Who and What Do We Trust?

As the role of the relationship-based sales person shifts, with buyers collecting more of their information online, both prior to, and during conversations with sales people, we need to pay close attention to the most crucial aspect of a sale. Trust. It is trust that every relationship has as its foundation. However, with the changing dynamic of how the conversation happens, there is also a changing dynamic of how trust is developed.

In classic relationship-based sales, the buyer grew to trust the individual salesperson. Conversations were typically face to face, and the relationship incorporated many “social” elements such as dinner, drinks, golf outings, or sports events. Over time, this built up a level of trust between the buyer and the seller and allowed the deal to move through its challenging parts.

Now, with significantly less face-to-face time being spent, the dynamics of this trust building are changing. Trust now manifests itself in a variety of ways, which together either contribute to, or detract from, a sales opportunity. Replacing, enhancing, or complementing the trust we historically had in the direct sales rep is the trust we place in the following sources:

Peers:
The most powerful and immediate trusted source, of course, are our peers. People we know, have existing relationships with, and respect are the most powerful influencers of our decision making. Both because of shared experiences, and a perception of them being free of bias, we are far more likely to trust recommendations from our peer group.

Online Communities:
In a similar vein, we tend to trust the recommendations of online communities, where individuals may not be known to us, but we share a common thread such as the use of a particular solution, a professional discipline, or a love of travel.

Online Personas:
Within these communities, active individuals often stand out. Through creating great content, intelligent commentary, and frequent presence, they build familiarity in the same way that repeated light encounters with a neighbour or office co-worker begin to build our familiarity with them. As this familiarity builds, a sense of trust builds with it.

Personal Brands:
Taken further, many individuals have become so well known individually within a given space that their views are given significant credence. As buyers, there may be significant trust placed in the views, opinions, and perspectives of these strong individual brands within a space.

Company Online Brands:
The overall reputation and brand of a company is greatly influenced by the transparency of social media. Numerous examples exist of companies who attempted to maintain a difference between what they wanted their reputation to be, and what the reality of their product or service was. Social media has collapsed this difference, and in doing so may have an overall positive effect on buyer trust. If a company brand becomes, through community discussion and reputation, a realistic impression of what that company truly is, it becomes something that can more easily be trusted.

As trust shifts from being mainly in the purview of face to face sales reps, and towards a variety of other sources, marketing organizations need to ensure that buyers trust what is being offered. However, with trust itself being a virtually unmeasurable concept, and the source of trust being even more difficult, this provides marketers with a significant challenge.

Are you measuring how and why prospective buyers build their trust in you?

5 things to do to get ready for coming communication shift

A while ago, I wrote a piece on the next transition in communication that sparked a number of conversations. The idea explored in that article (and the explanation for the diagram on the right) was that the major search engines will next apply their computing and analysis horsepower to understanding who is talking to whom about what.

As they do that, it may become possible to have passive discovery of interesting conversations guided by the algorithms of Google and Bing and their analysis of vast amounts of social media data. Much like Amazon’s book recommendation systems which looks at “people like us” and sees what they are interested in, Google and Bing may soon be able to accurately detect and show specific conversations that are most likely to be of interest to each person.

This coming transition promises to be as disruptive as any transition in communication before it. Here are five things you can do to get ready:

1) Dive Into Social: Watch what the major search engines are doing to aggregate and understand social media activity. Where this effort lands is difficult to predict, but the more involved you are with social, the more aware you will be of the effect of these efforts on how your conversations are being discovered.

2) Understand the Influencers in your Market: Not just the major press and analyst influencers, but the bloggers and smaller influencers in the space who will most likely cause your message to be “discovered” if they join the conversation. Engage and encourage your entire team in building strong relationships with influencers.

3) Create an “Information Concierge” Role: ensure that the high quality information you have finds its way into the conversations in the first place through identifying related conversations, and presenting your information, via an information concierge, in the context of those conversations.

4) Be Findable: understand, and continually improve, how “discoverable” your content is with natural search queries. Not only will this ensure a discipline of search-friendly practices, but it will guide your company culture towards one that thrives on the continuous creation of great content.

5) Watch the Search Majors: As Google deepens its investment in display advertising, and Bing makes similar moves, their ability to target “discovered” conversations will continually increase. Being aware of, and on top of, these investments will ensure you are well positioned to take advantage of them.


Each major transition in communication is disruptive, but those who anticipate, prepare, and get in front of the transitions stand to benefit from them significantly.


(this article, in part, first appeared as a guest post on SavvyB2B - it has since been modified and split into two from the original)