UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging

Chapter 3. Trust Gap

WHY DO YOU buy the things you do? Turn the mirror on yourself for a minute and think about how you make choices about your own purchases.

Trust is one of the main drivers of that hierarchy. The higher the trust, the more likely it is that someone will do business with you. This is an important point in service-based businesses that many business owners fail to recognize. One of the biggest challenges is to get someone to try a service for the first time, so companies offer ways to get you to try it "without risk." Unfortunately, we often equate this with giving something away for free—but this does not always address the issue of trust.

Before speaking at a professional organizers conference, I researched a bunch of their web sites and noticed that many organizers were offering a "Free Consultation" of their potential customers' home organizational needs, to get their foot in the door. By only focusing on price as a barrier to making the first purchase, they were missing something important. Of course, I do understand that price objection is a legitimate issue with many potential customers. However, there is also a tremendous trust gap. This is the amount of trust you have to earn before your potential customer will consider buying from you. The trust gap can be practically nonexistent, like buying a newspaper, but even then you have to trust that the content will be good. For many service-based businesses the trust gap is much wider.

So coming back to the professional ...