Episode 2.11 of Damns Given
"People liking you is not the same as people trusting you. It is simply not the same."
This episode is about why nice people get ghosted. Why saying "yeah, I can do that" on a sales call is a death trap. And why you're burning trust all the while they are telling you how much they like you...
...and what to do about it.
You had a great call. Everybody liked each other. They said let's talk again soon. And then… nothing.
I call this the affinity trap, the scourge of us midwesterners and generally socially sensitive people everywhere. And if you're in consulting, coaching, fractional work, or any kind of service business, you've lived it more times than you want to count.
It’s easy to think about how being nice might be costing you money. (You keep discounting) or opportunity (You aren’t a hard-charging sales person) but what you might be missing is that it’s mostly costing you trust. Nice people are easy to like, and hard to trust. Because they don’t do the work of taking a risk.
In this episode of Damns Given, I start with a question one of our Guild members asked me in a coaching session: Why do I have such great sales calls and then people disappear?
Great question.
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In the episode, I break down exactly what's happening between the great call and the ghost and why the very thing that makes people like you is often the thing that keeps them from hiring you. Being seen as nice, helpful, and flexible feels good in the moment. But it produces affinity, not trust. And those are not the same thing.
I’ll walk you through the two-phase structure of a real trust-made sales conversation: the exploratory phase where your only job is to ask questions, validate experience, and get to root cause and the offering phase, which is a completely different conversation that most people never actually have. The mistake is collapsing them together. Saying yes too early. Becoming everything to everyone. And walking away from a call where nobody rejected you... which means nobody actually considered you either.
The fix requires one uncomfortable thing: bearing the risk of rejection. Proposing something specific. People who take the risk of the relationship on themselves (especially when they are the one selling and have the most to gain) build trust. Giving people something real to respond to. Because the only way they can reject a vague helpful person is to ghost them. They ghost you because they like you.
People who sell advice and knowledge, this is for you. More like this twice a week for subscribers of Damns Given.
See you Friday, for a RIVETING (and I mean RIVETING) edition of our my usual Friday hijinks (which I missed last week, and I'm very, very sorry but I'm trying to finish a book)... YES + NO + MAYBE + NOW.
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