Why Should You Trust Me?

Whether it’s lunchtime snack trading or trade between businesses, trust is critical.

Trust is a fascinating, powerful concept in business. How we think about trust, and how trust manifests itself, has been one of the most important drivers of trade since pre-historic times.

Trust is at the foundation of trade. Think about it — if I don’t trust you, I won’t trade with you. So how can I decide if I trust you? If I’ve lived next to you in the same village, and I’ve known you since birth, then I have some basis to trust you. I grow apples, and you bake bread, and if I trust you in your product quality and you trust in mine, we can enter into an agreement to trade apples for bread. Delicious. We trust based on what we have known for years, and what we can see and experience right in front of us.

As economies have grown more complex, and trade has expanded out of the realm of what can be exchanged within our own towns and neighborhoods, trust in business has had to take on a new meaning. We now have to purchase goods and services from people who may not live in our town, maybe not even in our country. They may not even speak the same language as us, and we may never have met them in-person. So how do we ensure that businesses can be conducted in a trustworthy manner?

That’s the exact problem that Kinnek is trying to solve. Incredibly, there just isn’t a centralized place where interactions between businesses can be conducted in a trustworthy manner. There is no central source of third-party, objective reputation information about businesses, that other businesses can check before entering into business agreements with each other.

Until now, that is.

Through our years of research, hundreds of thousands of conversations with business decision-makers, and analysis of millions of data points, we’ve arrived at these five core tenants that constitute a business’ trust in your business:

1.) Hearing about past experiences other customers have had with your business.

2.) Seeing affiliations your business has with other trusted organizations, press outlets, and certifying bodies that themselves are trustworthy.

3.) Transparency and clear display of information that is important to a prospective customer and projects trustworthiness- including information about your product offerings, shipping information, pricing information, etc.

4.) Having the above information vetted by an unbiased third-party so that can be sure that it’s true.

5.) A customer’s own experience dealing with your business.

Those are the five core tenants of business trust. Aside from the last tenant, which depends of course on someone trusting you enough to become a customer in the first place, all the other tenants are things that a prospective customer will want to know about you if they get a call from you. If you meet a prospective customer at a trade show and they ask for your brochure, this is the information they’ll seek out after flipping through the brochure. If someone sees your advertisement in a trade journal, these are the pieces of reputation information that will be needed before they make a purchase decision.

We’ve taken all those learnings, and developed a product that helps businesses project that trustworthiness in exactly the right manner, at precisely the right moment, that generates the most trust in the eyes of prospective customers — the product is called Kinnek Reputation.

The two main components of Kinnek Reputation are:

1. ) A company profile where you can collect and display customer reviews and other reputation information about your business, and you can share with your prospective customers.
2. ) A Trust Report which contains the most impressive reputation highlights about your business, and you can share with your prospective customers.

If you want to see the true power of Kinnek Reputation, take a moment to look at Kinnek’s own company profile and Trust Report (it’s pretty meta, I know). If you haven’t heard about Kinnek before, just notice how much trust is generated from our company profile and our Trust Report. In just a few moments, you went from wondering if we were a legitimate company, to having a more full understanding of who we are and what we’re about. Pretty cool, right?

That’s the power of our product — our research has shown us the exact information and format that business owners want to see when evaluating suppliers and service providers, which is why it feels that way.

If you feel this way about our company after taking a look at our own Kinnek profile, imagine how impactful it could be for you.

Imagine if your prospective customers saw your Trust Report after their initial interaction with you at a trade show, after your initial marketing email, or even after sending a quote or proposal to them.

Your business could have a Trust Report just like this- and you can share it with all of your prospects at any point in the sales process.

Imagine if your prospective customers looked at your Kinnek profile after reading an article about you.

Imagine if you had a profile like this for your own business. It would provide instantaneous third-party validation of your reputation.

We’re so excited to share more about the power of Kinnek Reputation and how we can help you encourage every prospective customer to trust your business! If you’re a supplier that sells to small businesses, you can start building your Kinnek company profile today without even having to provide payment or even contact info to us. You can also call us at (800) 784–3151 if you feel like a chat.

Karthik Sridharan is co-founder & CEO of Kinnek.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he was formerly a Researcher at AQR Capital Management. He’s passionate about helping small businesses. In his spare time, he enjoys breakfast cereal, the Utah Jazz, and mangoes.