Tuesday the 5th of January 2010
If you have ever watched the film Con Air Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) says to Vince Larkin (John Cusak) "there's only two men I trust. One of them is me. The other's not you" that is until the characters are involved together in a chase to get the bad guys and they win the day. After this demonstration Cameron Poe says "Just so you know, Marshal Larkin, there's now three people I trust"
This month I am exploring the topic of trust and what it means to you and your business. To me trust is my number one business tool. It's true that people buy from people they trust. This fundamental understanding in business is often the secret to success.
Trust is required by all businesses but some businesses rely on it more than others. When I am selling IT and Telephone system support I must be trusted by those that I am talking to as they will be relying on me and my company for the success of their business. My company's services underpin my clients business and therefore they must gain trust before they buy. Regardless of how important trust is to selling in your business the more your business is trusted the more successful you will be. We offer people a risk free guarantee so that we take the risk, we seek trust our clients first before they trust us, we do this because we are confident in what we offer.
So what is trust and how do you become worthy of trust?
Interestingly the people who are most trusted are those that are most happy for that trust to be questioned. Conversely if your only way of gaining trust is to say "trust me" you are least likely to be trusted. So if you want to be trusted don't ask people to trust you must demonstrate your trust worthiness.
To explain how this works I recall some time ago I was out with a group of friends in London, one of my friend got separated from our group. I received a phone call at about 3am and supposedly my friend was in a police station slightly worse for wear and they wanted me to go and pick him up. Now did I trust the "policeman" and just go quickly to the station? No. I had no trust in somebody who called me in the middle of the night so I challenged him "can you give me the number of the police station and your name and I will ring you back" "certainly" the Policeman replied and he did so. I called back and indeed it was Holborn Police station and PC Proctor was available, it was the same man and indeed he was a Policeman and I trusted him now. He was more than happy to have his trust questions he demonstrated that I could trust who he was and trust was established. You have to be prepared to demonstrate trust.
The Police have a group trust that comes with the organisation, when you are selling trust is personal and in customer service it belongs to the customer service group, but regardless of where trust is established it must be demonstrated for you to be truly trustworthy. So how do I do that, well I have no baddies to chase. The main thing is to do the best thing for the buyer and not for me. That often requires me to recommend another company or recommend that the buyer goes to tender if that is the right thing for them to do. My buyers can trust me to do the right thing for them. Ultimately of course I win business by demonstrating I can be trusted because we know that people buy from people they trust, people also recommend people they trust.
This is not to say that you must turn trust into a tactic and try to be trustworthy. You must be trustworthy in everything you do, it must be part of who you are and it must be the culture of your company. Unless you really are trustworthy then you will get found out! There are plenty of groups of people we don't trust (such as politician who made unreasonable expenses claims) but maybe 2010 is a good time to find new trust in people by challenging them to demonstrate to us just how trustworthy they are.
2010 is my year of growth in all areas and high on that list is to grow the number of people that truly trust me.
I hope 2010 is good in every way for you too.
Best Wishes
Julian.
