Good morning everyone,
Have you ever had to work with someone you just didn’t trust?
Would you hop into a car with a 12 year-old behind the wheel that says don’t worry, “I am great on video games?”
Would you do a back flip off of a cliff not knowing how deep the water was if a friend asked you to?
How about having fights with your significant other about small things only to reveal a lack of trust being the root of the conflict?
I have studied the art of building rapport with people for over a decade and trying to understand how to build deep relationships with customers. One of the key ingredients to building rapport with people is TRUST. If we don’t have trust, we will not have much of a relationship. Customers most likely will not give you information which will hinder the selling process and growth. Trust is crucial!
We have to have trust in relationships, the products we use in our daily lives, our organizations we work for, basically we have to put some trust in everything we come in contact with. We trust that the vehicle we drive will not just explode when we turn the key or push the start button. We trust that the engineers and the manufacturing individuals have assembled the vehicle so that it will function properly. People we don’t know and may never meet that assemble a mass of steel barreling down the road have our trust.
Trust is a huge factor in organizational success, teams, and relationships. Without trust we won’t get very far in life. We must focus on building trust with those we come in contact each and every day. I do this when I get up and write my blogs to help each and every one of you get some insight in hopes that you have a better life. I constantly build trust with people I work with, friends, and family each day. Trust is a huge moral obligation to me.
I have had to work at being trustworthy and to show my trustworthiness to those I have come in contact with in all situations. When my previous employer took over sales territory in Florida which it had never had distribution in, we had to work extremely hard to build trust with the new customer base. I took a Dale Carnegie course on effective communication and human relations, learned all I could about the new products as well as the competitive landscape, and did a great deal of leg work to build the trust that we were going to do what we said we were going to do for our new customers. This meant a great deal of studying the competitive landscape while on the road (some years 110 nights a year), going out to sell products for my customers to their customers, train my customer’s sales force, help them with marketing, etc.
There was a great deal of effort on my part to build trust. Some of the things that happened as a result of this hard work were some of my customers asking my opinion on other aspects of their business, products they were looking to purchase, inviting me on fishing / hunting trips to their properties, and phone calls to catch up even though I have not called on them in over eight years. Last week on customer called me to catch up and see what was going on in my life. It was great to hear from him and can you guess what I will be doing the next time I am in the area? You’re right, I will be stopping in to see all the changes they have made since my last time in their location. I am excited when I see my customers winning! It is FUN for me to build trust and relationships with people I come in contact with! You never know what will develop out of those relationships.
This past week I had the opportunity to speak on trust to a great organization that builds axles, drive shafts, gaskets, etc for the automotive industry. Most of the employees are engineers which takes me back to my roots as I started out an engineer myself. See engineers focus on a series of processes and equations to develop great products. We put our trust as consumers that they have done their diligence when we head down the road in a vehicle with their products inside.
In speaking with these individuals, I needed to make it a goal to speak their love language. I broke trust down into an equation. It was better than a bunch of bullet points. These individuals received a great deal of value out of the training and the discussion after was fantastic. My hope is that this equation might help you with being intentional in the future to build trust with those that you surround yourself with and come in contact on a regular basis.
Over the next few weeks I’ll break down the equation and share with you each component of the equation for you to fully understand as we step through.
Have a great weekend and I look forward to helping you build unmatched trust in the weeks to come.
Sincerely,
Kevin Sidebottom