Today’s buyers seldom take anything at face value, especially when it is a new, innovative, or expensive product – like what startups typically sell. Customers expect a vendor, whether they are selling chicken wings or cybersecurity technologies, to demonstrate they can alleviate the customer’s pains (be they hunger or malware.) As a startup or small business, you enter the market with zero advantages. In contrast, your more established competitors have all the advantages, but most importantly, they have name recognition and customer trust.
This is the Wall of Buyer Skepticism. Every startup faces it and for many it is utterly insurmountable. You can have the best product in the world, but if a customer does not see you as a credible supplier – you lose.
And why should a customer trust you? Without name recognition or endorsements from trusted third parties, you are merely another company selling stuff. The odds are entirely against you.
When buyers evaluate products, they take in a lot of information. This information comes from numerous sources, such as social media, word of mouth, advertising, endorsements, and messaging. Not all information is treated the same. Some buyers value endorsements, while others are more easily convinced with social media posts.
Regardless of how customers evaluate you, at some point customers will hit a Key Credibility Event (KCE). This is the moment where a buyer decides a company is a credible provider of pain relief. It is the moment they switch from skepticism about your company and its products to curiosity. Without this event, you will never sell a thing.
As a seller, you must figure out when, where, and how this moment happens. It is not the same for every company.
In my industry (cybersecurity), I discovered that buyers needed to view the company as intelligent. They needed to see that a potential vendor possessed the knowledge and experience of information security. I figured out that the most effective way for us to do this was to hold a meeting with a prospect and talk with them. However, not merely any meeting, it had to be a meeting with a subject matter expert.
Consequently, I put myself in most of these meetings. My expertise as a security practitioner was key to demonstrating to customers that my company was credible. Once the prospect viewed me (and by extension my company) as credible, they were more open to considering our products.
While this is not a scalable practice, it is critical for building credibility. In the early stages of a startup, you must find what makes potential customers see you as credible. You cannot use your brand name or product features, because your competitors can easily win in these areas. You have to figure out how customers evaluate vendors in your industry.
As your company grows, the KCE will change. Once you have greater name recognition and/or word of mouth, your KCE may be watching a video, downloading a demo, or reading a chart of specifications. If you sell chicken wings, it may start with people merely smelling them to get them to want them, but mature to online reviews or endorsements from respected influencers.
Knowing your KCE is almost as important as refining and improving it. In the early stages of a startup, founders typically must do most (or all) the work to get a customer to a KCE. This is because founders are the center of credibility in a startup. As a startup grows, one of the key challenges for founders is to train others to build this credibility as well. Once a startup hits the scale stage, credibility building needs to become automated and built into the business as a whole.
The most common KCE for early-stage startups is some personal engagement with the product or people. Demos are great since they can drive credibility without a big-time commitment. However, if you sell a complex product or service (say like cybersecurity) then demos alone rarely suffice in generating a KCE. You must build a relationship with your customers, so they not only see your product as credible, but you and your team as well.
To determine your KCE, ask yourself: what would make me trust me? It is a bit of a self-reflective question, but a good thought experiment. You need to identify the key moment where a buyer looks at you and/or your product and thinks to themself: “yeah, this company knows what they are doing.”
This is why restaurants hand out free samples, why appliance manufacturers offer demonstrations in retail stores, and why consultants do presentations at trade shows. These are opportunities to show a curious audience that you are credible.
Be careful with on-line advertising, social media posts, and “content marketing.” These marketing methods contribute to credibility, but they rarely create a KCE. For example, on-line advertising or social media posts help raise your brand awareness, but they are unlikely to turn a skeptical customer into a curious one. White papers, blogs, and other “content marketing” are equally useful for reinforcing your credibility, but they must be supported with other sales efforts to be truly effective.
Finally, never underestimate the importance of credibility as a startup. The brutal truth is: you are a nobody. The only way you will ever become a somebody is to convince people that whatever you sell can alleviate their pains. And do not for a second think that cold showers, grind nonsense, or connections to important people can replace credibility. Buyers do not care if you are cold or connected. They care about themselves and whether you can solve their problems.
I have observed numerous startups, including my own, abandon credibility only to have sales evaporate. Credibility is profoundly important to customers. Once it is lost, it is virtually impossible to regain.
Key Credibility Events are described in much greater detail in Credibility Selling, coming soon.
