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Everything is built on TRUST.
Its commonly said that for a customer to buy from you, they need to trust you. That’s đŻ% true.
What’s not as frequently discussed is that for that client-vendor relationship to thrive, the inverse has to be true as well; the vendor needs to trust the customer
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This is critical in the early stages of an innovative solution’s evolution. Bringing a new, truly innovative solution to market requires continually experimenting, learning, modifying, and (hopefully) improving the solution. To do that requires customers – even if they are in a pilot implementation – the company can trust to give them honest and accurate feedback. The “customer” is more of a partner. And the company needs to trust that the customer wants them to succeed in meeting their needs. They need to trust that the customer is willing and capable of being patient in terms of the time it may take to smooth-out an issue in the product.
Not all prospects or customers are able to do this. In many cases the customer may not have the time necessary to wait for all the points of friction to be smoothed-out. Or they may not have a team of users willing to bring issues to the table and openly discuss them with a willingness to give the company the chance to improve the product or user experience.
That’s not a criticism. It’s a recognition that the pressures and constraints on some potential customers (aka, “prospects”) may not align with this. They may need a simple fix to an immediately problem. They aren’t looking for something innovative, but that quick fix.
This is why scaling a sales team and sales process too early can fail. It takes particular skills to assess a prospect as being well-aligned for where the company is in the solution’s evolution, and to be willing to say to a prospect “not now” as it turns-away from what appears to be a deal. In the early days of a company’s evolution when cash is limited, the pressure to sell to that prospect despite the mis-alignment can be daunting. And it’s where we’ve frequently seen company’s stumble, believing “We can sort it later and make the customer happy.” This frequently creates a negative-spiral as the customer’s demands for immediate resolution to issues creates excessive pressure on the support team, and chaos in the product and design teams as the demands are not aligned with the needs of the broader market, or the strategy for innovation.
Conversely, when the company truly trusts the customer, we’ve seen incredible results. The company doesn’t nickel-and-dime the customer to pay for changes; they adjust development timelines to prioritize the customer’s needs; they don’t get hung-up on contracts and change orders before work begins; and they work around the clock to accelerate things because they trust the customer’s feedback is in both of their best interests. The changes will not only satisfy the customer, but many others as well.
That bi-directional trust is critical in almost all customer-vendor relationships. But never more-so than in the early days of an innovative solution’s evolution.
