, take a step back for a moment and walk me through your background, your situation up to your current. Here's the key word, concerns you have around X. So if you're a financial advisor around your finances, if you're around your business, business growth, you kind of plop in the problem there. But the key word is concerns. You have to start at the top of your conversation around their concerns that helps them feel comfortable opening up. Now, we're not used to doing that. We're used to saying, nice to meet you, nice to meet you as well. So let me tell you about me and let's about you, and then it becomes like a dating conversation. So it's about having the right languaging and the space to have them open up. Is that sort of what you're looking for?
SPEAKER_03Yes, uh so often I think I find with potential clients that I guess out of their nervousness when they come into uh an office, a new space to them, uh they they get kind of chatty and and they want to start having those warm and fuzzy conversations, uh, like you know, hey, I I know that you know so and so, and right talking about other people or uh other issues.
SPEAKER_01So it they they they will they will try, Larry, yeah to hijack the meeting. They will start the process being very social. That's fine. Let them say a couple of things. Then when when the space is open, just start with that question. Hey, if you wouldn't mind, guys, take a step back for a second. Walk me through the big picture of where you're at, your concerns, back what's in the back of your mind about your situation financially, and then we'll go from there. With that being good, you guys, you have to kind of set the structure once the space opens up. Obviously, if it's physical meeting, it's harder because you're physically in a meet in a place. They have to get a chair, a cup of coffee, they drove to you. They feel this obligation to kind of go social. That's why I'd encourage people to go to a first meeting on Zoom, because Zoom cuts out all that social momentum because it's limited, you're in a square, right? And you can be the doctor. So you're right, it's tougher when it's live, especially if you go to like a coffee shop. Then it's like forget it. What kind of coffee do you want, right? So try and uh reorganize your process if possible to start the brief meeting, maybe in Zoom, or if they get to you physically, try and obviously let them say their piece and then write into the structure right away.
SPEAKER_03Great. Yeah, that's what I was looking for.
SPEAKER_01Oh, good, Larry. Good to see you again. Thanks for joining me on. All right, so uh that was a quote from Larry, a financial advisor, and um, this is very common in most industries that we struggle with how to navigate from a social structure to a professional structure because we're afraid of quote breaking the relationship with them or them not liking us or making it awkward. It doesn't have to be awkward if you have the right languaging and process in place to initiate the model from the beginning with them, where they feel right away it's about them and not about you. Okay, so um it's much easier, obviously, on Zoom or Teams to do this, but if you're doing meeting someone physically, you can do it as well. Uh, as long as you are aware in your mind of the structure so they don't take over the meeting, now you have to adapt to where they're gonna go, and now you're in trouble. Because it's why doctors have a structured process in place to not allow that to happen because they're on a time limit. They have 30 minutes for next patient. They have to do their job, they have to diagnose first. So, your job is to make sure that's structured in place to do that. To learn more about this, grab my book, Trust the Split Second, at www.thetrustbook.com, or just get take our free course uh in our community at arigalper.com forward slash free. You see at the bottom of the screen there, and learn the mindset and update your skill set to where the market is now because you're selling the old way in a commoditized world, you have a very low conversion rate of struggle with that. So um uh who's back there? Is that is that Sam back there, Steve?
SPEAKER_02Ah, yeah, let me bring Sam on right now. Here we go. Hey Sam, what's happening? Happy winter. Hey Steve, how are you?
SPEAKER_01Hey Sam, how's it going?
SPEAKER_04Great, thanks, great. Um, I've just been thinking about what you're saying. You know, there's people get confused with this whole trust thing, you know, they they you make it more complex than really is. But let's I'm glad you refined it because if you look at it from the simplistic level, now I just want to say that no one's suggesting that people are not trustworthy, right? This is a perception. So your prospects need to feel that they can trust you, right? So that's I like what you said about defining trust now. In the simplest fashion, this is the way I look at it. When they hop on a call, they're sort of saying to themselves, are they a friend or a foe, right? Do I need to put my guard up here? Can I relax? Can I just be me? And I like what you said about at the end of the day, trust in their mind is simply when they say to themselves, this person gets me, this person understands me. And when you feel understood, you're right, it's an emotional the logic, you know, is secondary. When they feel, gee, this person really understands me. It's like when you go to the doctor, the doctor just gives you 100% clarity on something, empathizes with you. You think, finally, someone gets me. I think that's in a nutshell for me. Trust is that feeling, also the feeling of, is this person a friendly? Are they on my side, or do I need to put my guard up? And the other thing that really comes into play is that they're constantly they were thinking to themselves, this person got my back as their best interests, or do they have their agenda? Because that's a big difference, you can smell it a mile away, and they're I think they're the fundamentals around trust as well. What do you think?
SPEAKER_01Well, it's interesting because when a lead comes to us, we assume they're looking for information. Yeah, and they'll say, I'm looking for some help around this. Can you help me? And we just jump right into yes, I can, or here's how we work, or let me ask you a couple questions, and you you qualify them and off you go to the races. And what people don't realize is psychologically, what they're really asking themselves in the back of their mind what they want that say to you up front is can I trust you? So when you understand the psychology of their process, that they are emotionally, they're emotion beings, emotional beings like us, we need to feel our system is on alert, especially nowadays. And when we're calling someone new or meeting someone new, we're worried about their behavior. We're worried about what they might do. In fact, we've had experiences in the past where we've been taken advantage of, so we assume their agenda is to move us forward. That in advance, then your job is to diffuse that at hello. Otherwise, you're playing a game with someone else that you can't win. That's why you end up chasing leads who don't call you back and go cold on you because you started the process inside their process, so to speak.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And uh, you know, that's the key thing. I mean, uh, you know, and and they're always thinking to themselves in that conversation from hello, two things. Do I trust him or her? And the other one they're thinking is it's pretty obvious. They're thinking, are they gonna try and sell me something?
SPEAKER_03Because that's what they expect on the marketplace.
SPEAKER_04That's what they've been conditioned to. I mean, how many calls do you get? You know that all the calls you receive is somebody pitching something, something that they've got that they want you to get. So, you know, they're used to that. So, disarming that from the start, this is not about me, this is about you. That's right.
SPEAKER_01Concept right there. You just said this meeting is not about us, it's about you. See, they're coming in thinking you are gonna hijack the meeting about you to sell your services. That's what the buyers are thinking, going to a seller. So, your job is to reframe the entire structure at hello for them to feel comfortable with you to know this this meeting today is not about me. I'm not gonna talk about me, it's about you, and then you have a structure to go deep dive inside their issues and then unpack their problems and then ask them that question I said earlier as a priority of you to solve this, and really they that's what their way to judge you. And and the irony of all this, Sam, is they're actually hiring you on your approach, yeah. Services, they already know what you do in advance of the meeting, it's not a mystery. They know what you do, they're on your website, they saw what you do. You don't have to talk about what you do, you talk about how you can unpack their problems, and that's the real shift because we can't help ourselves but to talk about our product, our business, our credibility, and our resume de flex, yeah.
SPEAKER_04And the other irony too are is that people are prepared to pay more for someone they trust, right? I mean, it no longer there's price, I mean, there's always a an equation in there, but you know, they don't always necessarily go with the cheapest because they think, you know what, I trust this person. I'm I'm I'm happy to pay that extra for peace of mind, for a bit of sanity, and and also to know that this person will do the job as I expect. That's trust as well. So, you know, that that people are prepared to pay a premium in some cases for trust.
SPEAKER_01Yes, a lot of industries right now are being um suppressed around price and being compared and shopped around by price. And the irony of this is that certain clients will pay you more, like you said, if they trust you, um, because you're you have to think about this new way of selling as a differentiator. You differentiate your business not based upon your services. That's hard to get that right now because everything's so much the same, but you differentiate on your approach to the market, yeah, how they perceive you, how you handle them, what you say is back to the old craft and the art form of this model around trust building. And in the day in a in the age of AI, more than ever, us humans have to get better at building trust with other humans. That's the only way to close that gap. Otherwise, uh, you're gonna lose opportunity as the market shifts to all technology. And if you're listening today, your job is to become a master at trust building, not a master at selling. So sounds counterintuitive. But we have to replace that word selling with trust building to be able to understand how this works.
SPEAKER_04Absolutely. And then the whole process becomes ineffective. Because if they don't trust you, they're not prepared to really open up and they'll give you a surface level problem, something that they know you'll take and start running with. But the real issue for them as you know as a as a human being is what's below the surface. And you know, they you want to match your solution to their real problem, not their surface level problem. So unless you have a process that's designed around trust to get that problem to rise to the surface where they're comfortable telling you, then you're not going to be as effective. And you might miss out on opportunities because you weren't able to do that. And every opportunity for many people, usually people in low volume, high margin, it's big money. So why why why miss out on an opportunity? It makes no sense.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'll just close on this. You mentioned the word iceberg, service level below the surface. When you meet someone at the first for the first time for a first meeting, they're gonna give you only what I call above the iceberg, above the surface level information. They have to, they don't trust you yet. Yeah, okay. What you'll do is if you don't know this process well enough, you'll assume what they're telling you is true, and that's the whole picture. They might ask you a few questions, you'll qualify them, and off you go to your presentation. That's not trust building, that's making assumptions, right? Doctors don't make assumptions based upon what the patient says about their problem, their symptom. Their job is to get to the source of the problem and not assume what they're hearing is true, which is counterintuitive because in sales, we've been taught to be what I call yes people to always agree with the client, always make them happy. But in our world, we're the no people. I don't mean no, no, I mean we challenge their assumptions, we challenge what they think their problem is. How often do we do we they say our problems X? Turns out it's actually Y. So you have to be able to go beyond what they're telling you and see inside, deep dive inside their world in advance of that first prostate to really build trust with them at hello.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, absolutely. Uh you got to be the truth teller. I've heard you say that before. I love it.
SPEAKER_01Here you go. The truth teller, not the pitch person. So on that note, Sam, thanks for coming today. Thanks to everybody else who joined us today. Where this is now gonna be a podcast, you'll hear it on Spotify or YouTube. You can watch it. And again, if you're not involved with us in any way, there's a way to do that uh by ordering my book uh at the trustbook.com and or join our community for free at arigalper.com forward slash free. Access my course there, join the community, post up a question, uh, see what other members are talking about, um, and uh we'll see you next time. Signing off for now. Be well.
SPEAKER_00We hope you've enjoyed this month's segment of Stump the Guru and that you've discovered some new trust-based selling strategies that you can apply directly to your sales process. You can get access to Ari's trust-based selling 60-minute masterclass at www.unlockthegame.com forward slash video. And if you want to go one step further, you can order his latest book, Unlock the Sales Game, and get a free one-on-one sales growth consultation at www.unlockthame.com. Before we say goodbye for now, if you enjoyed this podcast, please take a moment to review this podcast. It's easy. Just scroll down to the bottom of Stump the Guru Podcast within Apple Podcasts until you reach ratings and reviews. Click one of the five stars under Tap to Rate to leave a rating. Thanks so much, and we'll see you on the next show.
