Editor's note: Stephen Jackson is a business development professional in the Washington, D.C. area. This article appeared in the July 12, 2010, edition of Quirk's e-newsletter.

Trust is the essential currency of effective sales and marketing. Large companies spend tens of millions of dollars to build a brand. A brand is nothing more than a promise kept. Promises kept form trust in the customer's mind. This expensive investment in brands buys name recognition and the customer confidence that goes with it; a favorable position or association in the mind of the customer; and a belief that a company with so much invested in its reputation will not disappoint its customers. Investments in brand development pay rich dividends by locking in loyalty which is spawned by trust.

Smaller companies often simply can't afford the money it takes to establish a national brand. Instead of relying upon an established reputation, they must build trust and confidence from the moment a customer lands on their doorstep. Big companies have their brand, but small companies have the advantage of a personal face and personal character to the business - and connecting personally can be an effective persuasion factor.

Especially for small to mid-size companies, but for anyone studying the topic of trust, here are the five elements of creating and cultivating customer trust in business:

Benevolence/Concern: The customer has to have confidence that you have their best interests at heart and you will protect their interests. Customers want to know that you feel their pain and that you are concerned about them and their issues beyond the lip service it takes to land a sale.

Reliability: Reliability refers to the extent to which they can depend upon you to come through for them, to act consistently and to follow through. This will engender long-term relationships.

Competence: You must have the ability to perform the tasks required by the customer. Clients want to be sure you know exactly what you are doing. They need to feel a low level of risk when working with you. Sometimes they can't see and touch the product, so your ability to solve their problem becomes the focal point. In a real sense, your competence speaks for the product.

Honesty: A vendor's integrity, character and authenticity are all dimensions of trust. The degree to which you can be counted on to represent situations fairly makes a huge difference in whether or not the customer trusts you. Clients value honesty when dealing with a service company. They want a representative to be straight about what will work and what won't.

Openness: Judgments about openness have to do with how freely you share information with your prospects and customers. Guarded communication, for instance, provokes distrust because customers wonder what is being withheld and why. Openness is crucial to the development of trust between businesses and customers.

Once trust is lost, by obvious violation of one of these determinants, it is very hard to regain. Thus, there is clear asymmetry in the building versus destruction of trust. Hence being and acting trustworthy should be considered the only sure way to maintain a trust level. 

A simple explanation

The following example offers a simple explanation of the principles of trust. Say you have a brother who wants to come over and help set up your new 52-inch home theater HDTV, but he knows nothing about electronics or the assembly process. You know he has your best interests at heart, but there is no competence involved. You can't trust him. On the other hand, you go to a specialist doctor who has plaques and degrees covering his office walls, yet he makes you wait an hour and a half and then shuffles you through his exam without a personal touch. You know he seems to be competent, but as for your best interests? You don't trust him. It has to be both competency and benevolence.

May be more difficult

Trust can only exist if the customer believes that the seller has both the ability and the motivation to deliver goods and services of the quality expected by the consumer. This belief may be more difficult for an Internet merchant to foster than it is for a conventional merchant. In Internet commerce, merchants depend on an impersonal electronic storefront to act on their behalf. Additionally, the Internet lowers the resources required to enter and exit the marketplace. Internet merchants are subject to fly-by-night consideration, as there are fewer assurances for customers that the retailer will stay in business for the long haul. In the conventional arena, customers have traditionally put stock in the seller's investments in physical buildings, facilities and personnel. Retailers on the Internet thus face a situation in which customer trust starts off low.

The first state

Trust is the first state of psychosocial development in humans. It occurs, fails or succeeds in the first two years of life. When it succeeds we tend to have faith in human nature and are predisposed to seek trust in others. Then, we grow up and become individual and corporate consumers. The key driver in our buying habits is to find vendors, retailers and sellers whom we trust. We hope they don't take advantage of us. We want them to be competent and to have our best interests at heart. The relationship could be and often is a long one, so we calculate the gain depending on their reliability and predictability. We can detect easily any wavering from openness and honesty. We want to arrive at the point of trusting sellers because we have experienced their trustworthiness in the past.