Trust is one of the most valuable currencies among humans. Without it you can’t build better relationships with anyone.
Trust is a bilateral relationship. Trust is why people get married. Trust is the reason you pay for expensive services knowing that you will get good value for your money.
“There are two dimensions to how people make trust decisions. There is a preconscious, automatic decision to trust. And then there is a conscious, slow decision to trust,” says Robert Hurley, a professor of management at Fordham University and the author of The Decision to Trust.
No matter what you want to achieve in life, building trust from other people will be a big part of your success. The process of gaining trust and understanding with anyone takes time, but a single action can ruin any relationship you’ve built over a period of time.
Trust is key to selling easily and quickly.
So: how to build trust?
Firstly: building a brand that delivers consistently and continually on your promises, and then goes the extra inch will, over time, deliver a powerful preconscious desire to trust you from customers old and new: they will be less picky, less price conscious, quicker to buy and more likely to buy more. On top of this, they will be more likely to review you positively online, and recommend and refer you to their friends. This is exactly the situation you will create, over time, by following the Slow Selling systems, step by
step.
Secondly: in order to generate a conscious decision to trust in a specific situation (for example, whether a customer decides to take your call, try your offer or have a meeting with you), you also need to follow the same, principle driven, processes as outlined in the Slow Selling system.
Neither route is easy to do (you’ll always be fighting your baser animal instincts to ‘get a sale’), it’s not a quick fix, and, very often, it will be challenging to stick to what you know is right… but the 4 principles of Slow Selling apply to every situation. For trust, they will be:
- Customer focused mission: if we can genuinely build trust, the sales will follow … not the other way round.
- Customers’ REAL needs: what does the customer need to see, hear and experience to cut out their fear of making a mistake or being ripped off? How can we be as up front with what we do to help give them confidence? What promises and guarantees can we make and stick by?
- Go the extra inch: how can we listen for small breaches of trust? How can we ensure that we continually improve and build more and more trust? How can we systematically overdeliver on our promises by the extra inch each time?
- Measure: what measures do we need to help us do all this? How will we hold ourselves accountable to these measures… transparently? Remember: the key is simply to get started on building trust: start anywhere and keep moving forward step by step every week: this is the way to generate success for the LONG TERM, and this on its own will put you head and shoulders above your competitors.
Thus, over time, solving the question: ‘How to build trust?’
Slow Selling is a UK based not for profit organisation for small business owners.
The aim is to help you grow your business through customer loyalty, reputation and referrals … without all the hype, hassle and nonsense. To find out more, please click here
