The Foundations of Trust

People buy enterprise software / services based on trust. These days, buyers are skeptical of vendor claims. So how does a vendor cultivate trust?

01:39

Jul 02, 2015
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Too many companies have missed the value propositions or expected business outcomes for which they purchased their enterprise software / services. So buyers today, start relationships with potential new vendors with skepticism. Marketing or selling to an existing account doesn't guarantee an easy sale either.

Enterprise product / service providers must learn how to develop and maintain trust with prospects throughout not only the sales lifecycle, but the customer lifecycle. Listen to Hank Barnes on how to cultivate trust with companies.

Transcript

Think about ethics as being almost like if you pick a sports analogy, they are the rules of the game.        

But we talk about rules of the game, that doesn’t define how we play. And that’s really the activities where we have trust as a foundation, so ethics are going to set that path.

One of the things is that we have to as technology vendor’s, we have to balance our need and desires to catch people’s attention, because we still have to do that. Right, we are trying to sell things to them, but hopefully we’re selling things to them that they are going to get value from.

But, what we really have to do is stop a lot of the (verbally), stop a lot of the empty claims, back things up with customer stories and live demonstrations. It’s really interesting when we asked buyers what type of content they value the most from providers, the top two were what I just mentioned, live demonstration and customer case study. The third was really technical content.

And the reason why we think is because that stuff you can’t really fake. You can’t create a fake customer case study, and if you do you are probably going to get into a lot of trouble.

I’ve seen a lot of people who have had pre-recorded demonstrations, I’d actually called those a video, but a live demonstration, the customer can actually ask you do something different now. And if you are not willing to adapt to them, you’re in a a lot of trouble.

Published Date: Jul 02, 2015

Author: Michael Krigsman

Episode ID: 169