With advertising going very quickly the way of the dodo, and more and more examples emerging of brilliant "No Ads" marketing success stories, trust may well be the most valuable asset your company has.
Many times here we have reviewed the Amway case study. Amway is a company whose entire sales model is built upon leveraging trust. Getting people to sell to friends and family, or to those who are likely to think they are a) honest and decent people and b) competent.
From an older post:
Amway is a household name, and has at its core the leverage of trust. It has a model of direct selling vitamins to friends and family. In fact, according to Hoover's, Amway has a network of around 3 million independent business owners who sell around 450 products to their families and friends...Being able to bank trust means you have to be able to build an asset that leverages trust. An asset that builds on the trusting relationship you, or other members of your company or team, have built int he market place.
Thats a heck of a lot of trust to be leveraging! In fact Forbes put's its earnings at $5 Billion!
It all sounds very complex, but it really isn't. Some great examples of trust based assets include:
- A trusted blog
- A trusted newsletter
- Clientèle that are willing to refer you to their peers
- Books, articles, videos, and podcasts
- Interviews for news sites, magazines and even blogs.
All of these give you the potential to build multiple relationships based on trust. Trust that you, or your host (the interviewing magazine) is honest and decent, and that you can / will deliv3er what you say you will do.
But by far the greatest Trust Based Asset of our time has to be LinkedIn. LinkedIn combines many types of trust based assets and allows you to use all of them.
People visiting your profile can see.
a) Who you are linked to
b) Who has recommended you
c) Your track record of achievement
d) Any ancillary files, blog posts and links you have decided to include.
I wrote previously about how to really maximize LinkedIn for professional sales and marketing. My big claim at the time was that we (my company and I) had been able to leverage LinkedIn for about 7 figures.
We have now done that several times over. This year only. And we are still only in the early stages.
There is absolutely no doubt that you can bank trust. And the more trust you are able to leverage, the more financial renumeration you are able to bank.
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