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Hello there,

In the last email we talked about why the funnel analogy is not well-suited for consultancies and how we can build awareness of our services better and cheaper through “narrowcasting”. I hope you’ve found a couple of minutes to complete your Primus List - it’s a simple but highly underrated tool to manage key relationships.

Today’s focus is on exploring the role trust plays in marketing your micro consultancy, and how exactly it can inform your growth initiatives.

As I previously shared with you, one of the main challenges of marketing credence goods is their nature. It's difficult (or simply impossible) for clients to evaluate the quality of your services before and after hiring them, which is why trust is an ingredient that you can’t miss. But what does it mean to earn trust in the context of consulting services?

Studying trust is like entering an endless rabbit hole. The topic is incredibly rich, highly contextual, and involves multiple disciplines and areas of knowledge. My list of selected books and publications on trust-building includes almost 100 titles.

Most of the dozens of definitions of trust I have studied can be compiled into one simple idea: trust is an evaluation of outcomes, of how likely it is that things will go right. We can also say that the lower the chance of a harmful or unpleasant outcome, the higher the level of trust.

As Morton Deutsch said, trust is "confidence that [one] will find what is desired [from another] rather than what is feared".

It's instructive to apply this to our marketing journey. We're selling consulting services. But that's not really what buyers want when they hire us, right?

What they desire is to improve or transform their business. What they fear is losing time and energy, money, personal reputation, peace of mind. Building trust means increasing their confidence that the former will happen while lowering the chance of the latter.

Peter Drucker famously said, "All profit is derived from risk." The work of every entrepreneur, consultants included, is to manage it for business and society.

The world is complex, unpredictable, ambiguous. The speed at which markets and technologies change, the lack of predictability in their business, and the difficulty of telling cause and effect apart are all seen as risks for your client. When you sell your expertise, you're selling insurance to those risks.

As Rachel Botsman wrote:

The goal of your trust-building initiatives is to create that bridge. When you do, your sales conversations become less of a game of persuasion and more of an exercise of qualification. Your prospect already trusts your ability to deliver outcomes - the main question is whether you two are a fit or not.

Now, here’s a question for you: Do you trust school teachers?

Most people intuitively answer yes. But when you give a second thought to that question, it becomes clear it doesn't make sense. "Wait, trust them to do what?"

You might trust a school teacher to educate your children. But you won't trust that same person to drive an ambulance with you in it. As Onora O’Neill puts it:

This is what your potential clients do after first connecting with you. They trust some people to perform some tasks, and mistrust people for other tasks. Your long-time friend might love to go out for drinks with you - but if he doesn't trust your abilities as a consultant you will have a hard time winning his business.

When you present yourself as a specialist, people will try to judge whether you are trustworthy or not - in other words, if you "know what you're doing".

There is not a scientific consensus on what's required to "be trustworthy". Authors and researchers have small disagreements here and there. Since our goal here is to move from theory to practice, let's focus on what's actionable.

The 3 main components of trustworthiness for consultants are:

• Competency: People trust you have the necessary skills to do the job.
• Reliability: People trust you will deliver on your commitments.
• Honesty & Intimacy: People trust you will tell them the truth, and feel comfortable sharing and discussing their challenges with you.

Below you can find a structured assignment to diagnose your initiatives. But before that, I need to make a quick but important clarification: Although you can find several mentions of "trust-building" in this email series, this term is not at all accurate.

Trust is not built, but given. You can't force people to trust you. All you can do is give them reasons or arguments to decide you're a trustworthy consultant.

To make this happen, you need to satisfy both of the following conditions:

1. You need to be trustworthy. As Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." The best way to be perceived as a trustworthy consultant is to actually become one.
2. You need to provide evidence that you are trustworthy. This consists of showing your target audience that you have a high level of the 3 components previously mentioned: Competency, reliability, and honesty and intimacy.

My question for you is: Are you providing that evidence? You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, but what you spend your time on. The following assignment encourages you to think about it.

You can use this PDF to evaluate your trustworthiness and brainstorm new ways to improve it in your business development efforts.

There are no hard rules to determine which one of these three components you should prioritize. Sometimes one of them will stand out during conversations - multiple prospects asking if they may contact previous clients, for example, is a sign of low reliability. But all of them should be addressed at some point.

The following blog posts might be helpful for you to come up with ideas:

• ​How To Be Seen As Reliable
• ​Can You Demonstrate It?
• ​Disagreeing With Clients
• ​Self-Orientation Will Kill Your Consulting Business
• ​Building Trust Before Meeting

After selecting 2-3 initiatives, don’t forget to add them to your management systems so you and your team can implement them.

In the next email we will finally talk about your biggest strength: your expertise. You’ve invested years (and likely decades) to cultivate specific knowledge and become an expert at doing what you do. But how can you use that to generate more opportunities and win more business?

Believe it or not, it can serve other purposes than simply delivering client work.

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