Why Customers Don't Trust Your Business, Your Product, or You

Your business is built upon trust.

Customers might resist buying your product unless you provide real and transparent results that fulfill your promises.

And for any contracting business, from landscapers to digital tradesmen, it’s a constant fight for every dollar. If you don’t offer the best service at the right time for your customer, then every penny of that revenue could go elsewhere.

When they shop, customers usually don’t choose the exact best fit for their needs, but instead something good enough. For example, when you’re shopping at a supermarket, how often do you closely inspect every unit before buying produce? Usually, you only put back produce with visible spoilage, and trust that the other choices are so similar that choosing between them costs time that isn’t worth spending.

And that trust is why you buy from that supermarket, instead of just walking to another one.

The “Trust Problem” in Business

Good customers have 3 things: a problem that you can solve, the means to fairly compensate you for a solution, and the customer’s cooperation when solving the problem.

Once you deliver good results for your satisfied customers, you’re just a step away from securing their trust completely. We can call this final barrier the “Trust Problem”.

And to solve that problem, businesses have to ask and answer this: Why don’t customers trust my product?

Glad you asked.

Trust in You vs. Your Product

First, to answer that question, it’s important to distinguish between trust in your products vs. trust in product lines, in your brand, or in you. For the sake of this discussion, let’s treat product lines as equivalent to a single product.

Customers are often loyal to a company, brand, or product alone. These customers are the easiest to convert towards adjacent products and services since rarely will a customer object to more of the thing they’ve already seen great results from. As long as you can deliver those results, building trust is easiest when customers already know you.

Customer loyalty builds before the customer ever makes a purchase. Wish lists inspire very wishful thinking about whatever’s on them from the people who write them. Sometimes these people even refer friends towards things on their wish list, and won’t buy it themselves!

Building a Transparent Digital Brand

Building and showing off your brand as trustworthy is the hardest step. The declining number of ad clicks can be attributed almost exclusively to a growing lack of consumer trust in the digital space. And, after all, even the best marketer will have difficulty selling you a pen while representing Haifa Fertilizer.

By tracing the fine lines of trust to their source, you can map an entire buyer’s journey from the customer’s perspective – the ultimate way to win any business.

In other words, by modeling the customer relationship from the customer’s perspective, in terms of building trust, you’re giving yourself a cheat sheet for sales and success. And this “treasure map” will lead you right to the pulse of a buyer’s heartbeat; their trust.

So, as business owners and marketers, how do we trace the buyer’s journey back to the very first impression?

By reading their minds.

And while you probably can’t actually do that, there are plenty of buyer metrics that indicate a customer’s wants, needs, and pain points. Usually, the more you let customers know about you, the more willing they become to share their problems. And if you can help them with those, then the keys to a winning deal are virtually handed to you.

Not Enough Info

Many businesses don’t convey essential information about themselves. This rule can manifest in many ways; common examples include having undeveloped branding, vague product descriptions, or maybe a lack of online reviews.

Every time a customer notices a flaw in your branding that seems easy to fix, you lose credibility with them. It’s like entering a hotel that expects you to make the beds.

If your customer is truly an ideal fit, then you should already have them. The only reason you don’t is because your offer isn’t transparent enough. And if they still don’t want what you have, then perhaps you were never their ideal fit.

Bad Impressions / Perceived Risks

First impressions matter most.

If you make a bad first impression, then impressions after that usually return less than offers sent to new prospects. Keeping your reputation above water fills the trust gap that’s blocked many great deals from ever being made.