EP148 – Building Lasting Value.- Establish The Credibility

Do your partners trust your established value before you even arrive? As Walt Disney said, “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” #AdvancedqualityPrograms #TheQualityGuy #Value #Trust

When I wrote my book, “Principles of Quality,” and translated it into German, I hired a professional editor to ensure the German version of the book was as sharp and polished as the Spanish and English versions. This woman was a professional editor who understood everything from grammar to structure and how to best correct the book chapter by chapter. Additionally, she was a genuinely sympathetic lady. The more I got to know her, the more I found her personally trustworthy, which is why she was given the task of proofreading and editing the German manuscript. She mentioned that she could also assist me with marketing and help build a fantastic distribution plan. Trusting her personally, I thought this would be a good idea. However, a few weeks into the project, red flags began to appear. It turned out she was unqualified to execute the additional marketing strategy she was offering. In fact, her failure to deliver on the actual editing commission set me back several weeks, if not months.

We can understand that both personal trust and professional trust are interrelated. First, you need to build a connection, and then you can Establish The Credibility necessary for a project to succeed. In this case, if the editor had stayed within her area of expertise and delivered on her promise, I would have trusted her both personally and professionally. But because she offered services outside her qualifications and compromised the project she was responsible for; she lost some credibility with me. Perhaps I still find her personally approachable, but professional trust is no longer present.

Our brains make decisions in a specific order. We initially rely on instincts and emotions, then seek information to validate these decisions with facts and data. While we can trust someone personally to be capable, we often need more evidence to believe in their professional delivery. In quality management terms, trust is called confidence, which is the belief that someone can do what they say and actually deliver the promised product or service. This transforms capability into competence, leading to credibility. Credibility isn’t merely about reliability; it’s about effectively and consistently solving customer problems. When we achieve this, customers believe in us, and more importantly, believe in our offerings.

Here are a few ways to make sure your credibility accelerates trust with your customers:

• Understand their problems and exactly how your product or service solves them.
• Explain your solutions clearly and simply.
• Demonstrate knowledge  and expertise on your industry and market.
• Offer insights to identify potential risks or opportunities your customer might have overlooked or underestimated.
• Never promise things that you, your product, or service cannot deliver. And if you do make a promise, ensure it’s with the support of someone who can fulfill it. Be transparent.
• Keep your promises.
• Exceed expectations by delivering more than promised, either efficiently or with significant enhancements.

All this brings us to understanding what VALUE MEANS. Value tends to be the result of our perception of worth, based on what we paid compared to what we received. Unfortunately, most customers understand value after they make a purchase, and it’s based on a feeling, not necessarily facts. This can be in our favor if they feel good about their purchase. But many times, it can leave us in an unstable position when our customer, weeks or months later, cannot quantify the value they received from our product or service. What many people actually call buyer’s remorse.

Value is determined by how our brain compares two sources of input. We compare new decisions against previous experiences, or what we call anchor points in our mind. This is why so many companies struggle to assign value to their product or service in the commodities market. They tend to allow customers to compare their product or service based on price compared to a lower-priced competitor. It seems logical that the lower the price, the more value one would receive if both products offer the same service and features. But that is not necessarily the right measure of value.

In order for us and our products or services to be trusted and gain credibility, we must ensure our customers clearly and tangibly understand how to best assign value to our offer. This will eliminate the chances of buyer’s remorse.

For example, let’s say you offer an all-in-one quality app that does everything from audit planning to warranty deals, customer service, and so on… your customer invests a million dollars in your product. That’s a really good investment. But now let’s say six months after you get their order, their employees are still struggling to learn the system, there’s a ton of unresolved customer complaints. Finance is actually giving your customer a hard time because of the money spent on the app. And someone asks your client if the purchase was “worth it.” In other words, can they define the value based on what they paid? They are likely to say something to the effect of, “Well, we spent a million bucks. Employees are overwhelmed with work, and my CFO is complaining that the Return on Investment seems like the purchase wasn’t really worth it.”

And here is where you actually gain your customer’s trust and solidify your credibility: you must help the customer and all stakeholders understand and remember all the benefits they should be getting from their purchase to define and clarify value.

Now, in the quality app example, the company was actually spending over a million dollars a year on additional complaint management documents, processed manually. They also spent additional money on warranty expenses with customers and risk cases. Your app should eliminate these costs. That’s one of the benefits. With these benefits, the management portion of your product should allow employees to be more efficient, creating quality reports and quality plans, saving time and resources previously wasted on unproductive activities with the old system. The result is that your app is likely saving the customer at least $2 million per year while increasing efficiency and productivity. This translates into value, not only monetary but in many other ways.

And if the question comes back again, “Was it worth it?” the response we should be getting from our customer is, “Introducing a new system is always tough, but the benefits we’ve seen so far have everyone excited to see how much better we can be with this…” Although it’s the very same situation with the same app, the complementary part where you offer support gives the customer a good feeling of value, clearly demonstrating what our solution provides. As a result, they trust us more and we gain credibility for our product in the future.

After all, the best partnerships are those where trust is established before we even arrive. Our pre-established credibility paves the way for success. That’s what we call value all the way around.

“Trust comes with consistency.” – Richard Branson