Trust is expensive and trust is worth it
That’s the word this morning from leading marketer, author, and speaker, Seth Godin. Brands are based on trust.
The two key choices a brand makes to be trusted in the long run, per Godin:
- You will postpone profit-taking. There are always shortcuts available to you, always ways to make money sooner rather than later, plenty of chances to do a little less or charge a little more.
- You will do things that are difficult. We know it’s not easy or convenient for you to keep every promise, especially the little ones. That it’s expensive or a hassle or emotionally risky for you to extend yourself and your brand, but that’s where the trust is earned.
You don’t get to say we cannot get you an answer today. You don’t get to say no because you don’t have the resources – or maybe made the decision not to deploy the needed resources.
You can’t always be guided by what’s going to make us the most money. You can’t always be guided by keeping expenses down.
You need to be guided by how can we best help the people that we signed on to serve.
I’ve been on both sides of this equation. I’ve been in a large corporation where the goal (as the employees saw it) was to get an incremental $600 increase in a year from each lawyer we served. Nice, but not at the expense of not serving solutions that our lawyers loved.
I’ve also been on the side of busting my fanny to do what I felt was the reasonable and right thing to do. Some folks thought I was loving our clients more than my teammates. Not my intent, I just feared that if we did otherwise, we’d fail.
I’ve also been willing to postpone profit-taking. Building LexBlog, we were creating something that had never been done. Who had ever heard of blogs, let alone charging for professional turnkey blog and social media solutions? Who knew (for certain) what was required to deliver such a solution?
We needed to create a market, gain the trust of leading lawyers and law firms, and build out the solutions and systems to deliver what our clients needed today and in the future.
Some folks, probably smarter than me, have accused me of not charging enough, delivering too much, and not getting to the profitability we’ve achieved sooner.
They may be right. I was just trying to earn the trust of the people I wanted to serve.
For entrepreneurs (and law firms) looking to start enterprises I agree with Seth that postponing profits and doing the difficult things is the route to go. You’ll earn the trust you sorely need for the long run.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Somali Chandli