Trust Runs Both Ways

Someone posted recently on LinkedIn about trust-led growth, as opposed to product-led, sales-led, or marketing-led growth.

It isn't a new motion. All sales are based on trust. But the post sent me back to something I built a long time ago and never published anywhere. I put it in a deck and taught it in a workshop. I never wrote it up.

2012

I had just left a company I helped found and was trying to figure out my "what's next." At that company I wore a lot of hats. One of the bigger ones was sales and lead generation. We sold to small businesses, so I did a lot of networking: networking groups, the Chamber of Commerce, and the usual collection of rooms where everyone is simultaneously trying to meet someone useful.

As is usually the case with me, I started wanting to understand how it worked while I was in the middle of doing it. So I built a framework for myself and called it the Trust Scale.

It was a line with a 1 at one end and a 10 at the other. The idea behind it was that every business has a different trust level required to earn a referral. A bookkeeper and a divorce attorney are not asking the room for the same thing, even when they're standing in the same room asking for the same favor: a referral. Then it went into a folder and I didn't think about it again until that post showed up.

What I'd draw now

Instead of 1 to 10, I'd put two words at the ends. Transactional and relational.

The transactional end is a can of soda, or a box of tissues. The trust required is close to nothing, and what little you need can be manufactured with a good demo, a solid reference, or clear ROI. It's mostly a question of evidence.

The relational end is a contractor who's going to be in your house for three months, a financial advisor, or a platform you'll be living inside for the next five years. That trust gets built over time through consistency and care, and no demo substitutes for it.

Most business happens somewhere between those two points.

That's what trust actually is: the confidence to act in the presence of risk. When companies talk about moving a deal through a pipeline, what they're really moving is a person, or a group of people, along that continuum. Closing is mostly a matter of reducing uncertainty.

In Why Some People Get Picked Early, I wrote that signals make you predictable, predictability lowers risk, and low-risk people get pulled in early. That's the transactional end doing its job — supplying enough evidence that someone can act without needing to know you.

And in Your Swim Lane Is a Signal, Not a Constraint, I described how buyers conflate industry experience with capability, when what they're really saying is "Make me feel safe." That's someone grabbing a transactional proxy for a decision sitting at the relational end. The résumé is being asked to do more work than it's capable of.

Nobody in that room was assigned a role

There was a second line on the slide. I'd labeled it the Reciprocal Law of Trust:

You have to trust the person you're networking with as much as they need to trust you.

I don't think I would have arrived at that through selling. I got there through networking, and the room is why.

Walk into a Chamber breakfast and nobody has been assigned a side. There's no buyer and no seller. Everyone is both, simultaneously, the entire time you're in the room. You're evaluating the person across the table at the same moment they're evaluating you, and neither of you has a title or a purchase order to hide behind. 

I had a slide asking what you're actually selling in a room like that. 

The answer was: you.

A referral costs the person giving it something real. If I send you to a client of mine and you're sloppy, that's my relationship, not yours. I've spent my own credibility on you. Which is why the trust has to run in both directions to make it work — the referrer is taking on risk they can't recover if they're wrong about you.

Then move the same dynamic into a sales conversation and it goes invisible, because now the roles look fixed. One party buys, one party sells, and everything written for the seller points in a single direction: earn their trust and reduce their uncertainty. Close the deal.

But the seller has decisions to make too.

Does the buyer actually know what they want or are they still shopping the category? Will the champion survive the next reorg? Is the revenue worth what the relationship will take? Is this account going to be a problem to service? Anyone who has taken a bad customer knows the answer.

And the seller is spending credibility the same way the referrer was. There are only so many customers you can put on a call with a prospect, and every one you burn on a bad fit is one you don't have for the deal that matters. You spend it inward too. Every customer you take gets vouched for internally, to the team who has to support them.

Take the wrong customer and you've spent something on a stranger. It's the same currency the referrer was spending at that breakfast — a client relationship there, a reference here — and in both cases it's gone once you've used it.

Saying "I'm evaluating you too" out loud feels like something a vendor isn't allowed to do. So it happens in qualification calls and internal threads instead, filed under "fit" — a word procedural enough that nobody has to admit it's a judgment about people. Who decided only one side of the table gets to say it?

Getting the read wrong

There are two ways to miscalibrate, and I've done both.

You can over-invest relationally on something that only needs evidence. Six weeks of discovery for a decision the buyer was ready to make on the first call. It comes across as friction, and you lose to whoever answered faster.

Or you under-invest on something high-consequence. The demo lands, the numbers work, everything looks fine, and then it dies at the last step, and it may not be clear to you or to the buyer - why. One thing that may have happened is that they never reached the confidence required to act.  There's no vocabulary for that in a procurement process. So it comes back as timing, or budget, or a decision to revisit next quarter. No amount of ROI was going to carry them there.

In The Room Has Moved I wrote about how trust travels through people in conversations you'll never see. The scale sits upstream of that. Before you worry about how your trust travels, there's a simpler question: What kind of trust does this deal require in the first place?

Berkson's Bits

One time I dictated a premise for a blog post but every time I said "agility" it translated as "chili." It's pretty funny. 

"Do you have that organization with chili?"

What I'm Listening To...

In this great cover of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain by The Highwomen, I love that the only percussion is the bass player tapping his foot. 

What I still don't have a clean answer for is how you read the scale before the deal rather than after it. Ticket size is the obvious proxy and it's a rough one. Consequence isn't the same as price. Plenty of cheap decisions carry career risk, and plenty of expensive ones are reversible.

And I don't know what it would look like to be honest about the reciprocal side in a room where the roles have already been handed out. How do you tell a prospect you're deciding, too, without it landing as arrogance?

Fourteen years later, I still haven't figured out the second half. 

Maybe that's the more interesting part.

How do you know how much trust a decision actually requires — and how do you make it clear that trust runs both ways?

Let me know if you have.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation...

Alan