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A Matter of Trust

**Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels**

This is the last article of the series Know, Like, Trust. If you missed the first two, you can find them here and here. I saved trust for last because it’s pretty hard to achieve without the other two. Let’s say a Potential Client (PC) knows and likes us. Now, how can we earn their trust?

Respect

Becoming known and liked can happen relatively quickly, but trust doesn’t. It takes time to demonstrate integrity, dependability, and consistency. PCs trust our companies after they trust us as people. We need to accurately represent what our companies stand for and broadcast those core values through multiple communication channels. We should be prepared to answer frequently asked questions like:

Can your company really do what you say it can? We’re able to answer this with a testimonial page on our companies’ websites.
Do you really want to help my business succeed? We prove this by sharing our PCs’ “We’re Hiring!” posts on our companies’ social media platforms.
Are we like-minded in our values? We affirm this with a how-we-help statement in every employees’ elevator speech.

We know we’re earning our PCs’ trust when they begin liking, commenting on, and/or sharing our social media content. Sharing is especially exciting. It indicates our PCs are engaging with, endorsing, and embracing our companies’ value-driven content.

Realign

The biggest mistake we make in communication is assuming it has happened. Paraphrasing what our PCs said, reflecting it back, and repeating the process until we verify we heard correctly, demonstrates we not only want to understand the problems, but we are also actively listening. Initially, this exercise is time consuming, but realigning our communication style to our PCs’ streamlines the process for future conversations. Being in accord with our PCs is crucial when it’s time to address sensitive issues. For example, how we will handle our PCs’ customers’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

Resource

After all this work, we may discover we aren’t the best solution for a PC. Our role then becomes connecting them to someone who is, because we are in relationship with our PCs for the life of their businesses. We demonstrate both trust and courage when we offer, “What you need isn’t what we’re best at, but I know someone who is.” It’s important to have an established network of colleagues we know, like, and trust to partner with so when this happens, we’re ready to refer them. It not only solves our PCs’ current problem, but also sets us up as the future go-to, trouble-shooting resource. When our PCs’ next crises strikes, we will be the first people they reach out to for help. Referrals build trust between all businesses involved in reaching solutions. People love to connect people they trust to one another. When we pay it forward, our colleagues feel obliged to repay in kind by connecting us with one of their PCs whose problem we can better solve. The loyalty these relationships inspire can help everyone’s companies grow exponentially. When our PCs trust us, they want to keep collaborating with us. Who doesn’t want to work with someone who solves their problems?

What do you do to prove your trustworthiness to PCs? Please share in the comments.

Spread the Love

Sure, Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark holiday, and you can choose to spend it drinking your favorite adult beverage and watching The Notebook. AGAIN. But, consider using the occasion to spread love outside of your circle. We’re programmed to give back to our communities around the holiday season, but people are in need all year round (especially 11 months into the pandemic). We can still spoil those closest to us, but what can we do to spread some love to the rest of the world?

Friends

If you’re purchasing a gift online, consider using Amazon Smile. They donate 0.5% of eligible sales to the charitable organization you choose without adding that charge to your bill. Does your town have locally owned small businesses like: a coffee roaster, chocolatier, florist, locally-themed speciality gift shop, bakery, and/or book store? You can fill gift baskets with goodies purchased from some of these shops and drop them off on your friends’ porches. If you’re pressed for time, you could send them valentine cards with gift cards from locally owned restaurants enclosed, or memberships to a local art museum, science museum, zoo, or historical park. If you have the option to do this online and save a tree in the process, bonus love!

Neighbors

Since giving your time is still complicated right now due to COVID-19 restrictions, it’s difficult to spread the love in your own hometown by serving meals to guests at a homeless shelter, helping students with homework at a public library, or playing checkers with residents at a nursing home. Instead, you can give money to a local charity that feeds people, one that provides online homework help, or one that cares for senior adults. You could order a few dozen donuts from a local donut shop and use a food delivery service to take them to your local fire station. You could donate money to a local natural disaster relief fund. You don’t have to spend money to give back. You can smile and say thank you to the mail carrier, the driver who delivers your food order, the grocery employee who puts your pick up order in your trunk, the barista who hands you your latte at the drive-thru. Unless your mask is transparent, they won’t see your mouth smile, but they will see it in your eyes.

Strangers

Remember exchanging valentines in elementary school? You brought in tiny cards, candy, pencils, etc. to give everyone in your class. Kids in the hospital can’t exchange valentines. Check with your local Children’s Hospital. Candy, pencils, and trinkets are probably prohibited, but would they accept unopened boxes of Valentine’s Day exchange cards? They may have volunteers willing to observe COVID-19 protocol and distribute them. Looking for other ways to give to strangers? Send a care package to a military service member. Donate blood. Register to become an organ donor. Drop off unopened bags of pet food at your local animal shelter. Create a fundraiser on Facebook.

How do you plan to be generous this Valentine’s Day? Please share in the comments.

Still Dreaming

On Monday, January 17, 2000, all 50 states began recognizing the third Monday in January as a holiday. Most celebrate it exclusively as Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Media typically highlight one of King’s most famous speeches. We haven’t yet realized his dreams. We still have lots of work to do. My dreams revolve around the American workforce. Here are five of them.

Earnings

I dream of equal pay for equal work. The disparity we hear about most is probably the wage gap between women and men. The latest statistics I found are from 2019 when, on the average, women earned $.80 for every $1.00 earned by men. But, employees of color, employees with disabilities, and LGBTQ(IA+) employees experience even wider wage gaps. The U.S. Department of Labor has been trying to fix this since the 1960s and is still working on it; which leads me to my next dream.

Child Care

I dream of safe, dependable, economical, quality child care for every family. Since the 1950’s, the number of women entering the workforce (including mothers) began to rise steadily, peaking in 2000. The cost of living meant a significant number of families required more than one income to survive. Consequently, parents had to pay someone to watch the kids while they were at work. In 2019, around 10% of a family’s income went to pay for child care. There is plenty of research out there on this topic. Here is an insightful article about why child care is so expensive. Here is an article on why America resists universal child care.

Health Care

I dream of available, affordable, and accessible health care for all workers. I have no answers; only questions and research. Why is this so hard? Why does it cost so much? Other developed countries have figured it out, why can’t we?

Inclusion

I dream of every employee having the opportunity to not only voice their opinions, but also have them heard, acknowledged, and taken seriously. It’s time to make diversity in the workplace a given. American companies should employ genders, religions, ages, races, other-abilities, etc., at least as varied as our clients. Our companies’ workforces ought to reflect the people we serve. How can we produce relevant user experiences if we limit our knowledge to how someone like us uses our product? We need to take the next step and embrace inclusion. This goes beyond diversity. If our workplace is diverse, but only one or two group’s opinions matter, the marginalized groups will take their talents to our competition.

Work Week

I dream of workers being compensated for results instead of time. With so many of us homing from work, er, I mean, working from home; haven’t we proven the forty-hour-work week is as dead as the Wicked Witch of the East? The eight-hour workday was invented by Henry Ford in the early 1900’s to recruit talent who were used to working 12-hour days. With the availability of technology, project-based solutions, and team-based problem solving, the current model is no longer best practice. The organizations who develop compensation criteria for productivity based on results will likely attract the best workforce talent.

How would you revamp the current conditions for America’s workforce? Please share your suggestions in the comments.

Another Christmas Story

Once upon a time, December was the busiest month of the year.

Holiday parties – my husband’s work, my work, our daughter’s school
Gifts – making a list (and checking it twice), buying, wrapping, personally delivering or shipping
Christmas cards – buying, writing the end-of-year-family newsletter, addressing, buying postage, mailing
Cooking – planning the menus, making a grocery list (also checking it twice) purchasing the ingredients, cooking, serving
Decorating – pulling decorations out of storage, repairing the damaged, purchasing new
Miscellaneous traditions – driving around to see Christmas lights, baking and delivering cookies for first responders, attending Christmas Eve service

My fingers are tired from typing this. At the time it was fun. We love putting on ugly Christmas sweaters, gathering with friends and family and coworkers and celebrating the season, right? Or do we just love the idea of it? We downplay the stress of its reality. Our brains exhausted from holiday office party small talk. Our savings account spent on gifts for neighbors we barely know. Our cupboards bare from constantly replenishing the buffet at our extended family’s feast. Our vision of the perfect holiday is rarely realized since we can’t control the players, and this holiday season, there isn’t much of anything we can control.

During our first holiday season in Georgia, my husband was a worship leader, our daughter was in elementary school, and I was a teacher’s aide. By the morning of Christmas Eve, all three of us were exhausted from, well, see the list above. Working multiple Christmas Eve services, my husband was unavailable from early morning until late evening. Our daughter and I attended the first service. We grabbed tins of cookies the congregation baked for first responders on our way out. In the car, we ordered pizza before leaving the parking lot. By the time we dropped off the cookies at the firehouse located between the church and the restaurant, our pizza was waiting for us at the drive-thru. We got home and put on our jammies (it was only about 1:00PM, btw). I found White Christmas on TV. We ate pizza. We sang “Happy Birthday” to Jesus, blew out the candles on His cake, and ate slices for Him. We napped. When my husband got home, we repeated the process. We watched Christmas movies, stuffed our faces, and napped for the next 24 hours. Christmas Day ended with a drive through a local coffee shop for lattes and hot chocolate and meandering through neighboring subdivisions to look at their Christmas lights on the way back home. We did not answer the phone or check social media the entire time. It was the most relaxed the three of us had been since Thanksgiving. When the next year rolled around our daughter asked if we could do it again. I dubbed it “cocooning” and it became a tradition for the rest of our Georgia residency.

Several of our holiday activities aged out. I no longer send a year-end family newsletter. I refer everyone to social media. Email makes sending season’s greetings both quick and inexpensive. Because of COVID-19, more traditions are canceled this year and if I’m honest, I’m sorry, not sorry. We have plenty of options to cocoon. We can:

have food delivered either from our grocery to make our favorite treats, or from a local restaurant. If we order through a food delivery service, we keep a local driver employed
stream most any Christmas movie ever made
have decorations and jammies delivered from a local department store
stream holiday music playlists from our chosen service
send a cookie gift basket to our nearest firehouse through a local bakery
watch our church’s Christmas Eve service on their website
make our own lattes and hot chocolate and tour neighborhood Christmas light displays from our couch thanks to YouTube (For my Dayton, Ohio friends, you can see the old Rike’s holiday windows virtually)

This global crisis has given us a holiday gift: a reason to celebrate small. Do you usually:

travel 312 miles to stay with the in-laws? Can’t this year; COVID
spend hundreds of dollars on gifts? Can’t this year; COVID
attend your partner’s office holiday party? Can’t this year; COVID.

The pandemic has taken people we love, employment we need, and freedoms we cherish away from us. But, it has given us a reason to stop, be grateful for what we still have, and act on it. Let’s celebrate through our words and (maybe virtual) presence the people we’ve leaned on, both personally and professionally, to get through 2020. Isn’t that the essence of the holidays? Making sure people know how much we appreciate them?

How are you adjusting your holiday celebrations this year? Please share in the comments.

It’s Complicated

B2B holiday gift giving was tricky without the constraints of COVID-19. Now, it’s practically a minefield. Does your company have the budget to give corporate gifts nine months into a pandemic? If teams are mostly working from home, will your gift end up at an empty office? Will your clients accept a gift when they can’t possibly know how many unaware-coronavirus-carriers have touched it? When choosing gifts for clients this year, here are five things to consider.

Surprise And Please

Don’t buy people stuff they don’t want just to buy them something.They’re your clients, part of your job is finding out what they like. What have they joked about in meetings? What does their website say about them? Has your sales staff left clues in your CRM? What is on their LinkedIn profiles interests lists? Strive to give gifts that both surprise and please. For example, you could send a gift-wrapped case of quality toilet paper. They won’t be expecting it (surprise) and it gives you the opportunity to make them laugh (please). Hopefully 2020 will be the only holiday season where toilet paper is considered a gift.

Set Reasonable Expectations

Even if your business is growing during COVID-19, it’s counterproductive to flaunt that happy circumstance with an expensive corporate gift. If you give your clients an over-the-top gift this year, what will they expect next year? You are not trying to buy their loyalty. An extravagant gift leaves the impression you’re blissfully ignorant of the current economic climate. The easiest thing for you to do is to give all your clients the same gifts, but they don’t all pay you the same amount, right? (Helpful hint: if they paid you $1000 this year, a $90 gift is appropriate.) Your goal is twofold. One: demonstrate appreciation. Two: emphasize your relationships with these clients are important to you. The same goes for not spending enough money on client gifts. A coffee mug with your logo on it may daily remind them of you, but not in a good way. This is the year to scrutinize your list and decide which clients will receive a gift and which clients will receive a season’s greetings thank-you note.

Think Small

We’re all in this pandemic together. Buying gifts from local small businesses is a win-win-win. You acknowledge the importance of small businesses to the community in which you and your clients work. You remind your clients what a great community you both live and work in. You and your clients help sustain another business in your community. Most retail small businesses offer gift cards, home-town themed gifts, and some even offer contactless delivery.

Donate To Their Favorite Charity

Give in accordance with both your company’s and your clients’ company values. Your clients are people. They will remember who supported the community during these hard times. This gesture declares you appreciate the relationship your businesses have so much that you want to support the charitable organizations they care about; especially during the pandemic.

Wait For It

Your clients may be receiving lots of holiday gifts right now and yours could get lost in the pile. Think about waiting until January and giving a New Year’s present. This would set you apart, and, thanks to the pandemic, you have a great angle: “Good Riddance 2020!” or “Wishing You a New Year of Both Hope and Growth!”

What is your company gifting your clients this holiday season? Please share your ideas in the comments.