Impact your business by understanding trust.

There was an interesting thread here that asked
"are you relying on personality over process."

My answer is that I rely on REAL trust over both personality and process.

Most of us here want to either sell something or help others sell something.
Most of us are trying to sell it via the internet using calls, emails and automation.
We could all seriously impact our businesses if we truly understood trust
and how most of the popular methods are at complete odds with real trust thus
dramatically hurting our results.

Most of us try to sell by using examples of our work, testimonials and the like.
We develop scripts and processes.
The consumer recognizes from a mile away how impersonal these are
and worse nothing about doing it this way builds real trust.

What is real trust or what you could call emotional trust versus logical trust.
Real trust has nothing to do with your track record.
It has nothing to do with testimonials.
Has nothing to do with getting the script just right.
Real trust is an emotion that either gets triggered or not
and you can trigger it by doing things differently.


Before I continue, lets examine REAL trust.

What do most consider their most valuable possession?
For those that have them, it's their kids.
Imagine you and the wife want to go out on Friday.
You have a choice.
Hire Jane, a 16 year old with almost no babysitting experience.
Just a kid but you know Jane, you know her family, you know her story.
You can pretty much imagine Jane running into a burning building
to save your kids can't you?

Now imagine a 35 year old professional that just moved to town.
You don't really know anything about her except you have heard
that she has 10 years experience in child care.
She knows nothing about your story and you know nothing of hers.

Who will you choose?
You can bet it will be Jane.

Now think of that one guy you would trust with your life.
The guy you would call to hide you if someone was trying to kill you.
The one that would show up with a shovel at 4am in the desert to
help you hide the body.

99% of the time that ONE friend is often to others the biggest screw up you know.
That one friend is generally the one that your spouse hates you hanging out with.
How come you would not call your accountant?
It's because you know that friends story and he yours. Even though he is a screw up there is a real trust connection that defies logic.
See how track records, qualifications and all the logical stuff has NOTHING
to do with real trust?


REAL trust is an emotion that gets triggered by knowing story and being known.
Its triggered by knowing what someone or something is about.
Understanding this could change any type of business in short order.

Online and automation are great for going fast and scaling.
They are TERRIBLE for triggering the emotions that build trust.
Yet in the face of this reality most businesses are actually making it
worse rather than better.

They build processes that remove the human connection.
When was the last time that you felt you communicated with someone that cared
instead of feeling that you merely entered the pipeline to a process.

You already instinctively know this.
When getting action is crucial to you what do you do?
You get personal and pray you can break through the process
and hit the persons emotional triggers.
Imagine they turn off your heat and you have young kids.
Now your on the phone with "operator 27".
Would you start quoting your track record on paying bills?
or instead while he is reading you his script would you get real, build story and say
"do you have kids? mine are cold, one has the flu and a temperature
is there any way you can help me?"
You would then hope for a pause and a human reaction.
You hope he stops calling you Mr. X and says
"Steve I am not supposed to do this but I am going to try to help you".

Recognizing what real trust is, it now becomes much easier to build
and at minimum you can stop investing in purposely building systems
that completely kill it.
Simple changes could be applied to any type of company.

CELL PHONE COMPANY:

Imagine a cell phone service provider.
They are a dime a dozen, so impersonal.
Imagine if you got a call today..

"Hi Steve, my name is Mark I work for abc mobile.
I wanted to introduce myself. I'm just a young guy here starting at ABC.
Married and just had our first son Tyson. Reason I am telling you this is because
I just got put in charge of your account and I think there's away I can
do something really cool for you plus bring home some extra money for my family
and don't worry the money won't be coming out of your pocket.
I see on your account you have 3 kids that have mobiles. I guess that's something I have to look forward to providing for my boy though I can't imagine what cell phones will look like when he hits 16.
Anyway, I don't know why nobody called you but because you have been with ABC
for 2 years and never got an upgrade on your phones I can send one out today at no upfront cost and you can even surprise your kids with an upgrade if you want.... Cool thing is I get a bonus for just being helpful so we both win."

Hybrids of sharing story and breaking out of scripts or at least personalizing them to the extent they are not blatant scripts are not difficult to build if you use your imagination. You can also shift training in organizations from scripts to trust building.

When was the last time you got an email or touch from ANY service provider that made you trust them more? Can you see some small shifts you can make to get closer to real trust?