If you want more customers to buy your product or service, you need to build trust with them first. Trust that you won’t let them down, that you will deliver the outcomes expected, and that they won’t regret their decision for choosing your company.
Companies that are focussed on ‘selling the meeting’ don’t build trust. In an effort to look for the ‘needle in the haystack’ that’s willing to buy from you now, their hungry SDR team churn and burn the market. Ever downloaded an eBook and had a sales team call you non-stop for the next few months?
Doesn’t build a great deal of trust does it?
(We go deep into the problems with ‘selling the meeting’, the Predictable Revenue modelling and why it’s hurting your business in pt.1 of our mini-series).
But how do you build trust? Is it through content? Events? Ads?
We have a system that you can use to consistently build trust with your prospective buyers, which is a key part of your revenue engine.
Today we’re going to share:
- Why trust is essential to your revenue engine
- The 4 components to building trust
- How to accelerate the trust building process
This article/episode builds on step 1 of this mini-series which is all about building an end-to-end growth engine. Step 1 lays down the foundations you need to have in place before moving onto this part of our framework. In step one, we made our list of companies that we’d like to do business with. We should also have a keen understanding of what led them to do business with us in the first place, and why they chose us over the competition.
This information helps us map the ‘buying journey’ – i.e. the information we need to deliver to a potential customer to turn them into a paying one. If you haven’t checked it out, please do so here.
As per usual, you can watch, listen to or read step 2 of our joint framework with sales expert Adem Manderovic below.
P.S. We cover every step in our framework in detail. Check it out below!
- Why sales-led growth is killing your business
- The foundations you need to create for your revenue engine
- How to build relationships of trust with prospects
- How to maximize your chances of winning deals
- How to reduce churn and expand revenue
Listen To The Episode
Watch The Episode
Why Trust Building Is Essential To Your Revenue Engine
Ever heard the saying: “Nobody got fired for buying IBM?”
IBM was the standard choice back in its day. It’s a phrase that suggests that you should choose the larger, more established option when selecting a vendor. Not necessarily because it’s the perfect fit for your business, but because it’s likely to be ‘good enough’, and has a strong reputation in the market. So, if the purchase goes wrong – how could you be to blame?
So that’s what you’re up against if you’re taking on a large incumbent. You need to build enough trust with your prospect that you will not let them down if they choose your product or service.
Above is my pathetic attempt at drawing a river. It’s this river that’s separating our target prospect from becoming a customer. Today we’re showing you how to build the bridge of trust to move someone from being a prospect to a customer.
This bridge needs to do two key things:
- Get your prospect to prioritize the problem you solve, in the way you solve it
- Lead the prospect to the logical conclusion that you’re the perfect fit for them
Now let’s look at how to do this!
Map Buying Journey to 5 Stages of Awareness
The first step to building the trust you need to turn someone into a customer is to deeply understand their buying journey. You should have gathered this information in step 1 of this framework (see here).
Now you need to match this intel to the 5 Stages of Awareness – our favourite framework for matching content to the buying journey. The 5 Stages of Awareness takes your Dream Customers from being unaware that they even have a problem that your business can help them with, to being led all the way to the logical conclusion that you’re the perfect fit for them.
A quick summary of each of these 5 stages:
- Unaware: At this stage, potential customers are not even aware that they have a problem or a need that your product or service can address.
- By volume they’re the largest segment, but also the most challenging to market to
- Problem Aware: Here, customers realize they have a problem but may not know the solutions available.
- They have lots of questions here at this point
- Solution Aware: Customers are aware of various solutions to their problem but may not be familiar with your specific product or service.
- They don’t know about you or what you offer, but they want to sort out the problem
- Product Aware: In this stage, customers know about your product or service but are still comparing it with other options in the market.
- Your prospect is now looking at all options, including yours
- Most Aware: Finally, customers are fully aware of your product, including its benefits and how it compares to competitors. They are on the brink of making a purchase decision.
- They need a final nudge to pull out the credit card
We cover the 5 Stages of Awareness and how you can create content to match each in detail here.
Your prospect won’t move through these 5 Stages of Awareness in a linear way. That’s just not human behaviour. Priorities change, so we bounce around between different stages. Your goal at this stage should be to make sure you have content to match each stage, so your prospect can find the content that’s most helpful wherever they’re at in their journey.
Make Your Dream Customer’s Lives Better Without Using Your Product Or Service
The second kind of content you need to create to build trust with prospects is content that makes your Dream Customers’ lives better, even before they use your product or service!
This builds a ton of trust. It’s just like real life. You build relationships with people by helping them out when they’re in times of need. They then grow to trust you because you’re there for them. It’s no different when it comes to B2B marketing.
This is exactly what we’re doing right here with this article and The B2B Playbook. We’re building trust by giving you helpful content to make your life easier as a B2B marketer. Then when you’re ready to seriously upskill as a B2B marketer or build your demand engine, you’ll think of our Demand Generation Course, The B2B Incubator.
Another example of doing this is RIVET. RIVET are a SaaS company that enables better construction labour management. They joined our Demand Generation Course, and build a demand generation engine over a 12 week period.
After deeply understanding their market, they realised their market wasn’t being heard. There was very little support for their Ideal Customers when it came to labour operations management.
To build trust with their Ideal Customers even before they became customers, they create the Construction Is Hard podcast.
This podcast featured their own Subject Matter Experts who discussed how their Ideal Customers can improve their workforce management. They gave them a framework over a series of episodes (kind of like how we do here at The B2B Playbook).
The response has been enormous. While I’m not allowed to share specific details, the CMO has shared with me how this has turned the company into thought leaders in their industry, how it has built so much trust with their Ideal Customers, and how often the podcast and its derivative materials have resulted in pipeline and revenue for the business.
Create Content that Overcomes Objections
The third kind of content you need to create to build relationships of trust is content that overcomes objections you regularly hear from your Ideal Customers.
You should be able to gather these objections from when you went through laying the foundations for your revenue engine (pt.2 of this mini-series). A lot of this information will come from cataloguing the market.
The objections that you gathered earlier are now your recipe for success. Every time you hear an objection, create content around it that answers it! That becomes immediately useful for marketing and sales.
Accelerate Relationships By Distributing To Customers’ Eyeballs
By this stage we’ve created the information we need to if we want to build relationships with our Ideal Customers. Now we need to get that in front of their eyeballs!
The way we think about this is you can distribute this information on the following basis:
- 1:Many
- 1:Few
- 1:One
1:Many includes things like advertising, organic social, YouTube, forums.
1:Few includes things like webinars, events, associations, round tables, Slack groups
1:One includes things like emails, calls, texts and meetings
Generally speaking, marketing are best equipped to handle distribution on a 1:Many and 1:Few basis. Sales are normally equipped to handle 1:One. But the key here is the messaging and the content should be the same. This is because we’re fully aligned on who our Ideal Customers are, and what information they need to trust us and turn into a customer.
So the game is just about getting that information in-front of your Dream Customers. And that’s how to do it!
Bonus: Permission Based Creative
As a bonus, one more way you can build relationships of trust is with permission based creative. This again relies on you cataloguing the market, which requires you to call your Ideal Customers (or get in contact with them), not to sell to them – but to understand things like:
- Who they are currently using to solve problem X
- What they like about it
- What they don’t like
- What they’re paying
- When they’re next going to tender
If you have this information, you can circle back at the right time and have a conversation that is very well informed, or send through content that very directly addresses their biggest problems and how you can help solve them.
Next Steps For You
Want to learn more about how to implement this in your business?
We have of course simplified the 5 step process for you here. The devil is (as always) in the details. If you’d like more information on how we can put this end-to-end growth system in place for your business, or train your team up internally to do this, please check out our end-to-end business growth engine program here.
P.S. We cover every step in our framework in detail. Check it out below!
- Why sales-led growth is killing your business
- The foundations you need to create for your revenue engine
- How to build relationships of trust with prospects
- How to maximize your chances of winning deals
- How to reduce churn and expand revenue
