Building Trust and Client Relationships
Building trust with clients is the key to long relationships and maintaining your business. Trust is a concept we often take for granted. We’re taught from an early age not to trust everyone we meet or believe everything we read. Trust is earned, much like having a job you need to work hard to earn someone’s trust. A simple premise to understand since we all want to be thought of as trustworthy. Individuals and business alike all want to be trusted.
In their book The Trusted Advisor authors David H. Maister, Charles H. Green and Robert M Galford discuss the value of trust in building business relationships. In fact their trust formula illustrates one of the great challenges facing businesses and individuals who want promote themselves or their products in a positive manner.
The trust formula in mathematical terms is T= (C+R+I)/S
Where
T=Trust
C= Creditability – Do you have the credentials to help your client
R= Reliability- Can you demonstrate how reliable you or your product is
I= Intimacy- Do your clients feel comfortable enough to share personal or intimate information about their business
S= Self-orientation – What degree of self absorption are you with total self absorption viewed as the extreme.
In person to person selling everything you do to build up trust is diminished (divided by) self orientation. Take a quiz on Greene’s website to test your trustworthiness
Businesses have personalities too that are projected through printed and electronic mediums. If we apply the same trustworthy formula to advertising and other forms of promotion we can improve the trust factor using new social marketing tools and the internet where users can respond and interact.
We have all been to web sites or have seen banner ads loaded with claims of how great product X is with little mention of how the product will make your situation better. And we have all fallen for headlines that on the surface appear to be the perfect solution.
The idea of positioning a business as trusted advisor solely with their advertising and web based marketing efforts is an interesting challenge. Since most business project the personality and style of the owner or the corporate culture that has formed over time it’s easy to picture how two dimensional materials can evolve into a self-promoting abyss with no intimacy or benefit for the customer’s immediate problem.
Most customers can spot self oriented and self promoting businesses driven solely by profit a mile away. So the challenge is how can you put the client’s interests first and balance the trust equation.
One approach is to focus on customers’ applications or situations where your product or service will be used. The focus of the copy and tone of the message is all directed to solving a problem the customer can identify with. In the old days we created application stories for the newsletters or for the sales staff to use. Today we have web based databases the customer or sales staff can access chocked full of anecdotes and other information about different applications or case studies.
We’re taught when writing copy for a brochure, catalog or web site that every feature has a benefit. One of the tactics most sellers use instinctively when selling face to face is to relate the benefit directly to the customer. This is a little more difficult through a screen two feet from the customer’s nose.
New social marketing tools including Facebook, Twitter Linkedin and various blogging outlets are helping us be more intimate on a personal level by adding a third dimension to a traditional two dimensional marketing presence and allowing business to become more intimate with their customers and thus balance the trust equation to become trusted advisors.
