Three Steps To Gaining Your Prospect’s Trust

Gaining your prospect’s trust is the ultimate objective of playing the small business marketing game. A sale has little chance of happening without trust being created during the marketing process. Once firmly established, trust provides the ability to score a sale and to accomplish it more often with less resistance. This is where real small business success can be found.

Creating trust is not as difficult as you might think, but it does require the right marketing attitude, a bit of research and a sound strategy. In this article, we will explore practical strategies to help you create a foundation of trust on which you can execute all your marketing plays.

When you analyze it, the marketplace is so saturated with “copycat” marketing. This occurs when similar, competitive businesses in an industry copy each other’s marketing approach. This situation is usually caused by the belief that ‘if our competitors are doing it that way, it must work.” This can be a costly assumption!

You’ve seen it many times before in fast food commercials, car dealership ads, lawn maintenance companies, and many other industries. Nearly every ad and sales proposition you see attempts to communicate the same message so it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between companies.

The result is there is no differentiation or competitive advantage gained. Worse yet, prospects have no way to tell who is competent, who offers the best solution, or who to trust. When everyone looks the same it’s impossible for the buyer to tell who the best choice is.

Because of all the copycats, the need for positioning your business as the most trustworthy, lowest risk solution is more needed more than ever. The opportunity is ripe for you to become the “go-to guy” in your industry.

A copycat environment provides you with an enormous opportunity to dominate your market and make significantly more sales. It’s much easier for your message to stand out from the crowd in these conditions. The differences in your marketing and the competition don’t have to be huge. However, they must be distinct and memorable.

The most effective difference you can leverage to claim your market position as the go-to guy is one powerful attitude: caring more about your prospects. When you show how much you care, your message will stand apart from your competitors. By creating an emotional connection you can communicate that you understand their needs and challenges and are not just trying to sell something.

This attitude lays the foundation for trust because you are perceived as a welcome friend rather than an annoying pest. As a trusted friend, they look to you first for advice and the solutions to their problems. Just imagine how much business you could be doing if people automatically came to you first to purchase what they need.

So how do you create the conditions to gain their trust?

To begin, it’s critical that you show empathy with their situation. You must articulate that you understand their problems better than anyone else. Explain to them that you, or one of your customers, has faced the same situation and tell a story of what solution you provided and back it up with results.

Do you know your prospect’s pain, problems, challenges, needs and fears? Do you know what keeps them up at night with worry? What really irritates them to the point of needing to take action? Everybody has these irritants – real or imagined.

Your target market niche shares common irritants that provoke them to search for a solution. You need to identify these irritants and create a list of the most important ones that you can solve. To uncover these irritants you must do some research. Here are three steps to get you started:

1. Do a keyword search in several search engines and analyze the content theme of sites it returns. Look at the top ten sites then dig a little deeper down the list for problems and irritants that various sites are addressing. You are searching for patterns and trends within your subject so a broad cross section is necessary.

2. Find the most popular blogs about the subject and read the comments people post on them. This will reveal some of the key issues they face and usually include what really irritates and challenges them. You can do the same in forums and chat rooms where they congregate. Both of these provide a raw, unfiltered look at the issues and reveal many hot button triggers you can use in our marketing.

3. Read the magazines and books that are specifically written about the subject. These give you a sense of what kind of information they are now receiving about their issue and show you where the best positioning opportunities can be found.

After you have researched the issues and created an irritant list, you need to develop a personal story that communicates that you empathize and understand their irritants. This story must be true and show that you have stood in their shoes and were able to overcome the problem. Remember, in their mind they are looking for solutions not products or services to buy.

A word of warning; be careful not to give off the appearance of “selling” at this stage of the marketing game. Prospects are very wise to sales techniques that set them up for the close. There is no quicker way to ruin your credibility and destroy the empathy you have created than pitching them a sale before trust has been firmly established.

For more ideas on how to establish trust within your marketing efforts, visit TD-Marketing-System.com and get your copy of the “Six Fundamentals For Winning The Marketing Game” from marketing coach Ron Abbott. Don’t just compete in your market…dominate it!