Throughout your career in sales, you’ve heard of multiple sales framework methodologies, from MEDDIC to SPIN. There have been multiple ways to qualify and generate confidence in a B2B sales cycle. Over time, these frameworks have established a stable foundation for salespeople to forecast deal velocity in a repeatable, consistent manner. What are the best salespeople, from B2C to B2B, from Mid-Market through to Enterprise, all saying are the key to their success? From what I’ve experienced, what the top performers have possessed is the ability to build and sustain deep & meaningful relationships.
This article seeks to reveal how those relationships are formed and sustained over time. It all comes from a cornerstone mindset of integrity. That is the catalyst for all relationships. What I seek to reveal to you is where integrity manifests, how it impacts your life and how it resonates in your personal/professional life to build deep trusting relationships.
Before I continue, I want to make one thing clear. As a top performer, my main objective as a salesperson is only one. To become a trusted partner to my clients. The secondary objective is to generate revenue; even then, I would do so only when it would be an advantageous commercial structure for everyone involved. This is a controversial belief and can be seen as incendiary & contentious. We’re all still salespeople; quarter-end will push you to pursue revenue. Can you still operate during those critical moments whilst prioritising your own integrity? This awareness separates you from being an order taker to being a legitimate, trusted partner.
Working in Strategic Enterprise B2B SaaS sales is about demonstrating the correct behaviours. The ability to establish a consistent meta-framework that positions you as the first choice when new projects are initiated. Creating this identity of integrity is the cornerstone of future growth.
To be considered as that first choice, you must be the trusted partner. There is no other way to set up a consistent pipeline that self-feeds if your customers do not bring the deals to you on a silver platter. The only way this works consistently is for your customers to approach you as their strategic partner.
All of this being said. Let’s dive into the four agreements that shape the worldview necessary for this approach.
The Four Agreements
- Be Impeccable With Your Word
- Speak with integrity.
- Say only what you mean.
- Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others.
- Use the power of your word in the direction of truth & love.
- Don’t Take Anything Personally
- Nothing others do is because of you.
- What others say and do reflects their own reality.
- When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
- Don’t Make Assumptions
- Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want.
- Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings and drama.
- Always Do Your Best
- Your best changes from moment to moment.
- Under any circumstance, do your best, and you will avoid self-judgement, self-abuse and regret.
First Agreement: Be Impeccable With Your Word
This first agreement is probably the most important. This is the cornerstone of developing and sustaining integrity. It’s difficult at the beginning to always be impeccable with your word. To always be truthful to yourself, despite bad habits, despite wanting to placate and please people.
This first agreement is simultaneously the most important and also the hardest to implement. To always be impeccable with your word is to be brutally honest about everything. This isn’t about brutal candour or disregarding the diplomatic language we so often need to use to balance sensitive account management with revenue-generating activities.
We’re all part of an organisation that needs to drive results. Our opportunity here as salespeople is to be the front door to the relationships our clients remember when wanting to transform their practices. We get to be the face of integrity, openness and partnership. This has to be balanced so we can act in the organisation’s best interests and ensure we don’t get taken advantage of. We can be this way because we practice self-love.
How we take care of our souls, how we feel about the inevitable internal politicking, and how we back the products we sell. Settling these feelings within ourselves ensures we’re best-placed to represent our organisation’s interests to our stakeholders, who also have their own priorities and key results to achieve.
Being impeccable with our words gives us the ability to show an honest face to the outside world and provides a stable foundation to sell with integrity.
Don’t Take Anything Personally
The second agreement is a critical component to survive the swings in account ownership. Very commonly throughout a deal, we can receive pushback or receive nothing at all. It’s happened to all of us, and it can leave us with unsavoury feelings of betrayal or frustration. Not taking anything personally allows us to rise above these frustrations and remain in the driver’s seat when interacting with clients.
Look internally for a moment. Can you think of a time when you’ve accidentally released your suffering upon a loved one or colleague? When were these situations their fault, and when was it because you had some other situation occurring? If it’s the same for you, it’s the same for others around you. Ultimately, we’re all the same, and we all go through the same swings in life. Displaying empathy, patience and kindness allows us to be emotionally separated from the outcomes.
This level of integrity doesn’t go unnoticed; it makes you the mature voice of reason in the room, capable of traversing the inevitable swings of a sales cycle.
Don’t Make Assumptions
Not making assumptions feeds into a key concept of integrity in the sales cycle. Creating a safe environment for customers to share information.
All salespeople will have to forecast their deals to senior leadership. It is a key component of the role, and accurately forecasting deals and the sales cycle is critical to success in this field. It works best if the current state of the situation has no gaps or holes. Being secure in your ability not to make assumptions is probably what makes or breaks your career.
Part of this is courage. The courage to ask questions, the courage to push your customers for information, and the courage to ask others for help if there are risks to your deal. Another part of this is the experience of identifying which conversations have a shape and which are just noise. Typically, the pressure to hit your number leads you to make assumptions out of fear of backlash from leadership. Courage and experience create the necessary conditions for you to lead with integrity, address objections, and move towards a genuine reflection of truth that inevitably feeds into success.
Always Do Your Best
These are not easy agreements to adhere to or maintain consistency with. In fact, at the beginning, it seems impossible. This isn’t entirely true; it does get easier and will become second nature in time. Once you decide to take care of your soul and lead with integrity, you’ll soon find these agreements to be non-negotiable.
The important agreement is always to do your best. There will be times it feels impossible, but you need only always do your best. It changes from time to time. There are days when you can only achieve a modicum of success in these agreements. There are days when it becomes unbelievably fulfilling as you recognise your success with these agreements. The important thing is not to rush to implement everything immediately. You take this awareness as part of the journey and allow yourself to grow into the version of yourself that acts with ruthless integrity.
Always doing your best means doing whatever you can at every given moment. Not everything you can do for a brief period, abandoning the potential for change.
Catalyst For Change
Where does the onus for change begin? To keep your word/have integrity, you will have to value yourself genuinely. Keeping your word is the direct result of having self-respect and true value for yourself. To have a strong sense of self-value, you must be able to judge yourself in terms of your personal values.
So I would say the first thing to take care of your soul and drive change is to seek a real understanding of yourself. Your boundaries, attributes, and sense of validation.