Who Do You Really Trust?

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Trust. It’s what it all comes down to.

You intuitively know this to be true, don’t you? Trust is everything. Whenever I think about trust, I think about something that my dear friend, Jeffrey Gitomer, would often say in his public sales presentations: "All things being equal, people will do business with those that they know, like and trust. All things being unequal, people will do business with those that they know, like and trust." Trust is a topic that isn’t approached or appreciated nearly enough in the business world, especially if you consider how important it is. But, what is trust and why is it such an important component of success? Thankfully, there are people like David DeSteno to help us understand and decode it. According to his bio, DeSteno is "a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Group. At the broadest level, his work examines the mechanisms of the mind that shape vice and virtue. Studying hypocrisy and compassion, pride and punishment, cheating and trust, his work continually reveals that human moral behavior is much more variable than most would predict." With that, he recently published a new book titled, The Truth About Trust – How It Determines Success In Life, Love, Learning And More. To celebrate the launch of the book, he stopped by to present his concepts at the Googleplex. It’s a fascinating near-hour presentation that will reshape how you think about your emotions, your work and your life.

This is the truth about trust…

2 comments

  1. I just said exactly that in a meeting with the partners of a client law firm last week.
    It is true that you have to establish trust and many opportunities exist to do so. Let’s take a political campaign for example – the ultimate consumer campaign. You can saturate the airwaves with you face and message in people’s living room televisions to the point where you become part of the family. You can meet face-to-face with people at group events, county fairs, town hall meetings. You can have an army of field operatives call voters every week to talk to them about you and issues until they are on a first-name basis with the targeted voters. You can use PR to be in the news as often as is possible with positive messages, because if they read it in the newspaper, it must be true.
    All of the above leads to familiarity and ultimately trust. By the time you ask for something from them, people trust you enough to do it for you (vote).
    The same is true when you are selling a service. You want people to be familiar with you because that engenders trust and increases likelihood of behavior that will benefit your company/product/service/candidate.

  2. This is so true. We often spend our time and money trying to push a product or service without any thought to how to build the relationship. I was able to build an entire small business consulting firm with zero advertising. It was built solely on advocacy and trust and a lot of golf.

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