How to Build Trust with Customers

When Luke and Josh talk about how to build and nurture relationships, they are, in large part, talking about how to build trust with customers. For this week’s Stay Paid guest, developing trust in relationships with clients and prospects begins with clearly communicating three value propositions that all clients want from their financial advisor—indeed, from every service professional with whom they work.

Adam Holt, CEO and Founder of Asset-Map, says if you want to know how to build trust with customers, then demonstrate you:

• Know what matters to them.
• Understand their unique situation.
• Provide them with options.

You can’t tell a customer to trust you. You have to communicate with them in ways that prove you know, understand, and can provide what they want. Do that consistently, and you’ll build trust in your relationships with clients.

It’s what Adam helps his clients do.

Adam’s clients are financial professionals who are tasked daily with explaining complicated and technical data to their clients. But instead of having to review an 80-page report with their investors, Adam provides his clients with a single page, visual summary of their clients’ assets, liabilities, and other key information.

Using this single page, financial professionals can easily sit with their clients and communicate complex ideas and all their dynamics in a way that is engaging and actionable. As Adam observes:

When you make things simple, when you make things consumable, it doesn’t matter your level of expertise or technical acumen. You can absorb it and you can get involved in it.

Prove you’re trustworthy

To build trust with clients, Adam suggests two primary actions.

Find a way to prove to your customers that you know what matters to them, and then give what you know back to them so that they know you’re listening.

For example, a real estate agent who documents their client’s wish list of items in a home they are looking to buy, who gives that document to their client for validation, and then shows homes that include those items, has proven they know their client and is listening to them. If you can do that in a visually way, rather than through a list, then it’s so much better because it’s more easily understood.

Adam’s secret sauce is being able to provide his clients with an expertly designed, visually attractive document that proves they, in turn, know and understand their clients. It gives these financial professionals something that demonstrates they’re listening, that they care about their clients being able to understand, and that reflects their current situation and the options they have. It also provides these professionals with a chance to validate the information with their clients, and to adjust a strategy if necessary.

Deliver value without being asked.

It may surprise some of you to learn that your clients want you to bring ideas to them. They want you to share information that demonstrates you know them and what they want. They want you to contact them and say you were thinking of them.

Taking actions like these is how to build trust with customers.

They prove to your client that they are important, and that what matters to them matters to you. It’s demonstrates you have empathy, that you know the one thing your clients can’t buy is time, and that you’ve taken steps to save them some of it.

When you reach out, offer advice, provide assistance, and truly listen, your relationships with clients are strengthened, and you remain relevant.

Key Points

• No matter their expertise or technical acumen, you’ll engage your clients if you can make complex ideas simple and communicate them clearly.
• If you know your client, their situation, and can present them with options, you’ll earn their trust.
• More clients want the professionals they work with to be thinking of them and to proactively bring them ideas that will solve their problems or make their situation better.

Action Item

Tomorrow, select five people from your database and add value to their lives.

Connect

Find Adam at www.asset-map.com or connect with him at www.linkedin.com/AdamHolt