On a scale of one to ten, how high would you rank the importance of trust in a relationship?
Would you agree that without trust it’s next to impossible to build a meaningful friendship with another person?
This same principle applies to our relationship with existing and potential clients. When someone contacts us for information, they are trusting us – but only a little.
They are providing us with a small window, a brief opportunity, for us to prove that we are worthy of that trust and possibly even more. We call this permission marketing and it's all about turning strangers into friends and friends into clients.
So how do we turn a stranger into a friend?
By treating them in a way that builds their trust in us.
When choosing which agent to appoint, a potential client needs to be convinced of two elements.
First, does the agent inspire confidence in their ability to do the job?
Second, is the agent trustworthy?
Can they be relied up to deliver the end result in a way that relieves the client of concern, stress, hassle and worry? Some would call this approach “professionalism”, but it goes way beyond that.
Trust is a word that is more usually associated with the reliability, honesty and integrity, of relationships with friends and family, whereas professionalism is strictly business!
The Nature of Trust
We trust others when we take a chance, when were not sure, yielding them some control over our money, secrets, safety, or other things we value. Our decision to trust people depends on our estimate of how trustworthy they are, which is in turn based on what we know about them and whether we can damage their reputation if they prove untrustworthy.
We are influenced by a range of information sources. One of the most powerful appears to be personal experience and, likewise, the experiences of friends and family.
What Trust Is
Trust is an expectation that another party will not allow you to be harmed at a time when you are vulnerable.
Obviously, we cannot trust strangers as much as we can trust people we have long-standing relationships with. As we become more familiar with an individual or a group, we gradually allow ourselves to be vulnerable to them. We share our personal concerns. We rely on the information they give us to make decisions that we are held accountable for. As long as no injury comes from that vulnerability, our trust increases.
However, some individuals and groups violate our trust. We allow ourselves to be vulnerable, and they take advantage of us or let us down. The information they provide to us proves to be unreliable or misleading.
How Pocomed Build Trust
Several characteristics of Pocomed engender trust from the clients that we deal with:
Integrity - Exhibiting basic honesty and moral character are keys to demonstrating that you are trustworthy. A company can be trusted to do what is right even when there is "no controlling legal authority" because they are guided by internal standards.
Reliability - Trustworthy companies are consistent, dependable and stable. Their actions are congruent with the values and principles they espouse. They keep their promises.
Fairness - Being fair means making unbiased decisions and not taking advantage of people just because they are in a weaker negotiating position.
Caring - We have all been taught to make rational business decisions and to not let our emotions bias our decision-making processes. Rationality is important, but emotions shouldn't be completely ignored. The most trustworthy companies are the ones we can talk to about our worries and frustrations because they care.
Openness - Trustworthy companies keep confidences, but they do not keep harmful secrets or have hidden agendas. Open information sharing is a reciprocal process. We tend to withhold information from people who seem to resist opening up to us.
Competence - Trustworthy companies perform their roles competently.
Loyalty - Trustworthy companies also show through their actions that they are willing to protect and defend their subordinates when they make mistakes or during times of crisis. This kind of trust is particularly important during times of innovation and change because of their inherent risks.
In Summary ... Trust is too valuable an asset to be taken for granted. It's very difficult to be a truly successful company without it. While it may take weeks, months or years to develop it, a single violation can damage it.
Only companies who can inspire confidence and develop trust will be able to evolve their service and reputation alongside their customers’ highest expectations of them.
Most agents fail to harness these critical points of distinction in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors.”
I have an inherent distrust of people who frequently say .....
"Trust me".
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