Trust is The Whole Game

You can have the best product in the world. You can have the sharpest salesperson money can buy. You can get every single thing about your business right. And none of it matters if the person sitting across from you doesn’t trust you.

I was walking my dog Gus along the seafront this morning, listening to an old recording of Zig Ziglar, and he said something that stopped me in my tracks. Trust isn’t one ingredient in a sale. It’s the whole thing. Without it, everything else you’ve built is wasted breath.

Here’s why that landed so hard. I’ve got a pretty good bullshit barometer. I’d guess you have too. The second I don’t trust someone I’m buying from, I walk. Doesn’t matter how good the pitch was.

And that’s the bit most of us forget. We’re all in the communication business. Doesn’t matter if you’re a dentist, a plumber, a builder, or running a fifty person company. Every single person who represents you is either building trust for you, or quietly spending it.

Because trust doesn’t stay in one place. However you treat the people who work for you, that’s exactly how they’ll treat your clients. Be straight with your team, and they’ll be straight with your customers. Cut corners with them, and they’ll learn to cut corners too, whether you meant to teach them that or not.

Steve Jobs understood this better than almost anyone. Nobody bought an iPhone because it was the cheapest phone on the shelf. They bought it because Apple made them feel like they belonged to something, and that they’d always be looked after.

That’s the whole game. Not the pitch. Not the product. The feeling that someone’s genuinely got your back.

If there’s anything I can ever do to help you or your business, you know where I am.