When owning a business that offers a service or product, you have to build trust with your customers and future customers. One extremely important aspect of doing this is having and building credibility. Credibility can seem to be a bit abstract at times, with everyone having a different idea of what it means. In this blog you will learn exactly what credibility is when it comes to business and the four core pieces that are required to build credibility.
Credibility is the quality of being trusted and believed in. Credibility is incredibly important when it comes to establishing a successful small business. Credibility is way more important for keeping clients and customers than it is for getting new customers. Your existing customers are the ones that are going to be loyal, come back to you and refer you to others. Remember, it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than finding a new one.
The four core pieces to having credibility as explained by Stephen M. R. Covey in his book The Speed of Trust:
- Integrity (is what you say and what you do the same?)
- Intent (what’s your agenda?)
- Capabilities (are you relevant/competent?)
- Results (what’s your track record? Can you deliver?)
Let’s go into a little more depth on how each one of these is an important piece that helps to make up your credibility.
Integrity
Integrity is what happens when you are the same behind closed doors as you are in public. People look at the little things. When a company is marketing and branding itself one of the attributes that it really needs to be careful of is consistency. Companies or brands can make or break themselves in this place. The biggest spot where it can go wrong or fluctuate is at the customer service level. It happens all the time. When customer service doesn’t align with the message of a company it can radically impact referrals, reviews, business, etc.
Intent
What a company says and what a company does may be the same thing, but what is the intent behind that? Is the intent to get ahead, to fraud or to deceive? Is the company just looking for a winning situation or does the company actually believe in what it is doing?
Most of the time in life and most of the time in business there is enough for everybody. You can make a profit and take care of the customer. The best way to do that is to make sure what your company is doing and what you are telling your customers you are doing is aligned with what they want.
Capabilities
Does what you do fall within the area of your skills, gifts or talents and what you like to do? How good are you at what you do? People’s capabilities often fall in line with a measuring scale with the acronym of TASKS: talents, attitude, skills, knowledge and style.
To learn more about how to use TASKS, give this blog a read next: Leadership is Getting Results in a Way That Inspires Trust
Results
What’s your track record? Do you deliver? Is your organization delivering on the promise that you communicated to your customers in your message? Is the customer getting what they want?
If you want to strengthen your credibility you need to make sure you are doing what you say you’re going to do and aligning your integrity, intent and capabilities with your results. Credibility is not an either/or; it’s something that happens in degrees. If you’re going to build credibility it’s helpful if you know how to evaluate the different aspects to see if you are indeed, credible. These specific pieces and parts will help you to evaluate where you are as a company or small business and what you need to work on.
Do you want to have a successful small business that has credibility amongst its customers? We can help implement a strategy that will help to get you there.
Since 2002, Half a Bubble Out has been dedicated to providing marketing, advertising and small business consulting that meet the needs of our clients. We specialize in powerfully telling stories through inbound marketing to grow your business filled with more passion and provision. Based in Chico California, we serve clients throughout Northern California and across the country to New York.
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