Trust Enablement: The Future of Business Growth

You. I'd like to just ask the audience a question. Just to sit and think about this. Now, to give you some context, I've said over 100,000 executive meetings between C Suite and executives over the past 15 years, working with the biggest firms and some of the smallest firms in the world, like literally the biggest firms. And every single time, we would build a program and we would run a meeting initiative. And Tricia, you guys were a part of this. And in my recap with those companies last year, we found that only 3% of those meetings actually closed. Now, it was a lot of money, it was a lot of generated wealth out of that. But that left 97% of the deals on the table. Think of getting 100 to 300 meetings with C suite executives for six figure, seven figure opportunities and only closing 3% of them. That was great. We hit our numbers. It was the numbers game, right? Well, really what it was was a failure of trust. The trust gap was so big. And so I want to just ask you, think about the. This is a question I asked all of my clients. I said, out of all the deals you've closed in the last two, three, four years, how, as a percentage, how many were from a referral or a trusted resource, and how much was from a cold call or a cold email or social post or something like that that wasn't related to somebody that you knew? Right. If you ask that question, usually the answer is 97%. Right? It's like that's the math that we sorted. And if you don't have a tactical solution that's like directly correlated to an outcome, then it's probably 100%, because that's just the way it goes. And so it really got me to begging the question of how can we leverage trust in a more powerful way? How can we leverage referrals in a more powerful way? And after a lot of research and a lot of study, we found that there was a trust that. We all know this, right? I'm not telling you guys something you don't know. Trust is the currency of business. Everyone, all the speakers have already been talking about that. We all feel that we inherently know it. But that's not the problem. The problem is how do you scale that? Like, you get, what's the problem with referrals? When I would sell against referrals, it was they're non predictable, non scalable. Typically you don't get the right person on the phone and so forth and so on, and so you want those. But there's not really a great way to get them to scale out. And that's kind of the. That's the process, that's the tool that we've built, is to help you understand how to do that more effectively and how to manage your network, how to. How to be the most trusted person in your network consistently. Because we all have a pretty decent network now. There's some, a lot of statistics about this, but all of us here typically have 5 to maybe as high as 18 really close trusted network friends. Now, if you think about your circles, think about your inner circle. Maybe about five people that you talk to probably every day, right, that are really trustworthy. You can do a lot with them. And then maybe colleagues, maybe your executive team, maybe family. And that's your inner circle. And then you have this layer right around that. That's a really great circle of trust. That is people that you would really do a lot of business with. You could definitely refer. You know, you may not talk to them every day, but maybe once a month, you guys are connecting and you got a really great rapport. And then there's a third one right outside of that, which is, we're colleagues, we respect each other. The trust layer is maybe a little lower, but we still trust each other and we'll do business and we'd happily give each other referrals. So if you think about that, that layer can go from anywhere from 50 to 200 people. And there' power users. Probably a lot of you are power users in the sales space that have 500 connections that are. Would fit all three of those categories. But how do you manage that? Because, you know, how do you build trust with all those people? You can't, right? Like, have you ever been the person that says, man, I've been meaning to reach out to that person, anybody, right? We've all done that. Like, I was just thinking about this the other day. I was like, I met this gentleman who was who we really hit it off with. He was a huge influencer out of Chicago in the legal space. Had tons of clients around the world that could make a lot of referrals to me and somebody I put in my notes. I want to keep a tight relationship with this guy and grow that. And guess what? I didn't, because it just wasn't top of mind. I just couldn't do it with the volume of people that are in my personal network of influence. And so we all have those prospects or those individual influencers or those channel relationships that we want to grow the greatest relationship with, right? Gerhard and I have got to know each other really well over the past many weeks. And, and in that journey, you know, Gearhard should be part of that trust network with me. And I need to make sure that I'm engaging and interacting and touching base like I would want to. But because our days are busy and our calendars get full and our focus is on sales, we focus on the three or four that are top of mind and everybody else just what kind of falls by the wayside. Right? And that's unfortunate. So our tool helps you manage your trust relationships, putting them into a network that you care most about, enabling you to never be the person that forgets the thing that matters most by creating a monitoring system for your trust network to remind you on a morning, by morning basis of big events and things that matter within your network's power, right within your network's world. And what we want to do is we want to help you build a trust development program for everybody that matters to you. And that's what our tool enables. It helps you do that. And so you may see in the chat box, there's an early access. Our MVP is coming out within about 60 days. Love for you guys to jump in and get early access right now. We're, we're very excited about the tools and the enablement that this brings. And think about it like this. We want to do this right. You want, if you had the perfect world, you could, you could like draft it out for yourself. You would put your, you would build your networks, you would know who your executive team is, your, your clients, your prospects, your, your board of advisors, if you're a founder, right, Your board of directors, your family, whoever else might be there. And when you build out these networks and you put the people into those networks, what you really want to be able to do is manage that right? And you want to be able to monitor it. But we have tools that can help with that. So why not leverage AI to monitor and fill out the full profile on a daily basis or weekly basis or monthly basis, right? Why not have that person monitored and when a big event comes up, it triggers to fall within a communication sequence for you and tell you, hey, maybe send this text to this person. That would help you advance your trust score. So the world that we live in today is really focused on numbers. It's really focused on growth, like, you know, the traditional sales process. And I, in my journey over the past 15 years, I've seen private equity firms buy about 20ish companies that were clients of mine in the middle of our work together. And what they typically come in and do is they'd fire the sales staff, they'd bring in a new sales staff, they'd hire CRO, a VP of Sales, 10 BDRs, give them a zoom info and say, hey guys, go pound sand, right? Go get it right. Go, go, go. And then about nine months or 12 months later, almost in every situation, for the most part, we saw those teams fully dismantled. And then the PE firm went to an acquisition strategy instead. Now, of course, it's not always the case, and I'm sure there's situations where it's not like that if you're not engaging executives, but if you're looking to interact with the at the higher level markets, the cold engagements kind of fallen by the wayside, right? Cold calling, cold email has taken a drastic hit with AI technologies. Preventing spam, preventing cold outreach, preventing cold calling in a lot of ways. And so how do we engage? Right? The only way for you to do that is to enhance and manage your current network to the fullest of its capacity. Did you guys know that there's an $88 billion lost opportunity year over year, according to Gartner on lost referral opportunities that are sitting right there in your network? Right. So if we build this, if you build your network the right way and you can see into your second degree network, there's plenty of tools out there that do this, right? But you buy into the concept of I need to have a trust enablement system for my life and for my company, right? I need to have trust enablement as the centerpiece of my organization. Because a trust enables enabled operating system inside of an organization allows you to get more deals faster, quicker, larger, right? That's really important. And they close more frequently. So higher conversion, faster close rates, bigger deal size, right? If you do this the right way, if you build the right trust enablement operating system or the trust operating system into your business, and then if you do that the right way, what also comes is capital, right? And then also great hires and then also retention. So all of these things happen if you build the right trust operating system at the center of your organization. And so we've seen this now happen time and time again. And what we really want to see organizations adopt is the philosophy that trust and relationship are the centerpiece of an organization. And how do we build an engine around that that amplifies our voice, amplifies our reach, amplifies our access to the market. That's the most important thing. So we did a research study of over 1,000 companies that sold for over $50 million. And we did this mostly in the professional services and SaaS tech space where we did most of that research. And what we found is that 97% of those organizations had an established referral generation system for their growth engine. That's pretty impressive if you think about it. And so if you're able to build a referral engine now, there's lots of ways to do that. You can do that through a trust network. But typically, you know, in the SaaS space there's a lot of, you know, ways to integrate, you know, a partner networks and reseller networks and so forth. And those were part of that, that exchange. But there's also a deeper way to do that through a trust operating system. And trust operating system is about how do I build a network of influencers around my business that are vested in my company, that are and will be my proponents on media, my proponents in deal flow, my proponents with their colleagues, my proponents to their client base, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And building that infrastructure the right way is critical. And I really encourage everybody to try and go do that. So how do you systemize trust into your organization and leverage this trust equation into your, into your, into your everyday work? So those are some of the things I wanted to talk about today. And why do we want to do all that? Right, and I mentioned it just a second ago, but because our business cycles will get faster, our deal flow will be quicker, our deal size will be larger and our close rates will be higher because we're centering our growth on trust network access. Now people say, well, I don't quite get it. I don't quite understand how building a trust network allows me to grow faster with all these, because I still have the problem of non predictability and infrequency for referrals, which is absolutely true. But a well established trust infrastructure creates dual commitment between parties that are in a trust relationship. And so if you could essentially know who out of your trust influencers, your channel partners, your influence networks, your board of advisors, your board of directors, your executive teams, if you could know their circles of influencers influence and see into their second degrees, right? And know who out of those second degree networks they had a good relationship with, then you could request referrals on purpose, on point, that fit your ICP and they would gladly give it. The problem is we have, the market has almost complete network blindness. And that's what that's called, it's called network blindness. And so what we want to be able to do is specifically grow really great targeted relationships with trust network individuals that have access to our ICP and then build that really authentically. And that's really the essence of what our technology supports you in doing on your own. You can definitely do it manually. But my biggest scream to the market, right, my biggest wish for all of you here is that you figure out what is your trust enablement system, what is your trust infrastructure that you're building at the centerpiece of your business to grow consistently at scale, right? And if you do this really well, you should be able to generate your firm anywhere from a hundred to several thousands of leads a year. Now, one of my board members and a good friend of both Trisha's and mine helped shared this, this concept with me and he said he did this as a board of directors member with, with DocuSign as they were. Is it DocuSign or Trisha? Was it DocuSign or Dropbox? It was one of the two. So one of the Ds. So he was on the board with this firm and they got.

It's DocuSign.

Yeah, it was, yeah, it was DocuSign. Okay, so, so. And they were able to implement a trust infrastructure like this and get over 6,000 referrals in their first year. It's pretty, pretty dang impressive, right? So if you understand how to build an operating system that is trust centric about managing the network of network effects, then what you're getting is you get tremendously high quality referrals on purpose, on point, that have all three stages. The faster close, the faster sales cycle, and the larger deal size as part of the baked in solution. Because trust has already been overcome. Now over my career and my 100,000 meetings, we landed meetings with Elon Musk, with Tim Cook, with 80% of the Fortune 500 companies for our clients through cold email. And that market's dead. You know, that market, that price, the cost to do that same work that we used to do four years ago is now four times higher than it was back then. To get those leads, to get those opportunities and the ability to do that was great. But even if I was winning, right, even if our cold calling program was winning for a company, their close rate was only 3%. And that was pretty much for most companies, just a non starter to continue on. So we had a higher churn rate because of it. And so being the best in the world at executive engagement setting 100 to 300, in some cases thousands of meetings for clients like C Suite and others, what we found was because the trust coefficient, the trust transfer wasn't there. It created a trust gap. And then we could never really get a consistent flow to high quality conversion, right? The only way to offset that was time. So if they had a good operating system that managed the follow up and nurtured those leads for two years, we would consistently get calls back. I got one particular client, hey, two years. I had this lead for two years, but they finally closed as a $2 million deal. It's like they were only a $3 million company at the time. I was like, that was awesome, right? What a great, great win. But they still didn't rehire us or they didn't continue on with that because the gap of trust development was time based in that case, right? So having good follow up, we all know, is a really powerful, powerful solution. So that's really where my belief is, is that we are in a world that has gone through an AI evolution, an Internet evolution. Really. You think about the early days, what were we doing? We're just building infrastructure, right? Internet infrastructure, people getting on the web, getting websites and so forth. And then we moved into the connection era, right? Where everybody was like, oh, let's all connect, let's, let's LinkedIn connect, let's Facebook connect, let's, you know, MySpace back in the day, right? It was like just all kinds of, just more, more, more, right? We got these big networks, especially in the sales world. It was just like, connect, connect, connect, get access, right? It was an access era. And now we're moving into something that's unique. We're moving into what we would, I'd call signal, right? What my, my team and I have called signal, which is, where's the, where's, where's the risk? Where do we restrict the noise and start to move out the noise for efficacy, efficiency, access with trust. Where do we, that's where we're moving into now, where we have an era around us with AI that is deteriorating trust, right? What content can I trust? What videos can I trust? Am I even actually talk, Are you talking to me right now? I don't know. I could have my AI bot being this presenting for me, right? My digital self. But obviously this is me guys, as a human, right? But, but that's the point is like that doubt is deteriorating trust across the network, across the world. And so our ability to trust what we do is only through people that we already trust. And so that trust has to be transferred. And so I'll give you a couple of examples. Like we ran a campaign for a $2 billion IT services firm that just built a $500 million into their AI tech that cut 50 to 70% of development time out of any development structure for their clients. And they were working with a lot of fortune companies and they wanted to get new meetings with new markets, and they were. So they had hired our cold email company to help them access the markets with their authority, their brand, their heavy investment and all that they were doing. And do you know that it was nearly impossible to get them a meeting on the AI topic because nobody trust it. It wasn't just them. This was about seven different companies that were in the AI space that we marketed for. And what we found from the AI marketing point of view is that every IT firm in the world just became an AI expert firm, right? Every organization, everybody wanted to be at the front of the wave and be the expert, claim their space. So then all will happen is trust just went through the floor. Think about the people that, you know, I got. If I wanted to go build out an AI agent for my, as part of my operating team for my new company, who do I go to, right? Literally if I type it in, there's a million companies that pop up, say they can do it right now there's tools, there's build it yourselves or services, there's everything. So who do I go to? I'm going to go to my network and see who's done it, who's been dabbling in it, who's having success. And I'm going to talk to that person that's referred to me because I don't know, because the noise is so loud because everybody's all of a sudden doing it. And you know, most of them are all fake, right? So again, the trust quotient is dropping. And these are the things that we're dealing with as organizations, as professionals right now is how and where do we source trust? I mean the, like I have a auto dealership. I just bought a car for my son, right? And they set up an AI oriented inbound calls service agent. I could not get to a human no matter what I did. And it wouldn't answer my questions that I needed. So I drove 20 minutes down the road to the dealership to talk to somebody and it just really, just irked me, right? It really got under my skin and it just, it's deteriorating customer experience. And so like, like Mark talked about in the earlier call that you've got to have that connection to the live, you got to have the connection to the actual human. That's going to be something that's going to become more and more powerful and become a marketing tool over the coming years, you know, so those are just a bunch of the stories. Tricia, is there anything you'd like to highlight on this?

Nate, we've got one question already, and I think everything you're sharing is pouring into how important trust is and why we desperately need it. There's this sort of dystopia world where we don't care about anyone, et cetera. And everything you're talking about is all about the care and trust that we build in our relationships. So, Peter, put out the question, you know, how exactly does the tool work? So how are you designing it so that we are building off of that trust? And I'd love for you to share that.

Yeah, thanks, Peter. So in terms of the tool itself, guys, this is really about you knowing your deepest trust networks and putting them in categories, managing them within those networks, and then allowing the AI to enable trust. Right. Trust enablement through AI is what the tool is built for, not trust automation. Trust automation is the natural deterioration of trust. So, but if what we can do is use AI to inform you, right? So part of the executive buying ARC through a good friend of mine, Tom Searcy and Kara Jane, talk about this thing called the executive Buying arc. And the executive buying ARC is this philosophy that you need insights first informed insights to make to understand your implications, to understand your options, to make good decisions. That's all executives go through this arc, right? And so what our tool does is if once you've assigned your contacts, a few of your contacts into your deep trust network, the AI now monitors that person digitally on your CRM, in your email, in your calendar, and it helps you fill in the gaps. And what it is, it's a reminder system to you with activation on it, so that it will pop up for you to say, hey, you should, you know, we've built a trust enablement program. We've, our IP is really built around a thing called the trust transfer coefficient, which is this concept of how trust is transferred from individual to individual and where they stand as an individual without another person and where they stand as a person to person. So like Tricia and I, if, you know, we're peers, if I, we would have a mirrored high trust coefficient. But let's say if you have a hold of sales title and you're making more referral up to a CEO, unless you have something in your experience that built high trust, that would be you would have a low trust coefficient with that CEO. So you might want to find a different resource to get that introduction so you don't deteriorate that out of the gate. Yes, Tricia.

So, Nate, here's something that I really struggle with because my network is enormous, as you well know. There are a lot of people that I am very, in very close relationship with, and I don't want to miss the big things. I don't want to miss the important things. And so, you know, I make myself notes. I mean, it's a nightmare. My calendar is a nightmare because I'll put in, you know, don't forget to say good luck with the surgery and, and, and congratulations on your daughter graduating. And, and I'm still praying, I'm, I'm hoping that everything's working out. You know, all of those things. Does this, how will this help support that? Because those things are the, the real trust of the care of somebody you're really in relationship with.

Absolutely. This is the centerpiece. So you manage that in the profile of the Deep Trust app that will always be tracked, and it will build that into your trust development program and it will set you those reminders through the AI will learn it. Right. So if you have reading apps or you have note apps, then you can dump all that information and sync it into the profile. Right. So now the AI is managing a profile that has all the email communications, all your calendar events, all of your CRM notes, all of your AI notes from your meetings. Everything goes into one resource. And now it's building that into a trust development plan so that you don't miss the moments that matter. Right. That's what you're essentially saying, Tricia, you don't want to. One, you can't think about it. We can't. It's way too. You have way too many people to think about that. So you're going to miss it all the time. And we all are. We're all that way. And especially if you're a busy professional and you're aspiring and, you know, the more senior you go, the harder it actually becomes. So, like the ability to just be able to pop up in your phone and say, oh, yeah, I wanted to. I'm going to send a quick text because you had the note in about sending a prayer for them, for their health or whatever it might be, it'll just pop up. Hey, Trish, you said in one of your meetings that you wanted to just follow up on. Good, good, good tidings or whatever. Here's a text. Would you like me to send it for you? Or would you like to edit it? And then boom, off it goes. It's pretty straightforward. Yeah.

Now we have another question. And Marie asked, so what are the five main factors of trust this tool is helping me with? Is it a smart agenda?

A smart agenda. I mean, this is really about trust management to maintain what we would say is a trust development plan. So we want to nurture and enhance trust with everybody that we put into a network over time. And you can prioritize that 1, 2 or 3. And then that's basically how frequent you want engagement, right? One might be weekly, two might be monthly, three might be twice a year or every six months or whatever. You get to pick that, you can customize that and then you assign those priorities to everybody in your network. And then according to that, the trust engine will design a program for engagement and it will capture events, but it won't tell you every day to do those events. What it will do is it'll capture the events to create a single comment about a few things, potentially. If it was every month, for example, right, because we don't want to overwhelm you. You're a busy executive already, so you can't get it like, you know, you have 150 people, you can't have 150 notifications every day, that would, that would overwhelm us, right? So the whole point is you control those inputs and outputs and that the, if you're talking about like the ways in which it's managing, it's looking for everything based on what enhances trust. What enhances. So the main three things that enhance trust is consistency, authenticity and frequency. So if we take those three things that are baked into our algorithm, right, to understand that you need to be involved in those three things about something in their life that we're monitoring and managing from your various social inputs and then the digital social available web as well, then we're going to be in a really good shape. And remember, everything's an enablement, so it's a pop up up and you can always cancel it because I just talked to him yesterday and it didn't catch it. You can edit it or you can say, yeah, that's perfect, hit send and it's done, right? So it's a really fast way for you to be kind of like your little black book of sales that we used to keep, right? And you're like, right, it's what you're doing, Trisha, you write everything down. It just takes that out of your life and allows you to have faith that, hey, I'M going to manage people the way I want to.

So, Gerhard, speaking of enormous networks, here you are with this enormous network, and yet you truly care. And this is where I think sometimes people get what I feel is off track to me. If I say, if I'm meeting with someone and I know that a text is going to come out for me in two days saying, I'm really, I'm praying for you, I'm thinking about you, and I'm hoping everything's going well, that going out, I wanted it to go out. It is authentic. I feel it. If that goes out without me having to actually push send, then that means I can spend the time on the inbound. Either they just know that I'm continuing to think about them, or they write back and say, my goodness, Trisha, I need help. Or could you, you know, could you. Do you know somebody who could do this or whatever? How do you think about it? Gerhard?

Well, I think that the word priority comes to my mind when I listen to Nate and you. I'm reminded of what Mary Kay once said. You know, imagine every person with a sign across their chest that says, make me feel important. People want to be a priority to somebody. And if you recognize that. And when Trisha calls and I'm in. In the middle of something, something I pick up. When Nate calls, I pick up. Because you were prioritized in my life because you were givers and not takers or give a takers. You give abundantly without asking any questions. So I think the Deep Trust Network is all about prioritizing the people that you serve and in not being shy, asking for something in return so that we all subscribe to the same mindset, that we cannot do it alone and together by leveraging what we have, we're going to win big.

I don't know how better to end that. I mean, we're going into networking already, but Nate, thank you so much. This has just been an incredible, incredible review of what's important and then how we implement it. So excited to see the whole platform come into play.

And I'd love to just end with this from my end, guys, when. When trust grows, business grows. You know, trust is not just the glue of life and business. It's the growth engine of our future. And so if you guys understand that trust is the currency of the next 10 years, and if you can build your organization and your personal life around that, you'll advance your career. Like what? With AI and robots replacing literally everything as we see it, everybody sees it coming, and we're all. Everybody's like, what's going to happen? Your currency is your network. And as Gerhard and I have been talking about your network. The old saying, network is worth your. Is your net worth. Right. The deeper those relationships, the more valuable you as an individual and as a company will be to the market and to your company. So advance your network. Build deeper trust. Relationships enhance that, and then our tool can amplify that for you. You. Right. And that is your security for the future. Don't wait. Sign up for our early access. I'm so excited to be able to support you in that journey. Thank you. That's all I have.