Trust Part 1: Your Biggest Competitive Differentiator With Customers and Investors

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This article recaps the first part of our VP Customer Success, Chief Diversity Officer Sydney Archer’s virtual workshop of the same name at SaaStr Annual 2021. 

Business trust incidents are on the rise and increasingly visible to everyone making trust an inescapable issue for companies. TechJury notes that globally, 30,000 websites are hacked daily and 64 percent of companies worldwide have experienced at least one form of a cyber attack. So in our digital age, it’s no longer a question of if a company will experience a breach or trust incident, but when.

Prospects, candidates and VCs need to know you’re trustworthy before they sign the dotted line. Because once they do, you become a steward of one of their most valued assets—their data and their customers’ data. 

Without trust, even your bottom line is at risk. For example, Accenture’s Competitive Agility Index reported 4000 companies that experienced a drop in trust, the revenues at stake equated to at least $180B.

So contrary to popular belief, cultivating trust is not a nice-to-have but a hard necessity. 

There is a lot of research around trust. Why? Because it is a powerful force. It’s integral to all human relationships, whether personal or professional. 

If you want to stay competitive in today’s world, trust must be central to your company’s overall strategy. However, telling potential customers, investors and employees you’re trustworthy isn’t enough.

Kent Grayson, an associate professor of marketing at the Kellogg School and faculty coordinator of The Trust Project at Northwestern University, breaks the element of trust into three key dimensions or pillars...

Read the entire blog here