TLDR: Trust = Consistency/Time. Follow-up & follow-through are key.
It seems my readers love work frameworks, so here’s yet another one from LinkedIn, and a first principle for working well with others:
Trust = Consistency/Time
Just as it sounds, trust is built by being consistent over time.
Do they do what they say they’re going to do?
And it dawned on my recently that follow-up & follow-through might actually be considered a lifehack to building trust.
I’ve written about sales hacks in the past—objection handling, accusation audits, etc—but I’ve never considered follow-up & follow-through a ‘hack’ per se.
Perhaps because it’s Sales 101.
But, if a hack is defined as something both easy and impactful that most other people don’t do, then in that light, I suppose follow-up & follow-through may genuinely be professional superpowers.
And since we’re all salespeople in one way or another, here are some ways great salespeople hack trust with their customers, and manufacture opportunities to be consistent:
Follow-Up & Follow-Through
Send a recap email immediately following a call or meeting. In no more than 3 sentences and 3 bullets, document what was was covered, what the impact might be, and your agreed upon next steps
If you agreed to another meeting, include the text from that recap email in the body of the calendar invite so that everyone has the context at their fingertips later on, and send the invite as soon as possible in order to protect the time on both calendars
Give yourself a license to follow-up more than you’re comfortable with by signposting that you will. “If I don’t hear from you, I will plan to follow-up on X date in order to stay on top of this for us.”
If you’ve promised to follow-up in a certain timeframe, put a reminder on your own calendar to make that call or send that email
If you haven’t heard back from someone, be more persistent than you’re comfortable being. Frame your follow-up with compassion or as a favor, rather than desperation
Always pick up the phone first
If you’ve agreed to a deliverable, set a realistic timeframe in which you can deliver the results sooner than promised. Under-promise & over-deliver
If you’ve promised to make an introduction, do it quickly, and put a reminder in your calendar to follow-up on how it went
When you’ve promised something, signposting that you are doing what you’ve said you would can remove the pressure of feeling too persistent. “As promised, I am following-up to…”
If your ability to see something through requires other teams and people who are not as good at following-through, it is your job to follow-up with them and project manage the outcome—not their job to follow-through. It’s your priority, not theirs’
I could go on for a while with examples, but the bottom line is that you can take the guesswork out of building trust by putting systems in place to be consistent.
See you Monday.