Last week, I spoke about professional trust. This week, I’d like to share with you a very simple tool called The Bet which can be a very powerful way of assessing the level of trust your customers have in your business.

Trust, is after all, a very loose and fluid concept, and half of the problem in dealing with trust is trying to figure out what actually makes up “trust”.

First, let me warn you that The Bet does require some gambling (timely given the Melbourne Cup), but in this case, it is all imaginary money. Otherwise, it is a very easy-to-use concept, and it goes something like this:

Let’s assume you and I were going to McDonalds and decided to have a wager. How much would you be willing to bet with me, that if you ordered a Big Mac, you would get exactly what you expected? Double or nothing.

$5? $50? $500? $5,000? $50,000?

Say you’re willing to bet up to $50,000. What are you saying in that instance? Effectively, that you are willing to bet $50,000 with me that if you get a Big Mac from McDonalds, it will be exactly as a Big Mac ought to be. More importantly, you are saying that you are confident that you will double your money.

So what has happened here? You have basically used a betting value to quantify how comfortable or confident you are in McDonalds delivery, or how RELIABLE their service is – how much you TRUST their service.

After all, the greatest factor in trust is RELIABILITY – delivering what you said you would do. And this is true irrespective of whether we are talking about professional or personal trust.

What is so powerful about The Bet is that instead of viewing trust as a binary equation, The Bet forces people to try to quantify it as a tangible value. After all, intuitively, we know that trust is rarely ever absolute. I trust the taxi driver to get me home, but I wouldn’t trust him to do brain surgery on me.

But what is the practical application of The Bet?

It should first be said that The Bet is not an analytical tool. It can’t tell you what’s wrong. It can only tell you that something is wrong. But using the example above, I have had people willing to bet up to $1 million with me on a Big Mac. Contrast this with $4.35 for a real Big Mac, and right away, you can see why hundreds and thousands of Big Macs are literally flying off the conveyor belt every day.

Win: When the amount that people are willing to bet far outweighs the actual cost (or investment)

Contrast this with Investment Trend’s latest research which says that Australians are willing to pay about $300 for advice. If we take this at face value, this is effectively the bet value. Yet, conversely most planners want at least 2,000-$3,000 for a plan. In reality, over the course of 10-20 years, a client might spend over $50,000 on their financial planner. So, that’s a $300 bet against what is really a $50,000 investment. Not exactly the kind of balance we are looking for in the equation is it?

Problem: When the amount that people are willing to bet is below the actual cost (or investment).

The saving grace for us is that people’s bet value can change over time. McDonalds didn’t get its $1 million bet value overnight. It did it by building up a customer base, delivering to it reliably over and over again, building trust with its customers, and promoting its reliability.

Likewise, there is no reason that the people surveyed who are only willing to bet $300, cannot, with offers that are simple, low-risk and delivered to expectation increase their bet value over time to significantly higher amounts. (The emphasis is on low-risk and delivery, which shows that financial planners are reliable and can be trusted to deliver.)

Certainly, it is not enough to say, “Well, they don’t want to pay enough so we won’t service them.” This assumes (incorrectly) that the $300 value is static, and cannot be changed. This misses the real opportunity, which is to build the trust with these customers, develop a sense of reliability, and increase their bet value in your business.

And in order to achieve this we need some genuine innovation in the industry – but that will be a topic for another week.

So, now it’s your turn to use The Bet. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. How much would you be willing to bet on your own business? Try The Bet with your own team. The results could be very interesting.

Lap-Tin



(Credit where it belongs – The Bet is an extension of a concept which I learnt off and was originally created by Jonar Nader, author of How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People.)