Wear it like Armor.
Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf son of one of the riches men on the continent, looks into the eyes of Jon Snow, the teenage bastard son of Eddard Stark and commiserates on their overlapping fates. He goes on to explain to Snow that “All dwarves are bastards in the eyes of their fathers. Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you.”
I have always loved this advice since I heard it. I have never been perfect, far from it. As a child I had asthma and was never overly athletic. At to the fact that I looked like Problem Child and I got picked on without mercy. Now, as I sit here in my thirties, I am grateful for those times. They forced me to be more resilient than most, and I credit that for the majority of the success that I have had.
Likewise, getting into sales, I had severe weaknesses. I was never the extrovert, in fact I “Irish Goodbye-d” out of so many parties that I thought someone made the term to describe me. I never liked being around big groups of people.
Now I look at these things as blessing, they have set me apart from the majority of other salespeople out there.
I wear what other people would consider to be shortcomings as my armor, just like Tyrion advised. And this is not limited to only myself. I use it to describe my products as well.
No company, no matter how great, has created the perfect product. It simply does not exist. There will always be times when the product does not help everyone. There will be cases when it simply is not the right fit. I love these times.
One of my favorite trust building exercises is to tell people directly what the faults in my product are. I tell people upfront that there is a good chance they may not like working with me if there are certain problems. FOr instance, when I sell marketing services, we do almost all the work for them, but we still need to get their approval before we post. We send an email, but if that is not the way they like to communicate there is not much we can do. It is not like we can show them the ad template over the phone. Because of this, I tell people almost right away that if they do not check their email and respond regularly, they will probably not like working with us.
By telling them this right at the beginning, I earn their trust, I give a mea-culpa before we do anything wrong.
Do not try to hide what your are or your weaknesses. Admit that vulnerability and watch how much more people trust you enough to start working together.