What is essential for gaining a customer?
What is essential for retaining a customer?
What when neglected, will lead to losing a customer?

The answer to all three questions is “trust.” So, what is trust, and how do you develop it with prospects and preserve it when they become clients? Trust is built on three elements: credibility, accessibility and reliability.

Credibility
Credibility, whether we are talking about prospective customers or clients, refers to having a message that’s relevant and demonstrates our understanding of the customer’s situation. Today’s technology — websites, blogs, e-mail, white papers, social media, webcasts, webinars and online meetings — has made it easier than ever to get a message in front of a targeted audience. Wasting their time with information that doesn’t help them solve problems or further goals will do little to build trust and can erode the trust that has been established.

Takashi Omitsu of IMRA in Ann Arbor has led his originally pure research company to a blossoming commercial technology company in the field of ultra-fast (femtosecond-pulse) fiber lasers. In order to make a commercial product in femtosecond-pulse lasers Takahashi (“Tak”) has labored for 19 years of the company’s 20 year history.

The foundation for IMRA’s credibility grew organically through hiring a team of brilliant scientists that were given the tools to develop laser technology. As the company grew and made published breakthroughs in the development of lasers that pulse rapidly, yet take up little space and have very few moving parts, practical applications became apparent in fields such as Lasik eye surgery and for precision cutting of microelectronic materials and substrates.

Accessibility
Getting your credible message in front of prospects and clients is a wasted effort if you are not accessible to provide information for prospects when they request it or to answer questions or resolve problems for clients as they occur. If they can’t trust that you’ll be there when they need you, then they won’t trust you.

As word spread about IMRA’s advances, firms like Carl Zeiss Meditec, a German optics and Lasik surgery equipment manufacturer, approached IMRA with application ideas. Tak responded by bringing applications scientists together with his research team to help adapt the technology to address Lasik surgery challenges, and this required close collaboration with Carl Zeiss Meditec.

A willingness to tackle a market application for femtosecond-pulse fiber laser and collaboration with IMRA’s team provided accessibility for Carl Zeiss Meditec to a needed technology, and trust grew. Patients of the faster and more precise femtosecond-pulse fiber laser benefit by faster surgery and higher quality eye correction.

Reliability
As IMRA scaled up its production to meet the increasing demand from its customers, they could have improvised ad-hoc quality systems. But as they found themselves breaking new ground in manufacturing processes and technology, they chose to adopt Japanese automobile component manufacturing quality systems, despite the additional expense and effort required to set up and maintain the approach.

This foresight ended up allowing them to produce zero-defect quality levels right from the beginning, saving them from having to establish and retrofit a proven quality system once an inevitable quality failure would have likely occurred.

This focus on top quality right from the beginning of manufacturing solidified the third factor in maintaining trust with a customer-reliability. Reliability is an essential ingredient for any relationship. If you make a commitment to a prospect or client…keep it. No excuses. Prospects and clients won't trust you until they can rely on you to follow up and follow through as promised.

Trust is earned
Whether we are talking about prospects and clients or friends, family and colleagues, trust is an essential context. When absent, a relationship will either never flourish or will crumble; when trust is born of credibility, accessibility and reliability, it can cement a relationship and result in huge rewards for all involved. Takahashi Omitsu and IMRA are flourishing as they are making the transition from being a pure research company, to a research rich company with fully commercialized products, and their customers and many more people who may never know IMRA will benefit.

Copyright 2010 Marr Professional Development Corporation

Joe Marr is a public speaker, sales and management consultant and trainer, and runs Sandler Training Ann Arbor at 501 Avis Drive. To reach him call: 734-821-4830 or visit his website at: www.sandlerannarbor.com.