Mastering the Art of Building Trust in Professional Relationships
Published on 22 August 2024
Trust is so important in relationships, particularly when you’re trying to meet new referral sources, meet new clients, maintain relationships with your contacts. Trust is a foundational skill. It really is the basis of so many successful relationships, and we talk about the importance of building trust, but I thought I would spend some time now just digging into more of the finer elements about how you get people to trust you. As I say those words, I want to make sure that we’re clear about something. We’re not trying to fool people. We’re not trying to get people to trust you if you are not trustworthy. What we’re trying to do is demonstrate that you are, in fact, trustworthy. I want to help you communicate those qualities that you possess that are real, that are truthful, that are honest.
The difficulty in building trust is that people are skeptical, especially people who don’t know you and have no contact with you. In some circumstances, when you are referred by someone who is a mutual contact, someone who presumably your prospect already trusts, that trust can carry over into your relationship.
So that is one of the reasons why getting referrals is such a far superior marketing technique, than going out and trying to meet strangers, because if they trust the person that referred you, they’re more likely to trust you. Of course, that trust is only going to carry you so far. There are still things that you have to do.
So regardless of whether or not you’re meeting somebody for the first time, or they’ve been referred to you, or they’ve known you in the past, the ability to build trust is going to be extremely important to you and your ability to generate new clients.
So let’s dig down into this and talk about what are some of the things that can help you communicate the qualities that are trustworthy.
The first thing I’d like to talk about is the importance of educating people. I think that there is a common belief, a widely held belief, the way you build trust is by telling people about yourself and about your service. Phrases like,
We are so knowledgeable in this area, we’ve been doing this for so many years. We have a long established reputation. Those concepts may be true, but they are not effective, or as effective in building trust is actually doing something that proves your trustworthiness that proves how smart you are and your expertise.
And one of the ways that you prove how knowledgeable and how smart you are is to give value in advance. This is one of my very favorite concepts. You can teach somebody. If you can teach them something that helps them in their business, maybe even in their personal lives, then they learn from firsthand experience exactly how knowledgeable and how smart you are and how successful you are. So by educating, by teaching, you paint a picture of what it is going to be like to work with you. And you can educate people in many ways. You educate them as you’re talking with them, by asking insightful questions that give you the opportunity to talk about how knowledgeable you are in what their problem is. So you ask questions, asking them what obstacles they’re facing, and then you can provide your thoughts.
You could use soundbites. Another technique for educating people is the use of sound bites in your language instead of just talking at length about how you solve a problem, you might say something like what we do is, in our business, we help people by building them up, not beating them down. That would be an example of a sound bite. If you’re trying to generate how reliable you are. When I say that I’m going to do something, you could take it to the bank. Some of these are well known phrases, but you can come up with your own personalized phrases as well.
So soundbites are a way of educating people.
You can educate people through through public speaking. And if you can get an audience of quality prospects or quality referral sources, and have an opportunity to talk to them and show them how knowledgeable you are. It is so far more effective than simply telling people how knowledgeable you are.
So whenever you have an opportunity to educate, that is a way of building trust.
Another technique for communicating how knowledgeable and how experienced you are is to share war stories. So if you can identify clients, you may not want to talk about by name, but experiences that you had where one of your clients or several of your clients have faced a particular problem that is similar to the problem that you’re discussing with your prospect and talk about how you found solutions to that problem.
Maybe they were creative solutions, unusual solutions that will also demonstrate not only how knowledgeable you are, but how creative you are. So whenever possible use war stories to demonstrate your experience.
So another area I’d like to talk about in this topic of building trust is the issue of time. It can take a long time to build trust with people. It is not something that happens overnight. People are skeptical. They may have had bad experiences with with people in your profession in the past.
Maybe they have prejudices. People have prejudices about all sorts of things, about gender, about age, and if you don’t fit into those criteria, they may be prejudiced against you without even knowing you. So it takes time to overcome those kinds of barriers. Now, you may not have that time.
If you’re talking to somebody for an hour and they come into your office or you’re spending time on the phone, you may only have one shot at communicating how knowledgeable and how smart you are. And that may not be enough. As we’ve talked about, you can educate them. And you can share war stories.
You can give lots of sound bites and get people excited about the idea of working with you. But once you leave that meeting, then they are subject to meeting other people and thinking about things that might interfere with what you’ve talked about. They might even forget about what you’ve talked about.
So if you’re going to build trust, if you’re going to be successful in doing this, you have to have many opportunities to interact with people over time. Don’t expect that you’re going to meet with someone one time, convince them to work with you, and then hope to hear from them. It often doesn’t work that way, so you have to create reasons to stay in touch over time. At the end of each conversation that you have with a worthwhile prospect or a worthwhile referral source, you should always strive to think of the next step. What would be something else that you could do after this meeting? Perhaps you could offer to do some complimentary work or some complimentary research, and then you could schedule a time to get together in the future. Or maybe you’re aware of some opportunity that might be beneficial to them.
You could schedule a time to discuss that opportunity or maybe you or members of your firm offer to do seminars or offer to do complimentary consultations. You could talk about what those things are and find out if they’d be interested. And if they are scheduled the next time. So the idea is, at the end of every conversation with a qualified target, you always want to negotiate the next step so that you have more opportunity to spend time with them and educate them and demonstrate how knowledgeable you are.
So if you are going to stay in touch with people over time in order to build trust, then you need reasons for reaching out. You need reasons that are both interesting to the people that you’re talking to so that you give them an incentive to have another meeting with you.
And you need something that makes you feel good and comfortable so that you don’t feel like you’re being pushy or that you’re trying to be invasive or trying to sell. We’ve talked about the concept of value as a reason. That’s the notion of offering a seminar or a complimentary consultation, but what other reasons could you come up with? Perhaps you could offer to entertain someone. You could offer to take them to lunch, or invite them to a ball game, or play a game of golf. People love to be entertained. Firms have been using golf and other forms of entertainment since is the beginning of business development.
And the reason is, that it works. People love to do things that are fun. The idea is this spend time thinking about an inventory of offers. An inventory of reasons for reaching out to people and staying connected with them. If you have partners, you might even sit down with them on a regular basis and talk about their ideas for reasons for reaching out.
The more interesting things you have to offer to people, the more likely it is that people will be responsive to your offers. Building trust is a process that can take a long time. It involves communicating the qualities that you possess, qualities that you’re proud of, qualities like how smart you are, how reliable you are, how honest you are, and substantiating those qualities, not just by telling people how knowledgeable you are but proving it.
By giving them good information, by sharing soundbites that you’ve thought about, by giving value in advance and helping them out in ways that they will really appreciate and really understand what it is going to be like to work with you.
So those are my thoughts about building trust. I have many more and I’d love to share them with you.
If you’re interested in learning how to become more effective in building trust with your relationships, please feel free to reach out to us. You can contact me by email: [email protected] or respond to us through our website. Our website, by the way, has many wonderful articles and other resources like podcasts and tools that you can look at.
And I’m happy to spend some time with you to discuss how you build relationships with your important targets.
