Trust Matters Primer vol. 4

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Greetings, and welcome to this month’s ebook. It’s the dog days of August, and I thought a good time to revisit three ideas from earlier this year, loosely themed around new ways of thinking. In this edition of the Trust Primer volume 4 we feature:

I welcome your comments, and wish you some long lazy days over the next few weeks of summer.

Enjoy.

Buying Lessons from a Master Salesman

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I am on vacation this week, and will be going back to the vault for some ‘oldies but goodies’ posts. I hope you enjoy them: I’ll be back in a week or so with new material.

I spent some time in South Florida this weekend with Sam, a retired former rep for a national clothing manufacturer—that is, he wholesaled clothing lines to retail stores and chains. His territory was New York. Here’s what he taught me about buying.

How Buyers Say They Buy–from Expertise

A few years ago, he got a terrible pain in his left knee. Three doctors in a row said he needed either a knee replacement or arthroscopic surgery. A fourth doctor said he suspected it was actually a hip problem which caused a pinched nerve, which resulted in knee pain.

“I’m not a hip guy,” said doc four, “but my new young colleague is. I’d like you to have a chat with him. “Fine,” said Sam, “anything to get rid of this debilitating pain so I can get back to tennis and golf.”

“The doctor was young,” Sam said. “That was no problem. But he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He told me it was a hip problem all right, and all those other fancy doctors had it wrong. None of them had even taken an x-ray of my hip, but he did.”

“Problem was, I couldn’t get over him not looking me in the eye. If a buyer or a seller won’t look the other in the eye, I just don’t trust him. Kiss of death and all that. So I says to him, ‘hey, I’m over here—who you talking to?’ He just said he was a distracted kind of guy, nothing to worry about.”

“But that’s exactly what I worry about. So I went back to his boss, Doc 4, and I said no offense at all, I just think I’ll look for someone with a little more experience.”

I asked, “Sam, you told me you didn’t trust the guy; why didn’t you tell his boss?”

“Well,” Sam said, “I don’t want to be ruining some kid’s medical career, so I just made a plausible excuse.”

And there you have it. Sam—a highly experienced and successful salesman, basically says people buy on trust, including him. And yet, when asked by the seller (Doctor #4) why he didn’t buy, he lied—he said it was lack of experience. He didn’t tell the truth–which is that he didn’t trust the young doctor.

How Buyers Really Buy–From Trust

So it always is. Sellers think buyers buy on expertise; they don’t. They buy on trust. And when they ask buyers why they didn’t buy, the buyers claim it was on expertise. And since that’s the answer sellers want to hear, they believe it.

The truth is otherwise. As Jeffrey Gitomer puts it, people buy with the heart, and rationalize it with their brain. We overrate the importance of processes–and underrate the importance of connection.

The irony is that young doc was right. Sam underwent arthroscopic knee surgery with a high-reputation doctor in South Florida, and the result was nothing but more pain.

A year later, Sam visited a hip specialist in NY who diagnosed hip troubles just by watching Sam walk. He got a hip replacement two months later, and shot a 47 on the front nine a few weeks ago–pain free.

The young doc was right. Unfortunately–So What. He treated the patient like a case study, not a human being.

Sam would be the first to tell you: being right is vastly overrated. Earning the right to have people believe you’re right—that’s where the trust comes in.

That’s trust. That’s how people buy. That’s good selling.

Four Principles of Organizational Trust: How to Make Your Company Trustworthy

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I am on vacation this week, and will be going back to the vault for some ‘oldies but goodies’ posts. I hope you enjoy them: I’ll be back in a week or so with new material.

Trust, in case you hadn’t noticed, has gotten “hot” lately. But much of it sounds very vague—soft, fluffy, nice-to-have, the buzzword du jour.

I’d like to do my part to make it real.

To me, that means breaking it down and making it sound; tapping into the strategy and mysticism, but also staying grounded in the tactical and the practical.

So let’s review some context; then talk about four specific operating principles a business can hone in on to improve its trustworthiness.

Putting Trust into a Workable Context

I’ve suggested elsewhere that “trust” is too vague a term to work with. To do something practical, we need first to identify the trust realm: are we talking about personal trust, or business/organizational trust, or social/institutional trust?

The next question is about the trust role: are we working on being more trusting? Or more trustworthy? They are not the same thing. And “trust” is the result of them both interacting.

Building a Trustworthy Business

In the realm “personal” and the role “trustworthy,” we can point to personal beliefs and behaviors as indicated in the Trust Quotient. But in business, trustworthiness is built through a set of daily operating principles. Trustworthiness is built from habitually behaving in accordance with a set of commonly shared beliefs about how to do business.

I suggest they can be boiled down to four.

The Four Trust Principles

1. A focus on the Other (client, customer, internal co-worker, boss, partner, subordinate) for the Other’s sake, not just as a means to one’s own ends. We often hear “client-focus,” or “customer-centric.” But these are terms all-too-often framed in terms of economic benefit to the person trying to be trusted.

2. A collaborative approach to relationships. Collaboration here means a willingness to work together, creating both joint goals and joint approaches to getting there.

3. A medium to long term relationship perspective, not a short-term transactional focus. Focus on relationships nurtures transactions; but focus on transactions chokes off relationships. The most profitable relationships for both parties are those where multiple transactions over time are assumed in the approach to each transaction.

4. A habit of being transparent in all one’s dealings. Transparency has the great virtue of helping recall who said what to whom. It also increases credibility, and lowers self-orientation, by its willingness to keep no secrets.

Executing on the Trust Principles

What are the tools an organization has at its disposal to make itself more trustworthy? Any good change management consultant can rattle off the usual suspects, but for trustworthiness, the emphasis has to shift somewhat.

The usual change mantra includes a heavy dose of behaviors, metrics and incentives. Some of that works here, but only to a point.

For example, Principle 1, focus on the Other, is contradicted by too much extrinsic incentive aimed at leveraging self-interest–it undercuts focus on the Other. And Principle 3, relationship over transaction, forces metrics and rewards to a far longer timeframe than most change efforts employ.

Another great shibboleth of change is that it must be led from the CEO’s office. But with trust, it ain’t necessarily so. Trustworthiness is a great candidate for infectious disease change strategies; guerrilla trust strategies can work at the individual level, and individual players can lead. Behavior in accord with these principles cannot be coerced; the flipside is, it can be unilaterally engaged in.

The most powerful tools to create a trustworthy organization are things like language, recognition, story-telling, simply paying attention to the arenas where the principles apply—and the will to apply them. Role-modeling helps; some skill-building helps. But most of all, it is the willingness to notice the pervasive opportunities to work in accordance with this simple set of four principles.

Trustworthiness breeds trusting (the reverse is true too); the combination is what leads to trust. Which, by the way, is quite measurable in its impact on the bottom line.

Outsourcing Loyalty, and other Oxymorons

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I am on vacation this week, and will be going back to the vault for some ‘oldies but goodies’ posts. I hope you enjoy them: I’ll be back in a week or so with new material.

Outsourcing loyalty. Think about the absurdity in that phrase.

Oh, we know what it means, all right. There are businesses whose specialty is executing frequent-customer programs. They handle strategy, research, program design, even fulfillment. It’s no different from any other outsourced business process.

But still. Think about the contortion of language implicit in combining those two words. Loyalty—that emotional quality that binds one person to another, to a clan, a country, or a set of ideals—can be mechanically crafted by a third party for hire. And we still call it loyalty.

Googling “outsource loyalty” turns up a few entries, like Ernex, which offers "a complete real-time points management solution for loyalty program or member-based loyalty databases." Cap Gemini, a major global IT firm, has a website that advertises its “loyalty factory.”

Hey, why not? You can outsource confidants (they’re called shrinks). You can outsource sex (the oldest profession). You can outsource phone calls (“your call means a lot to us…please hang on the line”). Why not loyalty?

But in our rush to turn business functions into business processes, then modularize and outsource them, we occasionally overdo it. A major casualty is the faux language of relationships. “Loyalty” programs are but one example.

Another oxymoron is “human capital.” Note which word became the adjective, and which stayed the noun.

“Relationship capital,” its close cousin, goes it one better. It isn’t just people that are financially fungible. Ditto for the relationships between people. Long live love. If it pays, that is.

“Customer focus,” as a practical matter, is often oxymoronic. It amounts to “inspect, dissect and reject” so that you maximize customer profitability per unit of financial investment. Customer profitabilty to the seller, that is; not the customer’s own profitability. Vultures are focused in that sort of way. If you’re a customer, "customer focus" can feel like you’re in the crosshairs of somebody else’s scope.

How about you? Can you add to the list? Got any oxymorons about the human dimension in business? Share them here; enquiring minds want to know!

A Tendency to Blame and an Inability to Confront

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I am on vacation this week, and will be going back to the vault for some ‘oldies but goodies’ posts. I hope you enjoy them: I’ll be back in a week or so with new material.

Over a delightful lunch last week, a client said to me, “I don’t remember where I got this, but I have a saying I keep nearby in my office:

"All management problems boil down to two things: a tendency to blame, and an inability to confront."

“I know where you got it from,” I said; “you got it from me, and I got it from Phil McGee.” Credit where credit’s due, Phil.

And here’s why credit is due.

A tendency to blame. To “blame” someone means to falsely suggest that they are responsible for some negative thing. The problem starts with ‘falsely,’ and gets worse.

To lie about someone makes you a liar. It means we cannot believe what you say. It means your motives are suspect, and therefore all actions that follow from them.

And lying about someone’s responsibility isn’t just lying–it’s lying about someone. It is an indirect form of character assassination. “Blamethrowing” is an apt pun, for blaming is ferociously destructive.

Finally, it’s evasive. “It-was-him” means “it-was-not-me.” Blaming means manipulating the listener—for the blamer’s own hidden purposes.

Inability to confront. Blame goes hand in hand with an inability to confront others directly with the truth. “The truth” is very simple—it’s what happened, what someone felt, what is. It’s reality.

I mean “confront” here not in a negative sense, but in a sense of being able to speak, to another human being, that which is true. Inability to confront means inability to have an honest conversation with another about the truth.

Evasion. Insinuation. Insincerity. Implication. Avoidance. Dodging, fudging, skirting, deception, fabrication, distortion. These are accusations we level against those who cannot confront.

Yet the accused doesn’t hear them—because their inability to confront extends to themselves. “I didn’t mean to hurt,” they say—often sincerely. But partially "good" motives do not excuse wrongful actions—or inactions.

Is Phil overstating the case when he says “all management problems can be reduced” to these two? Let’s see. What about:

• Giving and receiving feedback
• Interviewing
• Delegation
• Teamwork
• Engagement
• Leadership
• Morale
• Collaboration
• Crisis management
• Persuasion
• Trustworthiness
• Problem definition
• Project management
• Relationship management

Blame and inability to confront affect each item on that list, and that list covers a multitude of management issues.

What is the opposite of a tendency to blame and an inability to confront?

Someone who speaks the truth. Who speaks it in a way that can be heard by all. Someone who accepts his own responsibility—no more, no less. Someone who simply sees things as they are. And who is willing to assign responsibility exactly where it belongs, equally whether it’s his or someone else’s.

When we can see things as they are, and confront them as such, “blame” disappears. There is simply truth, and our various roles in dealing with it. Once seen, it is easily spoken.

The trick is to see things as they are.

Institutionalizing Trustworthy Social Behavior

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I am an occasional correspondent with Jim Peterson.

Jim’s resume is built for perspective. He is American, but has worked in Europe for many years; he is a lawyer, but also was 20 years in-house with the CPA’s at a Big 4 Accounting firm.

Finally, for many years he wrote a column for the International Herald Tribune. These days he writes a blog, Re:Balance. One of his enjoyable posts suggested all you needed to know about Bernie Madoff was that Donald Trump suggested he (Madoff) habitually cheated at golf.

Jim has well thought out and well backed-up opinions about many of the issues of our times: Madoff, accounting scandals, international relations.

I asked him the other day if he’d be willing to pontificate at a very high level How To Fix The World. Well, anyway, the world of perfidy, scandal and untrustworthiness in business. Here’s his response:

Of course, that’s difficult — especially when talking more broadly about basic principles on which societies regulate themselves. Your partner Stewart’s piece on school-kids the other day resounds — and causes me to mention the book "Nudge,” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, two really smart guys from the University of Chicago. There is discussion there that compares the results of coercive, top-down law enforcement with the setting of normative behavior by broadly-achieved social consensus, and where to draw the line on the tolerance level for deviant behavior.

My own examples and contexts would include, for example, the complex issue of drinking age rules on college campuses, the neighborhood decisions on cleaning up after dogs, and (as I remember) the de facto legalization of marijuana use in Central Park back in my early New York days.

As put in "Nudge," pedestrians don’t stop at cross walks because it’s illegal to jay-walk, in other words, but because it’s the social convention that cars generally won’t run you down (but there’s always the possibility).

In the corporate world I put weight on these principles:

– Law enforcement will always be reactive, behind the social curve and typically not effective as a deterrent.

– The American reliance on good quality disclosure and investor responsibility has generally served well, and better than most other systems, but requires serious re-calibrating.

– "Tone at the top" by way of management quality is of paramount importance, trumps almost everything else in the areas of ethics trainability, and can be observed and measured from the outside if investors and other users are only willing to do the work. (And per contra, Madoff and others demonstrate that sub-standard behavior is observable and measurable.)

That’s at least what comes top of mind to me.

What comes top of mind to you?
 

Selling Without Making the Buyer Feel Sold (Part 2 of 2)

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(This post was originally published in RainToday.com).

In yesterday’s post, I suggested that most salespeople feel a tension between the felt need to sell, and the desire not to make buyers feel like they were being sold. There is a solution, I suggested, which parallels some characteristics of gifts. They create an obligation to buy, but not in the tight, transactional, market-based way we think of as selling. Instead, they create a friendly, bonding form of loose-obligation. Selling based on that approach–being willing to give freely of sample advice for a period of time to a select group of candidate firms, ends up being highly profitable. Today: Why it’s hard to do, how to do it, and thoughts on the paradox of selling this way.

Why This is So Hard to Practice

The best salespeople practice this technique already: they freely give of their expertise—a tiny bit to everyone, and a lot more to a select group of people.

They don’t expect sales from any particular person at any point—yet they definitely expect an aggregate amount of sales from an aggregate amount of leads. They just don’t know from whom or when. But as long as the return rate remains high, they are quite happy not to be more controlling with any one lead.

Unfortunately, this line of thinking is the opposite of what passes for Received Wisdom in sales these days. Tools like Salesforce.com reinforce the idea of more control, smaller time increments, and more metrics. The dominant theme in improving sales is about efficiency, not effectiveness.

Every transaction is treated not only in isolation from others but is broken down even more finely. Behaviors are sliced and diced, incentives more finely tuned. Qualifying the lead happens more frequently and at shorter time intervals. The net effect on customers is to feel more mechanically processed. They will resent the actions and will push back.

How to Do It

It takes a strong personality to not give in to the general business demand for short-term and impersonal sales techniques. But the rewards of staying the course are great. The way to think about it mainly comes down to two changes: less control in timing and in metrics.

Timing: Take a longer view of the desirability of a particular lead. It’s the ability to show a sustained, genuine interest that offers the chance of a relationship. This doesn’t mean you don’t screen and exclude buyers; it means you do it more definitively and less frequently.

Metrics: In a longer timeframe, decision metrics become far simpler, and selling can focus on relationships, not evaluating transactions. Are you being invited in? Are they returning calls? Is there a real project being discussed? If yes, keep it up. If not, stop it.

The Paradox of Selling

Yes, you still want to sell what you sell. And yes, they still don’t want you to control them.

Don’t choose one or another, and don’t sub-optimize. By lengthening your timeframe and reducing the precision and number of metrics, you open up space for natural human instincts to work. In that context, you can intelligently give the gift of sample selling, and you can reduce the need to control that gift. That way people can feel the natural inclination to reciprocate rather than the resentful guilt or rejection that short-term control induces.

Selling Without Making Buyers Feel Sold (Part 1 of 2)

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(This post was originally published in RainToday.com).

One obvious purpose of selling is to persuade buyers to buy what you are selling. Most people have no trouble agreeing to that proposition.

Yet the harder you try to get people to do what you want them to do, the more likely they are to push back, resist, and generally behave contrarily.

Again, I think most people would agree.

Put those two statements together, and we can easily see selling as an ongoing struggle to get people to do what we want without making them feel that we are trying to get them to do what we want. Selling has at its heart a struggle to reconcile these two truths. You want to sell. They don’t want to be sold.

When two truths collide, one tends to lose, or they both tend to get watered down. But the way out is not to give up one goal (to sell) or the other (to not cause the feeling of being sold); it is to fully recognize both and transcend the apparent paradox.

It can be done. Here’s how.

The Tension Between Sellers and Customers

This paradox is hardly new. Sellers have palpably felt since time immemorial the tension to selling. Most sellers resolve the tension by one of three strategies:

  1. Defaulting to Truth One: hard selling 24-7 to anyone who comes within feeding range
  2. Defaulting to Truth Two: being nice and giving away money, relying on the hope that guilt will induce a sale
  3. Living With It: internalizing some form of denial, schizophrenia, or multiple personalities.

But there is another way.

The Other Way to Sell: Time, Gifts, and Trust

People resist being sold. But people love receiving gifts. In fact, receiving a gift induces a sense of obligation on the part of the recipient. Which suggests a strategy of "feels like" gift-giving might be the best form of selling.

For services businesses, there is an analogue to gifts—it’s what’s called sample selling in product businesses. Sample selling in the services might mean brainstorming, a small project, a "lunch and learn," a webinar, a series of articles, a series of conversations for which you don’t bill time, or sharing of some previous work.

Sample selling works even better in intangible services than in businesses that have "hard" products. The best way for a client to learn how to work with you is to let the client work with you. Create a sample experience.

But that’s only half the problem. The other half: if you set out to give a gift with the express intent of inducing guilt-based buying, you’ll get the reverse—outraged backlash at what is perceived as bait and switch, duplicity, two-facedness.

A gift has two features: it is open-ended, and it implies an ongoing relationship. (Think of Don Corleone in the movie The Godfather: "Perhaps, sometime in the future, and that time may never come, I will call upon you for a favor.") It is non-specific. It is not legally or logically binding, but it carries huge emotional obligation.

When we try to use the language of the market: "If you give me this, I will give you that" or "If you do this for me, I will do that for you," things change. That is the language of a contract, of money, of transactions.
The trick is for the seller to give up attachment to the specific short-term outcome of a particular gift to a particular buyer in a particular timeframe. The seller needs to give a sample as a gift, a generally social-obligating offer, not as a hard-obligating transaction.

Applied to selling, this means a strategy of loosely controlled sample selling is far more powerful than a tightly controlled strategy of transactions.

In simple terms, if you’re generous as a policy to a sensible group of people in the short term, many of them will buy in the long term.

Part 2, tomorrow: Why this kind of selling is so hard; how to do it; the paradox of great selling.

Does Your School Trust Its Students? Do You?

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Companies work hard articulating their values. For example, take a look at a short excerpt from Johnson & Johnson’s Credo.

  • Everyone must be considered as an individual.
  • We must respect their dignity and recognize their merit.

Thinking about and articulating values aren’t limited to big companies. A couple of years ago, one of my kids attended a school where the 8th grade students collaborated to create rules for their own behavior – values in action. The class worked hard together, and then voted on the rules the students would follow.

The rules the students created bear a passing resemblance to those quoted from J&J’s Credo – a document developed in an exercise that I would imagine took J&J many committee meetings and people hours to formulate. Here are the rules from the students as I recall them from parents’ night: ·

  • Be inclusive, share and work together
  • Talk things out
  • Don’t pull other people into your fights
  • Don’t get stressed out if an assignment is too hard
  • Always encourage fellow classmates
  • Include everyone all the time
  • Respect everything and everyone: classmates, teachers, and their belongings
  • Work hard to do your best.

I have to hand it to the school administrators. They believed in their students. They trusted that their students would create great rules for themselves. They also trusted that their students would both follow those rules, and impress upon each other the value of obeying or living by the rules.

And it worked! Designing rules collaboratively enabled both buy-in and self-enforcement. When these kids finished eighth grade they had a great start collaborating on, creating, and living values. I look forward to seeing how they bring their collaborative skills and values into the working world in a few years.

The Thin Line Between Trusting and Self-Delusion

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Chris Brogan is, if not a new media god, then assuredly a prince-in-waiting. Unpretentious and wildly prolific, there may be higher quality bloggers out there—but they put out one-tenth of what he does, and his quality:volume ratio is good enough that I nearly always read him.

So what if a popular blogger like Chris puts out a spoof—an April Fool’s day blog—and no one picks up on it?

That’s what happened, twice in a row. First, he posted “Get More Twitter Followers—Today!” an infomercial-type get rich quick genre spoof. In case anyone didn’t get it, he followed up with 10-no-4 Days to Become a Social Media Expert!

And—you guessed it—apparently these two posts were huge hits. Chris is partly bemused and partly seriously wondering why. (Now, Chris is no dummy—of course he knows why. He’d just like to see fellow-bloggers like me spell it out in various ways. OK Chris, here’s my take).

Are People Deceived? Or Are They Delusional?

On the face of it, there are two theories why people would over-react to these blog titles.

Theory 1. People trust Chris Brogan and, holy cow, if he says so, it must be true!
Theory 2. People trust anyone who’ll promise them get-rich-quick schemes—they are sadly self-deluding.

The truth is, as usual, all the above, and a few more. You can chalk it up to naievete, or the triumph of hope over experience, or the enduring ego-centric belief that god is uniquely talking to us and us alone in providing these windows to opportunity—I’m not sure the reason matters.

The point is: it’s a thin line from trust to self-delusion.

Is the Decline of Trust Vastly Over-reported?

Hearing of an obituary having been published about him, Mark Twain famously wrote that “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” I wonder if the same may not be true of trust?

We’re all familiar with the headlines of declines in trust among professions, government, business and other institutions. I don’t disbelieve them; but at the same time:

  • Are you using your credit card more online these days to purchase goods? Someone is. Has their level of trust in online commerce gone up?
  • Are states gaining more revenue from lotteries than they were four years ago? (I can’t find data more recent than 2007—someone else?). If so, does that mean we trust state government more these days?
  • If Chris Brogan’s blog stats go up when he promises instant karma, does that mean we’re now in a post-Madoff economy and more easily trust online promises of fame and fortune?

I guess what I’m getting at in juxtaposing these data is that first, measuring trust is a bit like weighing fog. You know there’s something there, but by the time you get your hands around it, much of it has burned off in the sunlight or condensed on the measurement instrument. Measuring longitudinal trust on the same question with the same audience seems to work; beyond that, I find it hard to draw many conclusions from comparative studies except at the grossest levels.

Secondly, the human capacity to BS ourselves is quite remarkable. We’re all quick to decry others’ obsession with get rich quick schemes. But there are an awful lot of “others” out there, and some of them look a lot like us.

And it’s hard to tell the difference between sensible trusting and insensible self-delusion.

Me, I clicked on Chris’s first link. There, I said it. And I’m still not clear why I did it. Do I trust Chris Brogan? Or am I a self-deluding fool?

Don’t forget about answer "d. all the above."