Early in my sales career, I thought I was doing everything right.
I was working a major account at a global oil company. I met lots of people. Took clients to lunch and dinner. Played golf, attended events, kept the conversation easy. They genuinely seemed to enjoy my company. I focused on being fun to be around, and it worked.
Until I was halfway through the year and behind on my numbers.
The trap that’s easy to miss
When being liked goes well, it feels like progress. Conversations flow. Calls get returned. You get invited to things.
What I didn’t see was what wasn’t happening. I was waiting for clients to throw work my way. Small, tactical projects. I’d pick them up gratefully and move on. Meanwhile, I wasn’t asking the questions that would have opened up something bigger. I wasn’t challenging their thinking. I wasn’t making myself genuinely useful to their goals.
I was focused on being pleasant. Not on being valuable.
The two feel similar from the inside. They look very different to a buyer.
What a colleague said that changed things
A team member of mine consistently hit her numbers and landed big deals. She told me something I didn’t want to hear: I was concentrating on being liked, trying too hard to be someone’s mate, rather than being a respected partner in their decisions.
She was right.
She asked me to think about what clients thought of me when they left the room. Did they see me as a good mate? Or did they genuinely value my questions, ideas, and perspective as something that would help them improve their results?
I didn’t have a comfortable answer.
Why the “liked” trap is so common
Being liked feels safe. Challenging clients feels risky. If you ask a tough question and it makes them uncomfortable, where does that leave the relationship?
What I’ve come to understand is that this fear has it backwards. The relationships worth having aren’t built on pleasantness. They’re built on usefulness. Buyers who genuinely trust you don’t see challenging questions as a threat to the relationship, they see them as evidence that you take their situation seriously.
Liked is comfortable. Trusted is valuable. Only one gets you into the room when real decisions are being made.
The behaviours that shift the dynamic
I picked two key client relationships and focused on changing how I showed up. It took time, but I needed to do things differently.
I researched their roles, their objectives, and their goals. I got into their metrics of success. I looked at how similar projects had made a real difference elsewhere and thought carefully about how that applied in my accounts.
I prepared questions for meetings, not questions to qualify an opportunity, but questions that would make them think differently about their situation.
The conversations changed. The meetings had more substance. I wasn’t just someone they liked. I was becoming someone whose perspective they wanted.
None of this meant abandoning the relationship side. Being personable still mattered. I wasn’t trying to become arrogant or difficult. But I stopped letting “being liked” crowd out “being valuable.” They aren’t mutually exclusive. What I had was a priority problem, not a personality problem.
What shifts when trust takes the lead
When clients trust your perspective, the nature of the work changes. Instead of picking up tactical projects, you get pulled into bigger conversations. Instead of waiting for them to offer something, they bring you in early. Instead of reacting to briefs, you help shape them.
That’s the difference between being a vendor and being a partner. Vendors deliver what’s asked. Partners help figure out what should be asked in the first place.
The shift doesn’t happen overnight. Trust builds slowly, through consistent quality of engagement. But it starts with a deliberate choice to be valuable rather than simply pleasant.
The question worth ending with
Think about your most important client relationships. When you leave the room after a meeting, what do they think?
That was a useful conversation – or – Nice catch-up.
There’s nothing wrong with being liked. But if that’s all you’re optimising for, there’s a ceiling, and you’ll usually only see it when your numbers aren’t where they should be.
If you want to understand where this shows up in your own selling, the gap between how you engage and the impact you actually have? A MyAcumen assessment gives you a clear view of your consultative selling capability. Specific to you, not a generic benchmark someone else set.
