Question #2: How do I know I can trust you?
The next two questions belong to the same group. How do I know I can trust you, and how do I know this is real?
In every B2B presentation, there’s some variation of this slide, already, right? These are the slides where we show the map and all our locations. Or we show customer locations and their logos. These are the slides where we show how long we’ve been in business. Or how big we are. Or how many employees we have. Or, if this is a meeting with a longtime customer, maybe we show off how long we’ve been doing business with them. And the parts of their company we have delivered for.
The underlying, unspoken message for those types of slides is, you can trust me.
So I’m not going to dig into those slides. Except to say, move through them as fast as you can. They’re always self-serving. And not interesting to some part of the audience.
What I DO want to stress here, when you answer this question, you’re telling the audience why the audience should trust YOU. You, personally. You, individually, for every person who’s presenting, if it’s a team presentation.
In B2B, it’s easy to hide behind the corporate name. But maybe you’re new to that company, and I shouldn’t trust what you say because you might be a little inexperienced. Maybe you’re in Sales, and I automatically mistrust you. We’ve all been there.
So if you’ve been with the firm a long time, be sure to say that. If you won awards for service. If you have a Ph.D. If you’ve been in the industry for a long time. If you have gray hair. These are all ways to signal that you’re safe to listen to.
If the audience has seen that, the company would have a lot to lose by deceiving them. And they’ve seen that you would have a lot to lose by deceiving them, we’re in good shape.
And these sorts of signals, they’re important, so stack them up. If your Company Page on LinkedIn has lots of followers, maybe throw in a screenshot of that. If your company produces a lot of video content, you might make a slide that shows a bunch of videos playing at once. If people in your company appear in articles a lot, you can highlight that. The more validation other people or companies give you, the better. If you can’t show anything like that, then show that you have a big building. Or that you spend a lot on advertising. Whatever it takes to signal that we can trust you.
One last tip. Deal with the trust question as early as possible while you still have their courtesy attention. The sooner you close the open loop in the audience’s mind. … Is what I’m listening to just bullshit?. The sooner the audience can settle into your message and stop worrying.
That’s why I put it right after the Attention Commander slide. My unspoken messages at the start of the meeting are, “you’re in the right place at the right time.” Then “I’m worth listening to.” And then “You can trust me.”
Until those 3 things are settled in the audience’s mind, nothing else you show them or tell them will matter much. All your other hard work will be, at least partly, wasted.
Or, something I tell clients, competing against yourself is fine. Fighting against yourself is stupid. And wasteful.
If you don’t close the trust issue upfront, your upcoming content has to fight for acceptance.
So answer the question — “How do I know I can trust you?” Until you do, the process of moving the audience from not-believing to believing? That process can’t start.
Okay. Moving the audience from not-believing to believing. That continues with the twin of How do I know I can trust you”. Which is “how do I know that this is real?”
That’s the next blog post.