This article is the third in the Ride Your Brand Through Economic Uncertainty series on how small- to mid-sized business (SMB) owners can best leverage their brand’s value to navigate challenging and uncertain economic times.
Here’s something that might surprise you: When budgets have been shrunk and shrunk some more, your prospects worry less about how much they’re spending. They worry more about being blamed for spending money badly. That makes knowing how to build trust with clients more important than ever.
LinkedIn’s B2B Institute and Bain found the biggest factor in B2B buying isn’t price or performance. It’s fear of being unable to defend a decision that turns out wrong, as reported by The Drum.
Decades later, the adage “No one ever got fired for buying IBM,” still makes the point. For my younger friends, it is a product of IBM’s mainframe dominance in the 1960s and ’70s. The point is that the IBM brand at the time was so strong that selecting them was so defensible no one could be blamed for it.
Half a century later that anxiety still exists. Your prospects are under a lot of pressure, especially if there are rumors of layoffs floating around the water coolers. That makes them far less willing to take chances on a vendor that has not proven themselves yet.
How do you ensure that your brand is the safest choice? That doesn’t mean you have to be bland, conservative, or boring. It means you have to build trust with clients by speaking to their emotional needs as well as their analytical ones.
Your prospects worry less about how much they’re spending. They worry more about being blamed for spending money badly.
Here are five steps to take to help ensure your brand is the safest of all the choices they have.
Become a broken record. Consistency is king, queen, alpha dog, omnipotent being—however you want to label its importance. After all, the top reason buyers switch is getting inconsistent information across a supplier’s teams according to McKinsey.
In the last installment, we talked about the importance of finding the top three ways what you offer is relevant and competitively differentiated from what your competitors do. Doing this not only makes you more differentiated, it makes you more trustworthy.
Double check that sales, service, proposals, your website, and your social posts tell the same story. You should probably check in on how your colleagues are using AI. AI can create some efficiencies, but it can also create a lot of contradictions and slop. Check out my recent blog post, Is AI Tanking Your Brand’s Value? and let me know if you need any help getting a handle on how your brand is faring in the age of AI.
Arm your champions. It’s standard sales practice to ask about what concerns your prospects might have and address them one-on-one. But you can go further. Ask them outright what objections, concerns, or misconceptions their senior leadership might have.
A LinkedIn, Bain, and NewtonX study found brands are over 20 times more likely to be bought when everyone in the buying group knows them from the start. So help your champions win over their colleagues and management teams by having a library of resources for them at the ready. Fill it with whatever stats, recommended language, case studies, and documentation you can.
For example, many of our clients have to convince their CFOs that investing in brand is not a nice-to-have. That’s why we created a white paper that defends the investment in the language CFOs use, not the ones marketers do. You can see it here.
Flaunt your facts. From your Glassdoor rankings to your client satisfaction data, promote the heck out of all the third-party rankings you have earned. There are many ways to do it from adding a rating to your email signature to forwarding LinkedIn posts that highlight recognition. Write a case study on how your management team has created an environment where high marks come easily. It’s all about the humble brag here.
Be predictable. Surprises and safe rarely go together. That’s why it’s important your prospects know what to expect at every step in the sales process. Over communicate about what you are doing, what they need to do, and how you will handle variables in the sales process. Lean in heavily on a methodology that demonstrates the method to your madness. Take a look at our Ask, Build, and Connect methodology for an example. We also reference it in all our case studies and anywhere else it might be appropriate. Predictability and transparency engenders trust that they can assume will follow after the deal is done.
Share your Why. Speaking of trust, trust is a feeling, an emotion. Make certain your prospects know why you do what you do. It can’t all be about the product. According to research by Edelman and LinkedIn, buyers are 46% less likely to trust thought leadership content that’s overly product-focused.
That’s where your why comes in. Share why you care about the work. Why your colleagues care about it. Video is a perfect medium for this message. It doesn’t even have to be an expensive campaign. It can be a series of simple social media posts, shot off a smartphone, that you can share with prospects throughout the sales process.
Who would you trust more? A group of genuinely passionate professionals or a team of clock watchers? If your brand house is in order, you already know what it is. If it isn’t, let’s talk about finding it.
The key takeaway here is to make your prospects feel confident about their decision to go to you. Be the safe choice. If you want to talk through any of these ideas, book a free 30-minute conversation.
So far in this series, we’ve talked about staying focused, differentiating yourself, and now being the safe choice. The next installment talks about staying top of mind now and in the future. You can find them all here.
Claude, Opus 5.5, provided research for this blog post. All the writing is my own.
