Trust can kill a sale, but it can't make it!

"Lead generation takes place when a person's need and your brand message intersect in an environment of trust." - Joe Abraham of BOSI via Twitter.

This tweet started an interesting email discussion between Joe and myself and to make a long email trail short...here is the core of the discussion.

There are many, many elements of lead generation/sales for businesses, but there are four key elements to the process:

1) Customer Need

2) Business Solution

3) Business Message/Offer

4) Environment of Trust

Joe's belief was that the "environment of trust" was the key element to the transaction to acquire a lead. That if a prospect believed that his information could be trusted with the business, then they would reach out and share his contact info with them and become an actual lead.

I confess that at first, I was not swayed by his "tweet". In hindsight, I think he is right, but that he also didn't explain the full transaction. (I guess that is the danger of forcing us to be insightful in 140 characters or less. :-)

I believe that all 4 steps of lead generation must be taken and in order for a lead to be fully developed. There must be a need, there must be a solution and then the business must deliver a message and offer that entices the prospect to act, but finally, there must be an environment of trust that exists between prospect and business.

All four elements are critical in the lead generation game. You can't skip any of them!

• The prospect MUST have a Need!
• Your business MUST have a REAL SOLUTION!
• Your business MUST have a relevant, authentic message with an enticing offer!
• You must build trust with your prospect! (side note: I think delivering an authentic message will help build this environment of trust.)

Without trust, the prospect will not act! So, I guess Joe was right, but my argument remains....

Which leads back to the headline of this post, lack of trust can kill a sale, but it can't make a sale on it's own!