Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
What are the best brands doing to stay relevant, build trust, and create content smarter?
At Share Your Genius, we have the same questions, so we're tapping the best in the space for their answers—one voicemail at a time.
Join us each week for quick hits of insights from b2b marketers and leaders.
[00:00:09] Amanda Smith: Okay, so everybody talks about how trust is really needed in the sales process, right? You have to build rapport. You have to show that you know them, understand them, and that you have a solution that they're looking for, right?
[00:00:22] So all that's fine and good. You send over the statement of work. You send over the proposal, they sign it, hip, hip, hurrah. Now you have to make sure you deliver on that and that your team delivers on that. And so I bring all this up because we do talk about trust a lot in the sales process, but trust with clients in that transition from sales to delivery is really fragile.
[00:00:45] A confident sales process can quickly turn into uncertainty if that trust that was built doesn't carry over to your team who's delivering. So how do you make sure that that doesn't all crumble once they sign the dotted line? I called Mason Cosby to ask him how he's doing it because as CEO and founder of Scrappy A BM, he focuses on making every team member visible, keeping communication steady, and following through on promises so clients feel supported from day one. So I asked him, what's the first step in building trust when new clients are just getting started?
[00:01:24] Here's what he said.
[00:01:35] Mason Cosby: Hey Amanda, that is a fantastic question. As I think about how do we build trust, there's three core things that we can do to build trust with clients as soon as they're kicking off.
[00:01:44] When clients are just getting started, I wanna be super clear, it's not easy to build trust. Hopefully trust has been built through your marketing program and then also the way in which your sales process was handled. Especially is when it's getting started, that is typically where you see the greatest nose dive in trust. They meet our great sales guy and he walks 'em through the sales process and then they sign and then they meet their delivery team and it's like, cool. I got to know this guy and now I'm with a group of somewhat strangers.
[00:02:12] There's a couple of things that help with that if you're a services business, which is one, pulling your delivery team members and making them heroes publicly so that they're not strangers when they hop on that first call.
[00:02:22] And then the other thing is frequent, constant communication. The more often we're talking and driving things forward, and setting and then meeting expectations, the more trust we build in our sales process.
[00:02:34] You tell somebody, "Hey, I'll have this proposal to you before end of day Friday." And you say that on like a Tuesday and you know good and well, you'll be able to get it to a midday Thursday and what you've done is created a day and a half of buffer in the event that crazy things happen,that you can't get it to 'em.
[00:02:50] And then by setting and meeting expectations constantly, you build a lot of trust because essentially you're just the kind of person that does what you say you're going to do. I wanna be super clear. It's hard, because if you manage a lot of clients, then you've gotta figure out how to add daily comms to a lot of clients, but it's not like we're actually adding new deliverables necessarily. Just way more communication. So again, when I think about how to build trust, one, pull your people forward in a sales process or in your marketing programs and they're not strangers. Two, make sure there is an intentional thought process for how we transfer trust from one team member to another.
[00:03:26] So like salesperson should be on the kickoff call to make sure that trust is transferred. And then third, set and meet expectations maliciously. Make sure if you're, say you're going to do something. Do it. And if something happens, because you're never gonna be perfect, communicate early and often why you're not going to meet the expectation and then reset the expectation if you do those things, trust is really hard to erode.
[00:03:52] Amanda, hopefully that was super helpful. If there's any further questions, you can always feel free to reach me on email 'cause you've already got that. Or feel free to shoot me a message on LinkedIn. Again, Mason Cosby on LinkedIn and look forward to seeing any questions you have.
[00:04:12] Amanda Smith: Thank you for listening. Want your podcast to do more? Subscribe to Genius Cuts because it's never just a podcast.