Should you take the risk of mentioning price early on in a sales call? Should you be candid about your less-than-perfect qualifications for a job? When you notice the client looking a little distracted, should you take the risk of commenting on it? In such situations I often hear, “That’s too risky, you can’t do that […]
In my last post, I asked the question: If financial services are such a low-trust industry (on average), then why isn’t someone pursuing the obvious differentiation strategy of forming a high-trust organization? The Reasons Why I offered five possible reasons, and commenters added two more. They were: Wait – some companies really are high-trust. The nature of the […]
Differentiation. It’s one of the two generic competitive strategies. You’d think it’s a no-brainer. If everyone sells coffee in supermarkets based on price, invent Starbucks. If water is free from the faucet, invent Perrier. If fund performances are undifferentiated, invent index funds. So, if your industry ranks near the bottom in trustworthiness – why not invent […]
(This post is written jointly with Ago Cluytens, and will appear jointly on both our sites.) Ago: Recently, Charles H Green (I get to call him Charlie) and I had a heart-to-heart about three seismic shifts that are completely changing the way buyers and sellers relate. Even though we live on different continents and have […]
King Kong vs. Godzilla. The immeasurable force and the immoveable object. The mountain and Muhammed. To these historic pairings, add Manti Te’o and Lance Armstrong, in the roles of trustor and trustee respectively. (For those outside the US, Te’o is a college football player whose girlfriend tragically died – and was then revealed to be a hoax, who never […]
Oh it’s brutal, all right. But it’s not honest. Real honesty is empathetic. Here’s how. I suppose you could be honest in a vacuum – but who cares? Was Robinson Crusoe honest? Until Friday came along, that was just a silly question. You can’t be usefully honest, except in relation to or with someone. Honesty Implies […]
Dilbert on trust and lying: Scott Adams nails it. With a sledgehammer, as usual. The pointy-haired boss is ethically clueless, and blatantly so. We all get the joke, much the way we get the old George Burns line, “the most important thing in life is sincerity – if you can fake that, you’ve got it […]
Quickly now – which are the least-trusted professions and occupations? If you think about it a moment, you’ll probably make pretty good guesses. Now for a tougher one: which profession is the most trusted? This one, I find, less than half of respondents get right. Your Profession Conveys an Image of You The annual Gallup […]
I wrote a good blog post at this time six years ago, and haven’t improved on it yet. Here it is again. Happy New Year. —————– My unscientific sampling says many people make New Years resolutions, but few follow through. Net result—unhappiness. It doesn’t have to be that way. You could, of course, just try […]
This week, as we get ready to say goodbye to 2012, we’re going to be posting some of what we call “Golden Oldies,” great posts from our Trust Matters vault. We hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday and wonderful New Year. ————————————- In trust-based selling, the default mode of presentation is transparency. In […]