Gaining Trust and Sales Through Credibility

So many businesses get sold on the idea of growing their website, sales and leads through branding, better content and more SEO, but few remember to apply SCCB [Sales Credibility & Confidence Builders]. You can have great branding, content and SEO and still have a low-converting website. So how does SCCB make the difference?

You may have an exceptional product that can truly impact your buyer’s life or business, but if your website can’t get positive decisions from even your most promising prospects, the true roadblock might not be the product or content, it could simply be lack of credibility & confidence.

Other customers, just like those prospects going to your website, have experienced tremendous success with your offerings, yet you’re not using their success to create new clients and success stories. I still don’t understand why many businesses neglect to collect their successes and case studies from customers they’ve helped already.

If a low conversion website sounds all too familiar, it’s because today’s buyers are more discerning than ever. They’re not particularly interested in your company’s product per se, what they do care about is solving their problems. However, they may not be inclined or able to connect the dots and understand why doing business with your company is the best decision.

They’ve likely been burned before [haven’t we all] and because of this, they don’t make a decision [even when they see value] unless there is credible evidence to support your claims. So how do you give them the credibility and safety in making a good decision to choose you?

Your website must establish credibility to engage buyers effectively. And achieving this goes beyond simply talking about your products/service. Whether you’re B2B or B2C, your website needs to share insights that enhance your credibility and position you as valuable assets throughout the buying process.

But there’s a catch: sharing insights isn’t just about showcasing knowledge or explaining how your product solves customer problems. It’s about influencing the way buyers perceive the value. Two winning approaches for sharing insights are effective storytelling and meaningful points of view. Let’s dive into how these strategies can transform your team’s selling efforts.

Storytelling that Dances Into a Prospects Mind

First off, let’s clarify the difference between storytelling and the customer stories that most salespeople and websites rely on. The stories you find on websites usually focus solely on the results achieved, with the product being the hero, rather than highlighting the strategy, approach, or process behind the success. Just take a look at any company’s website, and you’ll find countless case studies boasting impressive returns on investment (ROI), which, unfortunately, don’t offer much differentiation from their competitors.

If you want your website to stand out and establish both differentiation and credibility, they can’t rely solely on discussing products or ROI. Instead, they must share stories that showcase the value, experience, and insights they bring to the table, rather than just presenting isolated metrics.

We have taught our clients to use C.A.S.E. Studies, which is an acronym that stands for Challenge, Approach, Solution and Experience. When you have a formula for how you deliver results and can explain the experience in a way others can evaluate the outcomes, you are giving potential clients a way to know it will work for them or even to be able to ask questions regarding their own situation that leads to more sales.

The Art of Effective Storytelling in Sales Conversations

Your compelling stories must possesses three key attributes:

Relevance: You must have stories tailored to specific products and services. General testimonials often look contrived and won’t resonate with buyers as well as ones that meet each unique situation or challenge which past clients experienced and you solved.

Relatability: If you write your own cases and testimonials and have clients put their name to them, you are missing the point. Client created content is really powerful. Clients write differently and are usually more sympathetic or relatable than staged ones. Besides drawing the buyer into the narrative, you get a better understanding of how your clients like and use your product. 

Conciseness: The story should be well-organised, with a clear beginning, middle, and end, delivering a compelling point. It should strike the perfect balance, providing enough information without overwhelming the buyer. That’s why we recommend you use C.A.S.E. as a formula. Besides the individual cases looking better, when you have consistency to your format, the whole client success story looks more appealing.

Side Note: Most clients will tell you they don’t know how to write a case. Tell them to be honest and put their story in their own words. If someone else beside the person who bought the product or service uses it more than the original buyer, ask them to assist in writing the experience. This is the other reason you want a good format, not all success stories are super glamorous and the format helps keep them uniformed. 

How To Tell Positive & Negative Stories

Ever been on a website or in a sales presentation and all that was presented were the positives? It doesn’t feel balanced, does it? But you don’t want to go around telling negatives, so how do you present the challenges or potential problems?

Positive stories should illustrate instances where your organisation collaborated with the customer to achieve successful outcomes, with a focus on the journey. How did your organisation help the customer achieve those results?

What valuable lessons did you learn along the way? Which lessons did you learn that you added to your presentation to pass on to future customers? Collect great stories of process, changes, customisation and clarity, so new customers feel you are an expert and can deliver similar results for them. 

Conversely, we believe you should share stories that highlight challenges and hurdles encountered during the journey. More importantly, you can share how they changed your business, product, service or customer results. While you ultimately will achieve most client’s desired outcomes, some journeys have their fair share of speed bumps.

Your case studies and white papers [if you use them] can leverage these stories to guide buyers away from approaches that won’t work for them. Customers appreciate this kind of honest experience sharing. We’ve had clients who didn’t make a purchase from us send others to us, simply because of their experience and our honesty.

If you want your website to truly engage buyers, it needs to provide more than what can be found in a sales pitch on your company’s website. Information collected and learned through real-world case studies, testimonials, reviews and stories, not only sets your website apart but also instils confidence in buyers that they can trust your guidance throughout the buying process and beyond.

Sharing a Unique Perspective

Buyers often find immense value in fresh perspectives that challenge their existing knowledge and offer alternative approaches or new insights. However, you need to be careful not to go too far off the common client perspective to consider different viewpoints, as this can cause misunderstandings and loss of sales.

We’ve seen many businesses try and be clever in their approach and have it backfire. If you have a fresh approach to your delivery, processes, support or product/service absolutely highlight them. Make sure the majority of what you are telling a potential customer still resonates for someone researching and comparing other products and services to yours.

[Here’s a big no-no for you. Don’t try to use SEO keywords or keyphrases to give your product/service a unique perspective. It will come off as fake and get you the opposite results you are looking to create]

The Power of a Compelling Point of View [Not spouting opinions]

A point of view is not just an opinion! It’s a well thought through positioning, provable statement combined with a fresh, but realistic new perspective that stimulates and expands a buyer’s thinking [and ability to buy]. Let’s take the example of our business, Dance Monkey Design, a web design and marketing systems company that assists customers in enhancing their website and marketing successes. 

Positioning: When you first hear “web design and marketing system” you think duh of course that’s what a business needs. But when you go looking in google to find those for small businesses, you don’t find any fresh innovation or advancements [strong statement I know, but go have a look for yourself].

We believe you should only position higher-end products/services where you need to strongly advise a customer how to choose one particular path over another. In our experience for example, based on extensive market evidence, improving website sales & leads is not just about building a bigger more expensive website that regurgitates old content and uses paid ads and over abundant amounts of SEO.

Instead, we can show potential clients that websites are inherently passive media and that they should consider adding proven marketing elements that will enhance a website’s ability to become a more high-converting site without the giant price tag. Our fresh and honest approach is a new perspective for clients and it opens their eyes to some new possibilities and tools that will make achieving their outcomes more attainable faster.

Here’s a point to keep in mind, we didn’t and you shouldn’t make things up, you should know without a shadow of a doubt that your perspective and positioning is legitimate and effective. [you might see how compelling stories lead to the right next step for a client, cases and testimonials 🙂 ]

Let me just mention this about the perspectives of your innovative position. When you offer a unique position, your perspective must demonstrate a deep understanding of the market and presents the pros and cons of various approaches, otherwise it’s not a fresh perspective, it’s a sales ploy [I hope you know that customers have gotten too smart for cheap sales ploys right? And on a website they won’t keep reading.

So just don’t do it, cool?] So back to the Dance Monkey Design positioning with the new perspective added. We show someone the entire six step process and how it saves time and money. More importantly how it changes a website from passive to active and how it can be measured.

If all of it is provable, then customers can typically see they do have a choice, another website or a Dance Monkey Website Marketing System. Here’s the best part, selling disappears from the conversation and the customer is now free to make an informed decision.

The best positioning and perspective may still not sell every buyer, but it definitely gives your website an advantage when it offers potential customers a unique path to their outcomes . 

Where to from here?

Now that you know a bit more about these two concepts, storytelling and positioning & perspective, I hope you can see how they complement each other, more importantly how they can set you apart from your competitors online. 

Successful website interactions require the ability to tell engaging stories while expressing points of view that convey value. We suggest that you review your past and current clients to create a repertoire of stories that can be employed throughout the buyer’s journey on your site, consistently showcasing your credibility. 

Three things you can do right now to easily find a new positioning for your business and tell more relevant and compelling stories.

1. Go through your sales process and delivery process like a customer. If you’ve read other articles I’ve written, you’ll have seen this before. It’s because in consulting to many businesses and getting the owner to do this exercise, we found many hidden failure points that when recognised and corrected gave the business new life. 
2. Make story collection and positioning solutions part of sales, marketing, customer service and account management. One client made it a part of the regular follow up process and had over 50 cases in less than a year. It will boost your confidence and give you an arsenal to use in converting new clients.
3. For your case studies and testimonials, if you can use clients for cases, great! If not you know all the common challenges and questions someone would be asking before they buy, so turn them into problem solving cases until you can gather some real client cases. They are still honest accounts of how you solve things, that’s the second best way to create assurance for potential buyers. 

In Closing…

By sharing our experiences, perspectives, and insights, we differentiate ourselves in a crowded market and forge meaningful connections with our buyers. Don’t settle for conventional sales approaches or you might just be settling for average results. We believe in capturing attention, gaining trust, and building lasting relationships through our unique style and obviously, we recommend that to our clients as well. We’d love to hear how this works for you. If you have any questions, please get in touch 🙂

CLICK HERE For more information on Dance Monkey Design and our Web Design Marketing System