#206 Building Trust Through Genuine Care for the Customer

Notes:

Anyone who works in sales knows that trust is not easy to come by. It’s easier for Sales Engineers than salespeople due to the “Engineer” in the title, but we are still working with people who we may have not met before, asking them to share information that they would not share with anyone else, so it makes sense that they are wary of providing it.

We need to build that trust. And trust is the topic of conversation with Richard Jackson today. Richard is an SE leader based out of Austin, Texas. We will discuss the SE industry there, as well as how we can work to build trust, not only with customers, but with salespeople, product managers, and anyone else we encounter.

During this conversation, he talks about “Clifton’s Strength Finder”. I end up taking the test and the results are below. A link to a free test is below as well.

Key Takeaways:

Why Austin Texas?
His journey to Sales Engineering
Operations vs Sales Engineering
Leading an SE team vs leading an operations team
The essentials of building trust
How we can lose trust
The value of intimacy in building trust
Working on unraveling threads
Developing trust with Salespeople

Quotes:

“Understand your role in each relationship, internal or external, and find peace with it whether you are frustrated with something or whether you are excited about it, you genuinely have to care” – Richard Jackson

“You can always fake something, but over time you’ll get found out” – Richard Jackson about genuinely caring

“Relationship power is the only one that is going to get anything done 9 times out of 10” – Richard Jackson

“Always trying to redefine my day personally and professionally to make sure I’ve got extra margin to deal with unexpected things” – Richard Jackson