Building trust in a referral relationship
Trust. How to develop your ultimate business resource.
If I was to ask you what your ultimate resource in business was, what would you say?
I’ve asked this question of hundreds of business people and the answers vary widely, but for the vast majority of answers, when they are distilled to their core, trust is what people finally rest on.
Think about it. If you answered “my product or service” what is it that ultimately motivates people to want to consume this? No matter how fancy or clever your offering is, if your customers don’t trust it will do what you say it will do, it is ultimately worthless.
If you answered a variation on “me”, “my skills/knowledge” etc, again, without trust, no matter how incredibly awesome you are, without trust in you, no one is going to engage you.
If you answered “my people '', apply the above. I think you start to get the picture. Trust is the engine house of your business success, but far too often, people plow head first into business and fail to establish a level of trust be it with your marketing, your product or your network.
For many years I have been helping business people understand how to build trust with their network in order to develop a network that can generate business referrals. I have seen many people build phenomenally successful businesses when they understand this powerful, yet invisible driver.
So trust is so important, what do so few people take the time to develop trust?
The components of Trust
Stephen Covey wrote a fantastic book on trust “The Speed of Trust”. Covey talks about the fours quadrants of trust:
Integrity. Put simply, if you don’t go about things in an honest way, others see you as disingenuous and no matter how well you do everything else, your actions will be viewed as dishonest and weak. Think about world leaders today who may lack integrity in your eyes. No matter what they do, their foundational integrity isn’t there and nothing they do is viewed as worthy.
Intent. I love this one as I always look for the intent behind someone's actions. This is where you can “smell” “BS”. No doubt you've experienced this before, people doing good deeds or acts but somehow, something about the act seems not quite right. We have a real knack for being able to tell when people are coming from the wrong place.
Capabilities. Ultimately if someone lacks the capability to execute on what they say, you simply don’t trust that they’ll get the job done. Think about people who have said they can help in a particular area, but you know their skill set simply does not align to the job at hand - in other words, you simply don’t trust they can complete the task properly.
Results. We all look for a track record in people - can they prove that they have done this before and got the results they say they are able to achieve. One wouldn’t go to a freshly graduated lawyer to save one from a complex legal case, hence why we look for evidence that people can get the job done.
We all trust at different speeds and there's the rub. You simply cannot tell at what point another person truly trusts you. You must continually demonstrate behaviors that instill trust. I am a very trusting person, I trust others very early on in a relationship but if you break my trust, it's over. Others may take a long time to build to trust but that trust is very strong and takes a lot to erode.
This is why we must continually work on the fours quadrants of trust with our referral partners if we hope to maintain that business relationship.
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care
This is one of my favorite sayings in business and one I have learnt the hard way on several occasions.
As a new Director in BNI I remember I went to a local BNI chapter. I had not met these people before and after the meeting they invited me to stay for a leadership meeting.
I felt really pleased that i;d been invited and the very first thing they asked me was “what did you think of our meeting?”. Thinking I was going to help them, I listed out the many things they had done poorly or incorrectly. They sat there and smiled and when I finally finished they politely thanked me and moved on with their business.
I left that meeting thinking I’d really helped them but then over time I noticed I was being shut out of things. They seemed to be sidelining me and I could tell something was wrong/.
Eventually I reached out to the President and asked if everything was OK as they were ignoring my emails and not engaging with me. To his credit, he called me and told me the leadership team felt that I was a smarty pants and had shown them contempt by telling them all the things that were wrong - he said I’d basically alienated everyone and to be honest, I wasn’t really welcome to come back.
I was shattered - I thought I’d really helped them but realized what I'd done was just show off about how much I knew and not about how much I cared.
I never recovered that relationship and ultimately moved on as chapter Director. To this day there are people from that meeting who are very cold towards me. That was nearly 15 years ago and despite my current body of knowledge and my genuine desire to help them form a place of caring, the damage was done long ago and I’ll never recover from it.
The point of this story is that you can easily kill trust by knowing it all. I cannot tell you how many instances in my business and personal life I have known how to fix something but knew my currency of credibility was too low to jump in. Time has shown me that people must know I really care before they are willing to take my help - when you trust someone, you would literally put your life in their hands, but what must go beforehand to get to that point?
Trust is currency - its the depth of your relationships not how many you have
So if trust is the currency of relationships, how far can you spread yourself?
I have met many people over the years who purport themselves to be master networkers. They are literally at every event and ‘network’ feverishly yet have absolutely nothing to show for it. The ask me “why. If I network so much, do I have very little to show for it?”. Well the answer is simple - you can only build trust with a limited number of people at any time.
In my undergraduate degree, we learnt about a sociologist called Robin Dunbar. Dunbar had gone about trying to understand how many people we could have meaningful relationships with. How came up with a few numbers based on researching societies over time.
Firstly, he said we have the cognitive capacity to ‘know’ about 150-180 people. I’m not talking to friends on social media, but people we actually have a relationship with. This was important in prehistoric times because societies would break apart at that number because we simply could know more people which meant that if we were out hunting and a saber tooth tiger was barreling towards us, I’d save my mate on the left who I new rather than the bloke on the right who I vaguely knew.
He then says there's about 50 people we know better. In my ‘pub test’ (if you know me, I talk about this personal theory often) these are the people you can comfortably sit down and have a drink with and know each other well enough.
Then there are about 15 people we know really well and these people we’d happily have diner with and know enough about their lives to have a great conversation with over the course of a night.
Finally there are your inner 5 - these are the people you know so well that you would have them stay at your home or go on holiday with. You know their hobbies and pastimes, you know their business well. You know their family’s names and details. In short, these are your closest friends and allies.
How do you build trust?
Trust is a function of time and actions - its as simple as that. One of the best things I learnt from BNI was the concept of “Givers Gain”. I have found the best way to build trust over time is to help others and be genuine about it. And time is critical in the equation and the time it takes to trust someone is different for everyone.
You’ll know when someone trusts you by their own actions and behavior towards you. SO maintaining trust in a relationship is paramount and my advice to anyone in business is focus on trust for once its broken…
Think about other ways you can build trust in business - here are some ideas:
Consistency
Ask for feedback
Prioritize time to build relationships
Be reachable and available (at a reasonable level)
Be clear in your communication
Admit fault when you’re wrong
Always honor any commitments made
Be vulnerable/real
Be transparent in your actions
Always stand up for what you believe to be the right thing
My final thought is that people don’t trust words, they trust actions.
My formula for building trust is really very simple:
Actions + Time = Trust
I hope this article has helped you understand the importance of trust in business. When you build trust with others, they will go to any lengths to help you and your business. Don’t take trust for granted and know that with trust you can build referral relationships that will take your business to new heights.
