Monday morning, May 15, 2018, 6am in the Netherlands: the moment this newsletter was delivered to your inbox. In about three hours I will be landing in Singapore. After touch down, I will be all geared up to deliver an Alliance Masterclass to an Asia-Pacific team of a global company.
Building on trust
The past months I have experienced some cases of doing business with clients where trust was the essential element of coming together. Some of them were even purely built on trust. In those cases, we arranged everything that needed to be arranged. No difficult contracts or lengthly negotiations, a virtual handshake was all that was needed. With mutual respect and high levels of trust, those are the great clients to be working with.
Unfortunately I have also experienced the opposite over the past few months: cases with a complete lack of trust. Cases where I was asked for the most strange procurement details. Obviously, those cases never came to fruition. It did not feel good, there was no trust and I declined these opportunities.
Can we still do business purely based on trust?
I believe we can. My travel to Singapore is an example of it, it was enabled by the speed of trust. In fact, trust is for me an essential cornerstone of my business. When there is trust with a client, there is mutual respect. If the “feeling” is good, then we can do really great things together. This means the foundation is there and synergy is about to happen.
Is the old fashioned handshake still sufficient to do business together, in Today’s fast paced world? I am convinced it is possible and some recent experiences confirm my conviction.
How about your business, can you speed it up and build it more on trust and less on contracts?