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Trust is a Gift Only Your Customer Can Bestow. Take the Trust Gap Quiz.

by | Customer Marketing & Success

Without your customer’s deep and abiding trust, a long-term relationship simply is not possible. It’s on top of confidence in your technology’s ability to deliver today’s goods.

It is trust in you, the people that comprise your company, that sets the direction and engineers the value. It occurs only between humans.

“The strongest client relationships are built on trust earned over time—not on price, contracts, or scope of services.”
— Bain & Company, Client Loyalty Insights

You have to earn this level of trust. It hinges on your customer’s belief in your commitment to their current and future success, over and above whatever the contract says, especially when times get tough.

Trust is a gift that only your customer can bestow

Not convinced? Let me give you a real-life, clear-as-day example:

I was interviewing a senior executive, one of my customer’s key customers. At the end of our discussion I asked, what is the greatest value you get from (the company I am representing). The exec replied, our salesman. He’s a part of our team. He understands what we need and gets us.   

That hits pretty close to home

If the humans that comprise your key customer base believe in you, as proven by your word and deed, if they trust you with their future, you possess the single greatest competitive advantage and driver of customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is your single greatest driver of long-term profitability, especially in B2B SaaS.

Hint: you can’t back into this. Earning trust requires you to walk the talk. It requires you to be human.

So how are you doing on that “building trust” stuff?

Here’s a quick survey that will identify gaps between where your company is and where you want it to be in earning your customer’s trust. It’s based on the 7 best practices of B2B companies who have established long-term profitability, and those who have not.

Mind the Trust Gap Quiz

Where are you in each of these best practices? Score each on a scale of 1 (not at all or never) to 10 (regularly/often).

  1. You conduct regular qualitative research (e.g. enhanced Net Promoter Score/NPS) to better understand your customer’s progress, marketplace threats, and satisfaction with your service and support.
  2. There is a central resource for all of your team members that includes mission and vision, customer persona and needs analysis, messaging, use cases, and detailed case histories.   
  3. You are committed to an ongoing program of research and publishing leadership content to help customers be more successful.
  4. Your team has deep domain expertise in your customer’s marketplace.
  5. Internal measurement includes metrics that are critical to your customer’s success.
  6. Incentives are both revenue-based (short-term sales) and profitability-based (innovation, customer lifetime value), of which all team members partake.
  7. Key team members are regularly at clients’ offices for meetings, strategic planning, problem resolution, and bonding.

If you scored 10 on any one best practice, or 70 overall, you should be investing in your company. 5.0 to 7.5, you’re on your way but have some work to do. If your business scored 5.0 or under, you’ve got a big opportunity for improvement.

The heart of the matter is heart

Let’s not forget that deep and abiding trust is exclusively between humans. AI builds the platform of reliability, but then it’s us and our willingness to put ourselves out there, to invest our humanity in someone else’s success, that becomes the best way to ensure your success.

Every single person on your team earns, or does not earn, your customer’s trust, every day. It’s got to be a mantra. If there’s a fork in the road, if a decision has to be made, earning trust is the criteria.

Achievement is incremental and reinforcement is constant. It’s the journey, not the destination.

Everyone must walk the talk. Here are 3 steps that will educate, equip, and motivate.

Step One: The Talk

Everything you’ve done on brand, mission and vision, and positioning goes into the slip and gets molded into the story of how your organization and every single team member is focused on accelerating your best customer’s success, as dedicated professionals, and as human beings.

This is rooted in how your customer defines success, the challenges they face, and how they describe the future state they desire. That gives them the reason to believe.

Be careful, this is only for those who match your ICP or ideal customer profile. Those outside tend to be more expensive to service, generate less revenue, and leave early.

And don’t assume you already know your customer’s success goals, because that assumption blinds you to the reality that their success is not caused by your success. It’s the other way around.

Step Two: The Walk

This is how you want your team members to act every day. It’s the embodiment of the talk, because it provides the rationale. It equips your team with the knowledge of how to make your customers successful through use of your products and services, and your company’s humanity.

Here are a few “for instances”:

  • How is your customer’s business organized? Who are the decision makers and influencers and what do they need to be successful both personally and professionally?
  • Exactly how do you provide value today? This is illuminated through detailed use cases and case histories.
  • How should this value be messaged to customers and prospects?

It’s best if this compendium of information is published and easy accessible, as in a “pillar page.”  You can’t expect everyone to sing from the same hymnal unless you publish it.

Step Three: Putting it All Together and Taking it on the Road

This is walking, talking culture change. You need team members to expand and internalize. In my experience, every successful change effort shares one goal—to educate the culture on how they will benefit in the future state, and to give them the tools to excel.  

Each team member must have a solid answer to the question, what’s in it for me? That answer, to be believable, must be about measurement and reward, and begin with a dollar sign. Money talks. Without this reason to believe, the training and the tools will fall short.

Questions?

Here’s the answer: This level of trust only happens between humans. Your entire team must be on the same page, work in unison, and focus on building profitability through exercising and earning trust.

About the Author

International author, lecturer and consultant, Scott Hornstein has worked with clients in all phases of marketing strategy, research and implementation. He has worked with companies large and small to build profitability by improving marketing performance, and reengineering the customer experience to boost satisfaction, referrals and customer lifetime value. Contact Scott.

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