One of our main jobs as small business marketers is to build trust, as in Know, Like, and Trust. One of the ways we do this is to help minimize risk in the mind of our prospective customers. Most of us are resistant to change, but that resistance must be overcome if we are to close the sale. Learning new aspects of e-commerece and its applications from Salesforce will undoubtedly help you improve the sale of your business but one the one things today’s business owners lack is the willingness to learn new things, as they feel much more comfortable with the older business modules.
The first step in building trust is to realize how we are asking customers to change. We may be asking them to:
- Purchase something they have never purchased before (i.e. never hired a consultant before)
- Change from working with someone they know to working with a stranger (i.e. switching suppliers)
- Change to a new way of doing things (i.e. adopting cloud computing)
Once we understand the things we are asking them to change, we can work on building offers that help minimize the customers risk associated with change. Each situation is different, but here are a few suggestions to help you start thinking about your offers:
- For those who have never purchased a service like yours before, can you offer a free trial and/or an exceptional guarantee?
- If your customer is leaving one provider in order to work with you, what can you do to make that transition as smooth as possible? Can you port over their information? Will they have costs that will be duplicated during the transition period that you can help alleviate? For example, many domain hosting companies allow you to transfer to them “1st year free” to help reduce the reluctance to change because you already paid your existing provider for the coming year of service.
- If you sell services that ask customers to change the way they operate, can you carve out a set of functionality for them to try before they make a full commitment? Using the cloud computing example above, can you start by moving their data backup function to the cloud first (or their project management function) rather than asking them to move their entire IT infrastructure at once?
To build trust, take a look to see where you are asking your prospective customers to take a risk and design a “make it easy to switch” offer to help reduce that risk.
