Trust isn’t built in the pitch
A customer spends a fraction of their decision-making time with you. So trust isn’t created by a great presentation — it’s created by the small things you do when no one is watching.
There’s an idea that you win a customer’s trust in the meeting — with a good presentation, confident delivery, a clever answer to an objection. But according to Gartner research, a B2B customer spends only 17% of the entire buying journey with suppliers, and when they’re comparing several firms, any one of them gets five or six percent. You have no room for a grand gesture. Trust is assembled elsewhere.
From small promises kept
“I’ll send it by tomorrow” and you send it by tomorrow. “I’ll call on Tuesday” and you call on Tuesday. Every such micro-promise kept is a brick. Every one broken is a crack the customer remembers better than your whole presentation. Reliability isn’t charisma. It’s repetition.
From consistency across channels
Gartner also found an uncomfortable number: most customers run into contradictions between what the website says and what the salesperson says. Nothing erodes trust faster than the sense that the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing. When a customer calls after a month and you don’t know where you left off, you just made that crack yourself.
From a memory they can see
The strongest signal of credibility is mundane: you remember them. When you pick up the phone after six months and know they were weighing expansion into Slovakia and that their contract with a supplier ends in March, the customer doesn’t hear a salesperson. They hear someone who cares. You don’t manufacture that impression with a better memory — you manufacture it by writing it down somewhere.
What to take away
Stop thinking about how to impress in the meeting, and start thinking about what you do between meetings. That’s where trust is won and lost.
For a customer to feel remembered, you have to remember them — that’s what Lemnio is built for. Start free, or write to [email protected].