A Killer Marketing Technique to Build Trust
Trust is made up of two things — relationship and traction.
If you want a customer to trust you enough to buy something from you, you’ll either need them to see the social proof of lots of other people they admire buying what you’re selling (and being successful with it), or you’ll need them to feel some sort of relationship to you or what you’re doing.
For your first customers, it’ll likely be heavily weighted towards relationship because you obviously won’t have a ton of social proof. People screw up what a “relationship” is, though. They assume it means the customer needs to know you, the founder. What your company is about and why it exists and what you think about the industry and whatever else. But that’s just Harry Potter Syndrome - we’re all Harry Potter in our own movie so of course it’s about other people getting to know us. But, in your customer’s movie, they’re Harry Potter, and a relationship means you knowing them. They don’t care about you. You earn a few seconds of their attention by knowing something unique about them.
Here’s where the marketing technique comes in.
Let’s say you’re launching a new tool that’ll help B2B sales managers incentivize their sales team. Your instincts in your initial marketing and cold emails and socials and whatever else will be to highlight what you do well - why you exist. Maybe something like:
“We help you sales managers with remote sales teams organize weekly competitions so that your reps are motivated to do the uncomfortable things (like 50 cold calls a day) that actually drive sales and exceed targets.”
Great. The more specific you get in that messaging, the more you hit on the unique problem, the better. This can build trust through a tighter relationship because the more specific the messaging the more you’re proving you know exactly what this customer is going through.
But the best way to hammer home this messaging and move towards a sale - and the reason for this email - is the next thing you need to talk about. The biggest risk. The thing that most worries you about the business - because it worries your customer, too.
What will the customer default to the second they hear your pitch?
Whenever humans hear about something new, we think about the downside. It’s our nature. When you first heard about electric cars you didn’t think about the carbon benefits or impact on oil reliance or anything like that - you thought “yeah but how far is the range? What if I get stuck without a charger?” And, maybe, “but will people like me be the ones driving these things?”
So, what’s the risk your customer thinks of?
The best way to figure this out is to ask. I texted the made up pitch from above to my friend who runs a sales team and asked what he thought - his response:
“Sounds cool, but we already have tracking systems for just about everything - it sounds like it’d be a logistical pain in the ass to implement - lot of up front work for something I’m not even confident would get us to sell more.”
Great. Now, you know bullet point #2 for every bit of marketing you do is on implementation risk. And, your product needs to be geared towards mitigating that (assuming you heard this from multiple customers).
If you’re starting a new conference (or any type of event), the risk for an attendee is always - who else is going to be there? If you’re building a marketplace, vendors will want to know what’s in it for them?
Don’t hide from the risk. Call it out immediately. This is how you build a relationship. “I know this problem you have that keeps you from reaching this massively important goal. I’m going to help you solve it, and before you say it, I know the biggest risk to this working is X and we’ve solved for it.”
You need to intimately know the customers problem and how they solve it now, what success would look like, and what the biggest risk to your solution is. Then, you need to scream about all three from the top of your apartment building.
That’ll build trust, which will let you get early customers, which will let you grow.