Trust, Inc.

The adage “People buy from people they know, like, and trust” is so universally accepted that most people don’t spend much time considering what that sentence really means. More importantly, most sales organizations don’t structure their sales activities to support the journey their prospective clients need to take to get to the point where their trust has been earned.

To the uninitiated, the path from being known to being liked and trusted appears to be linear. Sales activity in the form of prospecting is the primary engine for keeping the top of the sales funnel full of new prospects, but, unfortunately, prospecting activity is most often dedicated to finding orders, not building trust-based relationships. If you’re not training your salespeople on the finer points of building trust in the early stages of prospecting, the most likely outcome will be frustrated sales staff and angry prospects upset over the meaningless intrusions being thrust upon them by your poorly trained team.

To overcome this problem, I would ask you to reimagine the know-like-trust continuum. Instead of a linear process, let’s look at the journey as if it were akin to climbing a pyramid. There are many steps in that journey, the climb can be perilous, and there are instances in the climb where you’ll realize that you’ve reached an impasse that will require you to change direction and seek a new path. Sometimes, you’ll even have to go backwards to continue the upward climb.

Don’t stop climbing.

Like everything in life, dedicating yourself to developing the skills needed to build trust takes time, effort, and focused concentration on the tasks that will grow your team's trust-building muscles. However, without an acute understanding of the importance of building these skills, an insufficient amount of time will be devoted to getting better at it. Additionally, without focus on this effort, your team will miss out on identifying the signals that suggest your efforts are working, which will result in a disconnect between your team and those clients and put your long-term sales success in jeopardy.

We have all been in the uncomfortable position of taking a sales call from someone who hasn’t invested in building trust with you. It’s uncomfortable, it’s intrusive, and the negative correlation that results in the minds of your prospects is hard to uncouple once the damage has been done. Instead of being merely an aggravation, these days, these trust-adjacent activities often act as the final straw in the minds of a growing portion of your prospect base.

Do yourself a favor. Gather up the names of your best clients and spend some time discussing with them the reasons they’ve chosen to work with you. Ask them what it was that ultimately earned you their trust and listen closely to what they tell you. Look for patterns in the responses and decide if there are any prevailing themes in the replies. Once you’ve identified the key elements of what makes you trustworthy in the eyes of your best clients, systematize that information and deliver the content to your team.

Imagine a day when you look at your prospect base from the perspective of trust as opposed to viewing it as a pipeline. By rearranging your focus in that way, you can dedicate time and attention to building reasons for more people to trust you, and you’ll be able to scale your trust to the benefit of your top (and bottom) line. 

PS – It’s possible to end up in a negative trust situation. Don’t ignore that, and don’t think that you can’t escape from a negative situation. It’s imperative you don’t because often times the person on the other end of that negative relationship will go out of their way to let others know about your lack of trustworthiness. Deal with those situations head-on, and watch as those nay-sayers turn into your biggest cheerleaders.