How to Build Trust With Your Sales & Marketing

Today’s business’ decision makers are savvy. They can sniff out inauthenticity a mile away. This means marketers have to put in the work to build rapport with a prospect and earn the right to be heard. So many brands jump into conversations and ask for something immediately. While you might get lucky now and then, more times than not, you will actually have to build trust and provide value before a true connection is even a consideration. Great marketing can help you do this!

Give To Get

Whether you call it a lead magnet, opt-in, freebie, or some other fun phrase, when you offer something of value to your prospective audience, you are starting to build an authentic connection and starting to establish trust. .

These “gives” need to have a perceived value with your prospects. How do you know if there will be a perceived value? You need to know what your ideal prospect cares about. What are their business challenges?  Where are their pain points? What issues give them agida?

The “give” doesn’t need to solve their problem or remove their pain, but it does need to give them information that is new, reinforce something they might already know, or provide a different perspective.

“Gives” can take many forms.  They can be an invite to an interesting webinar, a relevant client case study, an industry trend report, or access to a white paper on a relevant topic. The “give” has a triple benefit:

1. Provides something of value or perceived value to your prospect
2. Provides you to plant a seed as a company that “gives before asking”
3. Positions your brand in front of the prospect in a non-spammy way

Continue To Build Trust

Your website and your marketing funnel have the ability to influence prospects  for your business 24/7. By influencing prospects in the right way you are instilling confidence that your brand is the expert in your field and can provide a potential solution to your prospect’s problem they are trying to solve. Every interaction your prospect has with your brand can either positively influence and build trust or can turn a prospect off. Make the most of every interaction to move prospects along their decision making journey in a positive way.

Build On Touch-Points

Leverage what you now know about your prospect. What content did they consume? Where did they find the content? How did they consume the content?  What information did they provide you when they consumed that content?  Email? Phone number? Job Title? Company name? All of these are micro-data points about your prospect and when leveraged properly can help you develop a strategy for your second, third, and fourth interaction with that prospect. Use the information to curate how you want to engage with the prospect and at every engagement try to learn something new from your prospect to leverage to make the next interaction even more powerful.

Make Your Website Work For You

Roughly 80% of buyers will do research on your company prior to filling out a form or accepting a request for a conversation. At the very least, 100% of business decision makers will look at your website prior to spending time speaking to a SDR or sales person. Does your website support the prospects decision making journey or does it confuse them and make it harder for them to engage with your brand?

1. Do prospects believe you are speaking to them when they land on your site?
2. Does your top line messaging immediately resonate with them?
3. Is it clear what your company does and how it can help a prospect?
4. Was your website designed through the lens of the prospect or was it from “your” perspective?
5. Do you make it easy for visitors to navigate your site? Consume content?  Connect with you?

If the answer is no to any of these questions, you are not earning the right to be heard or building trust.

Arm Sales With Information

Imagine this scenario: your marketing team has done an amazing job engaging with an ideal prospect. Marketing provided valuable content and created value at every touchpoint. Marketing has created multiple engagement points for the prospect, bringing them to a well designed website that supports the prospect in their decision making journey, getting them to a point where they are ready to have a conversation with sales. The prospect fills out a high-intent contact form indicating they want to speak to sales. That form has their name, company, email, phone number. Marketing passes that contact form to sales, and sales immediately calls the prospect.

What can go wrong?

Does the sales person know where the prospect came from? How long have they been engaging with our brand? What content have they consumed? What web pages have they visited? If the sales person doesn’t prepare themselves for the conversation with the prospect by learning about the prospect’s journey, they are throwing away months of effort and, more importantly, all of the good will and trust that has been established with the prospect.

The hand-off between marketing and sales should be a continuance of the relationship with the prospect not a cold start. By leveraging the information we already have about a prospect we can make the conversation with the prospect that much more engaging, creating more value, and continuing to build on the “right to be heard” we have already established.

Building trust and earning the right to be heard is the most important part of me supporting sales. By the time someone has a conversation with your sales team, they should have a level of trust with your brand. And by aligning marketing and sales and providing sales with the information to continue the conversation based on the engagement that has already taken place with the prospect we can be more effective in providing a solution to prospects. Your growth is dependent on building trust with your prospects. The more you focus on earning the right to be heard and trusted, the more you’ll see prospects taking notice!