Leaderati

            Trust has to be won. In other words if I want someone's trust I have to demonstrate behaviors that elicit trust from that person. A good part of the ten years I spend in sales was spent on training and coaching sales people. In these years, I have come across several examples of sales people losing their customer's trust and in many of these cases it had more to do with the salesperson than with the customer. Trust was lost for a wide range of reasons including the salesperson's inability to explain the product to the customer in a way that the customer could fully utilize the benefits of the product, or the salesperson was not fully honest about what the product could do and couldn't, and in several cases the salesperson simply not honoring a commitment he or she made to the customer. Such behaviors are not seen as trustworthy by the customer, and rightly so. On other hand, I have also seen the converse being true. Salespeople who were honest, knew their product well, and kept their commitments, not only had great customer relationships but also had a regular flow of customers.

In fact there is empirical evidence to suggest that the behaviors I mentioned above are key to being worthy of trust or being "trustworthy" as Colquitt et al (2007) found from their meta-analysis of 132 independent studies. Essentially they found two broad aspects to being "trusted": trustworthiness or the ability, benevolence, and integrity of the trustee, and trust propensity, a person's willingness to rely on others. The latter being more of a personality-type factor.  So, according to their meta-analysis, for "trust" to happen, first the trustee should demonstrate ability, benevolence, and integrity, which I will explain further in this blog and second, the trustor should be willing to rely upon the trustee.

While there isn't much we can do about the trustor's or in this case the customer's personality, we can do much about our behaviors as a trustee. Further in this blog, I focus on "trustworthiness" or the behaviors that we can demonstrate to elicit trust from others as the Colquitt et al (2007) study suggests.

The first of three elements of trustworthiness is ability or competence. Using the sales example, it is the ability of the salesperson in demonstrating their knowledge, skills and expertise in the product, solution, or domain, to the customer. This underlines what we probably know already that product, content, or domain knowledge is essential for being able to explain the benefits to the customer or the value of the offering to the customer.

The second, benevolence, is demonstrating behaviors that indicate one's "caring, loyalty, or supportiveness" to the customer(Colquitt et al, 2007, p. 910). Benevolence is about providing a product or service that is most beneficial to the customer or best meets the needs of the customer or delivers the greatest value to the customer.

The final one, integrity, is the extent to which a salesperson is believed to adhere to ethical principles including being seen as just, fair, consistent and fulfilling a promise (Colquitt et al, 2007, p. 910). There is the sagely saying in sales: "under-promise and over-deliver". Many a sales person has seen the damage a reversal of this act does.  Breaking a commitment or a promise made to your customer is a sure way to lose trust. It is that simple: honor your word!

Another important addition I would like to make to this list is what Professor Robert Cialdini, known for his scientific work on influence, calls the "principle of liking". Customers in general like to deal with sales people with whom they can find similarities, or feel a bond with. How do we make ourselves likable? By making a conscious effort to learn about and converse on topics that interest our customer, in an honest, genuine respect of mutual similarities (Cialdini, 2001). For example, in the US, you can make great conversation with people in most parts of the country if you follow some of the popular games like football, basketball, or baseball. Besides games, there is food, restaurants, and probably a host of other things worth exploring that you might have a similarity you share with the customer. The only cautionary note here is to avoid any discussion on religion or politics- absolute taboos in an US context.

You can see that all these aspects I discussed are simple things but are nevertheless important for us to remind ourselves all the time about-- or we stand the risk of losing trust and relationships.

References

Colquitt, J. A., Scott, B. A., & LePine, J. A. (2007). Trust. Trustworthiness, and trust propensity: A meta-analytic test of their unique relationships with risk taking and job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92 (4), 909-927.

Cialdini, R.B. (2001). Influence: Science and practice. Boston: Pearson Publishing.