Trust is one of the most important levers that start-up businesses rely on for survival. It will be phenomenally impossible for small businesses to gain the opportunity of proving what they can do if no one trust them enough.
This is where this article comes in to fill the gap by giving simple and proven tips and strategies of building trust as a small start-up business owner. Below are ways of building trust that a small start-up business can leverage on.
How to build trust in small business relationship
In this section of this post, we will briefly look at some things that a small business owner can do in order to give him or her self the best possible chance of sealing that all important business deal.
Personal or business experience: people trust you if they are certain you have business experience and/or if someone they know has a personal or business relationship with you. The problem many people have is finding a way of proving their experience. I once worked with a friend who was born into a family business still think he does not have the required experience to manage a small business.
The most interesting thing is that he was always with his father at the business, performing virtually all the business functions, yet he thinks he has no experience. If you struggle with packaging yourself, look for a business coach that can help in this respect.
Familiarity: people will willingly do business with you if they are familiar with you. This kind of familiarity used to be very expensive to create as the only way of creating awareness in the past was by spending big on advertising.
Well, in today’s business world, you don’t need to have large budget to put your brand out there for people to see. All you need to do is to establish an online presence. This can be done by way of blogging or setting up a useful social media page like facebook fan page for example.
Perceived public reputation: your business ideas will be more appealing to potential business partners if they have positive perception about you and the business idea you represent. So many small businesses make mistakes while trying to build decent public brand and end up creating negative press. You can build good high quality public reputation by simply engaging in local charity work for example.
Affiliation: get affiliated with successful people and entity in your chosen field. Nowadays, finding credible companies to affiliate with aren’t that difficult. You can piggyback on the reputation of a well-established business by offering to market some of their products and services for some time just to establish that affiliation.
Ways of verifying trust
Just as people rely on trust before doing business with you, you also rely on trust while seeking business partnership. Before entering into that business arrangement, it is very important that you invest some time in verifying the ingredients of trust as briefly discussed below.
Verify experience: the simple act of asking for reference and confirming them is enough to verify the experience of a potential business partner. Performing an extensive background check is not necessary in some cases.
Verify reputation: this can be done by looking up social media to see what people think of the potential business partner that we intend to do business with.
Verify affiliate: you can verify claimed affiliation by contacting a trusted third party who can vouch that the entity is in fact affiliated to the reputable entity that they claim to be affiliated with.
How to verify online trust of small businesses
We generally rely on certificate authorities (CA) to verify that people are indeed who they claim to be. Certificate Authorities like Verisign and GeoTrust, for example provide commercial digital certificates that can establish trust between two strangers intending to do business online.
I am sure you have learnt one or two strategies that will help build that business trust you long for as a small business owner. Good luck in you venture.
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