Last year, former Chief Evangelist of Apple and current entrepreneur, Guy Kawasaki spoke on the importance of trust during a Stanford lecture series. His sales philosophy centers on the idea of enchanting the client.
He broke building trust down into 3 necessary ingredients...
- You first: He emphasizes the idea that the company needs to trust the customer first, then the customer can follow suit. Examples of this success are businesses who have very generous return policies, such as Zappos or Amazon E-Books. They trust the customer not to abuse the policies, thus the customer sees the company as more trustworthy.
- Be the Baker: Guy describes people who eat pies as seeing a limited amount of food. The more someone else eats of the pie, the less there is for you, so you attempt to eat as much as possible. But, that doesn’t build trust. A trustworthy business sees the world like a baker, and sees that the ingredients for pies are boundless and there is possibility everywhere. Trust in possibility and potential and you will be trusted.
- Yes Man: This idea really threw me off. He recommends always being ready to say “yes” to a request. This completely deviates from recommendations given in the books (that I recently reviewed) Rework and The 4 Hour Work Week. In my mind, I imagine this raising customer expectations too high and leading to lots of stress on your part, and disappointment on theirs (see post on expectation management). However, he says that it’s very rare for a customer to be unreasonable.
Watch his Stanford lecture here!
Photo: PetitPlat - Stephanie Kilgast