Trust me...please!

I heard a commercial while driving in to work this morning for Reputation.com, a service that manages what folks are saying online about you or your company. The commercial said something to the effect that 90% of people believe what they read online about your company, so the inference is that you best be sure that everything out there about you is positive. I did not catch the source of that statistic because I don't think they gave it.

On the other hand, I read a promotional piece this week from a publisher I know that cited Research magazine. The stat: seven of ten people say print advertising information is most important when making a purchase. Consumers still trust print in spite of all the market and media changes. 

Okay.

The real fact here -- and I say this without scientific basis -- is that there is so much information available to us today that you can likely find a study or research to back up most claims made about anything in media. And that's nothing new. There were many times in my own old selling days (B.C. or Before Computers) and when riding with a sales rep where a prospective advertiser would pooh-pooh your readership study or market report. 

"You come in here with your stuff that says you're the best, the TV guys come in with their stuff that says they're the best, and radio and everybody else," was a common comment made by these poor business owners (who probably spent as much time dealing with eager ad reps as they did anything else). And they were right. So how do you separate yourself? How do you develop folks to believe in what you say and what your company says?

Trust. You have to build trust. Build a relationship based on honesty and truth. And that, too, is nothing new; it's just changed. I love Jeffrey Gitomer (www.gitomer.com) who is famous for pointing out that we spend too much time training sales people to sell instead of training them to help people buy. "People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy!" is the Gitomer mantra. I believe that they love to buy when they deal with someone they can trust, someone who makes them feel very safe and comfortable when they open their wallet to spend. Gitomer also says "You don’t earn loyalty in a day; you earn loyalty day by day." In my own current sales career (A.D. or After Digital), I find this to be the most difficult aspect of today's market. There are too many faceless gatekeepers out there now with voice mail, e-mail and websites that lead nowhere when trying to reach out to someone you think your product can help. How do you build trust in that environment? 

I'm going to look for answers to that question and share them in upcoming blogs. If you have suggestions or ideas, send them to me at tcuskey@fcpny.com and I will pass them along. Thank you.