Hey friend,
I hope you’re enjoying the weekend.
I was thinking about you.
In particular, about something you practically give and receive every day.
Trust.
As basic as driving forward when you have a green light, trusting the other cars stopped at a red light won’t all of a sudden bump into you. And vice versa.
Why care
Trust is the connecting tissue that allows us to collaborate and build mega projects.
If you recall, I’ve recently covered the importance of trust, especially these days, as AI is reshaping our way of working:
Read on as later I include a more substantial reason for why trust is more important than ever in the AI age.
But hey, forget AI, trust is a keystone in building and retaining any relationships in your professional and personal lives.
On the low end, from ignoring spammers in your mailbox, skipping deep fake in your newsfeed - to asking a new nanny for references and having an inspector check a house you want to buy.
Merriam-Webster defines trust as:
a: Reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.
b: One in which confidence is placed.
Mechanics
In marketing, trust typically comes after you’re able to capture initial attention (hard challenge in and of itself), and follow it with trust and empathy-building steps that run through a relationship entire lifetime.
This is true when you’re prospecting clients or wooing investors with your pitch.
Storytelling
From a storytelling perspective, trust is a fancy word for a simple yet highly coveted concept.
In essence, when it works, it’s nothing but a story with a positive payoff your prospect is telling herself after getting your third follow-up email and finally agreeing to meet with you.
True! At first, for that discovery call, you only get a tiny portion of it - call it a “5% trust sample.”
You then need to follow up with further proof points (e.g., impactful product demo, references, dollars & sense) to win the deal (51% trust).
Later, if your customer is repeatedly able to generate value from your widget, receive meaningful retention programs, you then get to keep it for the full customer lifetime (100% trust).
Scarcity
Securing trust is hard these days.
At the top of the funnel, just consider our shrinking attention spans pummeled by staggering information overload we’re all exposed to every day via email, texting, and voice messages.
And now with AI, you often have no idea what is real and what is fake.
In job search, we currently experience an “applicant tsunami.”
LinkedIn reports 45% increase in the past year with 11,000 applications per minute! And according to Gartner, 1 in 4 applicants will be fake by 2028.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing some recruiters indexing more towards personal referrals.
Another reason why networking is essential.
As such, trust is a scarce commodity.
You give it sparingly with a growing screening challenge.
Our “Lizard Brain“, wired to detecting threats and processing fear, is part of our oldest survival instincts - teaching us to be suspicious of any “tiger we come across in the forest.”
Wider angle
Yuval Harari concludes one of his recent talks by establishing the rationale for why trust is even more important today:
Do you know why planet Earth is ruled by humans and not by chimpanzees or elephants? It’s not because humans are more intelligent. Humans rule the world because we know better than any animal how to build trust with strangers and cooperate in very, very large numbers. We have developed this capability for thousands of years. Now it is more important than ever. To survive and flourish in the age of AI, we need to trust other humans more than we trust AI.
Makes sense, right?
Just look from your closest to your farthest trust entities: your family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, city, state, country, G7, UN - all are trust-based relationships to achieve a larger good.
What trust-building program are you working on now?
See you next time!
Best,
- Shlomi
Shlomi Ron
Founder, Visual Storytelling Institute
shlomi@visualstorytell.com | Chat soon? 📅
story > visual > emotion > experience
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Trust is indeed the question of the moment. With content been generated more and more by AI, we need more sophisticated approaches to identify content we can trust. Here is my take: https://www.ecairn.com/blogs/forget-trusting-contenttrust-people-rebuilding-credibility-in-the-age-of-ai . Would love your feedback