No, You Shouldn’t Be a Trusted Adviser

If your business is selling to other businesses, then you’ve probably had a conversation about how to become a trusted adviser to your customers. For example, Salesforce wants its customers to turn to think of Salesforce when developing customer relationship and sales strategy. Okta wants its customers to think of Okta when deciding on security and information access issues.

Businesses aim to be trusted advisers because companies that deeply trust them are more valuable and tend to be loyal customers.

You’ve probably had this conversation in your own company. You know you have the expertise and the answers, but how do you convince your customers to seek out your expertise?

If you’re a SaaS company, I’m betting you’ve tried a thought leadership-focused campaign or two, probably supported by your thought leadership content. Maybe you’ve jumped on the Zuora bandwagon at some point and called what you do “the (fill-in-the-blank) economy.”

There’s nothing wrong with these approaches. They are necessary, but as a logician would say, they are not sufficient. Making these approaches work means gaining a deeper understanding of your customers’ needs and aspirations and which of those you want to— and can — meet. You then learn where and how to start making promises to your current and future customers.

Trust Is Not Binary

In most cases, your customers will trust you for something, but probably not all the things for which you think they should trust you. In part one of my series on achieving ambitious growth, I noted that getting your promises right is a critical element of growth. It allows you to achieve both customer trust and company focus, which are critical growth components.

A concerns map shows you exactly what your customers’ needs and aspirations are. It provides you with the tool to determine what promises you can and should make. The map will also show where your customers do trust you.

For example, let’s assume your customer is a vice president of sales for a small technology company. Creating a map like the one above for every person involved in the buying process for every type of customer is the critical first step to building trust and driving growth.

Let’s say you sell something that helps this customer keep conversion ratios stable or above target. The concern to which you map is in the promises category. The customer will trust you to help make sure her pipeline is flowing, but will likely not look to you to help develop a sales team everyone wants to join (a declared intention).

Trust is not binary. Knowing how and why your customers trust you helps you both focus on consistent execution and on the journey of building trust.

Trust Is a Journey

I can almost hear you objecting, “But we can do that, too!” Maybe you can, but the level of trust you’ve built based on the promise you made is not at that level — yet.

You just can’t show up unannounced and unknown and promise to help your customer with her hopes and dreams. Imagine if someone did that for you. Would you believe them? Probably not. At least not yet.

Trust can be built. Does that seem obvious? It should. We all work to build trust in a variety of ways every day. The concerns map is a tool to help you understand where you are, where you could be and how to get there.

You might be helping this customer get her pipeline flowing smoothly by keeping conversion ratios on track. Once you’ve established that trust, it opens a conversation about improving those ratios, increasing the pipeline and thereby driving growth. Eventually, you make promises about driving growth. When she accepts them, and you deliver on them, that moves you from promises to future promises on the concerns map.

The more trust you engender, the more valuable and loyal your customer will be. And the more likely you are to find it easy to earn and keep customers.

Tell me how you are doing this today. And then let’s talk about making customer acquisition and retention easier.

About the Author | Jeff Weinberger

DS3 Consulting founder Jeff Weinberger found his passion in helping organizations identify and develop critical, yet often overlooked, strategic opportunities. With a reputation for being innovative and, well, disruptive, he helps organizations maximize the value of their key relationships to create, adapt to and capitalize on disruption in their markets.