In this trustworthy episode, Natalie Doyle Oldfield, President of Success Through Trust Inc., shares how she helps business owners and leaders grow their companies by helping them build trust.
You will discover:
– How to measure trust in your brand
– The one question everyone on your executive team should ask?
– The three ways you can accidentally destroy trust
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello Hello and welcome welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast and I am here with yet another high demand coach. It is the one the only Natalie Doyle Oldfield. Now Natalie has been named one of the world’s top thought leaders in trust for five consecutive years by trust across America. Other leaders named in this list includes someone you might have heard of Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks, the author Stephen Covey as well. Natalie is recognized as one of Canada’s most inspiring women, business leaders and entrepreneurs, and has been nominated for the 2023 RBC Canadian women entrepreneurs award of the year. She Natalie’s training programs, trust measurement system tools and a propriety proprietary sorry, trust building framework are based on science and evidence and irregular she’s a regular podcast guest and writer, she is also a contributor to Forbes and has been featured in The Economist impact as a business trust expert. Well, Natalie, I’m so excited to have you here, you can always tell that it’s going to be good episode just by the couple of minutes leading in but even before that, just getting ready for this episode, I was really, really excited about what you have to share. I think it’s really unique, and it’s tremendously impactful. But before we unpack that, I’d love for you to share a little bit of what got you into coaching and consulting in the first place.
Natalie Doyle Oldfield
Well, I will, first of all, thank you so much for having me, Scott. So excited. And yes, I am very excited based on our conversations and what you do as well. We both love working with business owners and leaders. And so this is this is exciting. So Scott, what could be into this, I spent about 25 years in various marketing, and product and different types of business roles, and a variety of small medium sized and large multinational companies in and all these different types of roles, mostly customer marketing type roles. And while I was Chief Marketing Officer for a software company, I was asked to take over the sales role. And I really was like all Gosh, terrified to do all that. But I ended up doing it. And it was the right thing for the company. And it ended up being the right thing for me too. And when I took it over, I didn’t know how to do sales, though I didn’t know how to sell. And I love customers. And I’m curious. And the CEO at the time said, oh, you know what, you will love it, you’re already doing a lot of that anyway. So the market crashed about a month after I took over the role. And a lot of our customers went away or cancelled their agreements. And so I had to figure out how to do this. So very quickly, I asked everybody I knew that was really good at it and started reading all these books to try and figure out what to do. And it led me to, to service the customer, do whatever you can to help them. I got so excited and interested in how customers in a b2b environment decide to buy that I actually went back a year later to do my master’s degree. And boat, one, one and a half, two months into it, I learned that it actually all comes down to trust. Well that I was hooked. And so Scott, I have been focused on learning how people decide to trust figuring all that out for years. And while I was doing my grassroot research, I created a proprietary framework based on science and evidence of how people decide to trust and then I’m created a measurement system. And now I teach it and coach leaders and owners how to build trust in their organizations. I really believe that when we’re trusted when we have teams of people that know how to build trust with customers, everybody wins. Trust is directly correlated, and with recommendations, referrals, buying, and oh, yeah, satisfaction and experience. So it’s the foundation for customer experience, and it’s the critical success factor that drives a business forward. So I I got started because I kind of had to and fell into it to figure out how is it that we decide to buy. And it all comes down to First we decide to trust, then we decide to buy, or then we decide to go on a podcast or then we decide to invest in a company or work for a company. But it all starts with trust.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s it’s so powerful. And there’s a lot of folks who in our industry spent a lot of time on trust. But what struck me so remarkable, was twofold. One you depth on the topic. But two, as I was researching for the episode, you talk a lot about revenue. And even in this intro, he talked about moving into learning about trust from a sales perspective. And we’ve had folks on the show who talk about revenue, and it’s like an old, by the way, and we’ve had the folks who’ve talked about trust or culture or honored sincerity, and oh, by the way, but there’s a link between these two, What’s the link between trust and revenue?
Natalie Doyle Oldfield
Well, trust drives revenue, full stop, or as my niece would say, period, it drives revenue, it’s a benefit. So when you have what I call high trust equity, so when your customers have high trust in you, like I said, the research that I’ve done and the model I’ve created, is it there’s actually a statistically significant positive correlation between customer loyalty, continuation to buy, which means revenue. And all those other things I mentioned referrals. So so the link, it has been proven out. And it’s evidence based. When if you think about your buying behavior, right, when you have trust in an organization, trust in the people in the organization, specifically, Scott, because actually, people are made up companies are made up of people. So it’s about the interactions we have with everybody in an organization. That’s really where the rubber hits the road. It’s with the people, if all the people in an organization are consciously building relationships, or strengthening relationships, or protecting relationships, of trust with their customers, regardless of their role, whether they’re project managers, whether they’re in shipping, whether an accounting, customer service, engineering, production, doesn’t matter what role if everyone’s thinking about how can I build a relationship of trust, then what happens is an if they’re consciously doing this, the trust, what I call the trust, equity increases. And when we have high trust in an organization, it’s been found that 80% of people worldwide buy from companies they trust. So in addition to that 54% of people worldwide, pay more for products and services when they trust a company, you know, that varies by country. But trust is not a cultural thing we all buy, from companies we trust. So there’s a direct correlation, as you can see, not only with revenue, but row with retention of customers, right with stickiness to and I work with lots of different types of companies. And what’s incredible is that what we found is, is companies could have transformations inside, when they all learn how to build relationships of trust. And when else see the importance that they play the role that they play. And then everyone all of a sudden, not just the sales team, not just the account team, not just the customer service team. But everyone is listening for opportunities. Everyone’s listening about how can we, how can we provide value to a client? And and we all know, when we provide value to a client, and we have a close relationship. We learn about new opportunities, not only for the client, but for our companies. Yeah. And when you have a close relationship, they give clients give you ideas of how to augment your product or service, how to apply different and then we end up doing more work with them. Yeah, so there’s, you know, as you can see, I could go on and on, is it direct correlate revenue, and
Scott Ritzheimer
I love that and I couldn’t agree more. I think one of the things that’s challenging about that, and I think you’ve got an answer for this is that for most folks, sitting listening, the trust might be hard, it’s hard to quantify is at least like a qualitative discussion that we have is that a quantity they’d have way revenues easy, right? It’s either here or it’s not. But it doesn’t tell the whole story. So how can we? How can we start to measure our success and impact from a trust perspective?
Natalie Doyle Oldfield
So there’s lots of ways we can measure it. I love that you asked that. So you can measure it by what I call trust equity. So I actually created a measurement tool, I call it the client trust index. And it’s a survey tool that I work with companies and they say, Okay, we want to find out about the experience our customers are having with us or our stakeholders, mean customers could be, you know, member, it could be subscriber, it could be client, right? There’s a multitude of words that we use for my big word customer. And when, when I work with companies, they get a trust equity score, so it is quantitative, they get a score. That’s one way. Another way that you can measure is repeat customers. Right? What’s your customer retention rate? Yeah, so I have one client that I that I’ve been working with for a number of years, it’s a manufacturing company. And they had a big transformation inside their company. They didn’t measure the trustworthiness of or get their trust equity score, but what they did is they made whatever what I would say, you know, they, we, I worked with their senior leadership team first, because of course, that’s where it all starts right with the owners, the senior leadership team, and it cascades throughout whatever the culture is, whatever the vision is, purpose. I worked with them, and to teach them the eight principles of trust and my framework of building trust. And then I worked with their customer facing people, people from shipping from receiving to production, everyone who would touch a customer. And they went through what I program that I have, which I called trusted leader program, and everyone in the company went through this. So you know, I’d say medium sized company, they’ve both by 100 people. And over time, they all went through that. Well, what happens is they all get sensitive to sales, Scott. Right. So in addition to building relationships with customers, it comes sensitive to sales. And when everyone’s focused on having these conversations with clients, well guess what happens? A project manager is now going on a plant tour, and hearing about opportunities and bring it back. And now this one company, like I said it’s a manufacturing company, they have more sales opportunities than they’ve had in 20 years, because now we have, you know, dozens of people who are on stantly, interacting with customers, and hearing about opportunities. So not only do they have more sales leads and opportunities from current clients, but their retention of their clients has increased. So those are other ways you can measure it.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s fantastic. So there’s a question I have I like to ask all my guests, and it is this what is the biggest secret you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s the one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Natalie Doyle Oldfield
I wish everyone knew that reputation is about past performance. Trust is the number one predictor of future success. And longevity.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow. Yeah, that’s so good. So revenues about the past trust is number one indicator, and
Natalie Doyle Oldfield
and it’s a predictor of future success, right? You have trust. You know, like I said, it’s going to drive revenue, stickiness, loyal. Loyalty is a better word than stickiness. You know, the number of referrals, new opportunities, pulling engagement.
Scott Ritzheimer
Now, I know in your book, you mentioned this just briefly, but you’ve got a book out and you’ve got eight principles for building strengthening productive for creating more trust. If you could one, tell us where we can get a copy of that. But to pick one of those eight principles, what do you which of those do you think is maybe the most important?
Natalie Doyle Oldfield
That’s so tough to ask me which one’s the most?
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s not a fair question. It really isn’t.
Natalie Doyle Oldfield
Okay, so I can’t answer that quick. So thank you for mentioning my book. Yes. My book is called The Power of trust how top companies build, manage and protect it? I’ll answer the easy question first, you can get that on amazon.com, or Amazon, wherever, whatever country you’re in. So that’s the easy question, Scott. So yes, there are eight principles of building strengthening and protecting trust. Sort of backup, there are three components of building trust. So there are three components, when, and that’s communication, behavior, and service. So I liken it to a triangle, right? You can be a wonderful communicator, but have poor behavior, and the whole thing breaks down. You have to walk the talk. So if you made me made me choose one principle, I would say it’s principle number five, which is act in the best interests of customers, employees, stakeholders in the public. So if you want to build trust with the customer, it’s act in the best interest of the customer. So actually, you know, because this is all about integrity and ethics, your motivations and intentions and thinking of others. When you’re doing things, that’s why would choose that one. But like, then, Scott, that’s difficult because we to be trusted, we must strive to apply all of the principles to each and every interaction that we have.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. It’s fantastic. Had a chance to look at just a little bit of the book, and everything that I saw was tremendous. I’d highly, highly recommend it. If you’re looking at ways of growing your revenue, in a way that you can sleep well, over at night, right? What did I think is so beautiful about this is it’s doing the right thing. It’s fundamentally doing the right thing? And how do we, how do we step into that as a full organization? I love it. There’s so many different directions. I could go with this conversation. There’s so many more questions I have. But folks to get those questions answered, Go get the book. That’s where we’re gonna leave it. But Natalie, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for what you do. I think it’s tremendous. I think it’s crucially important, and I love that we had the opportunity to share it here today. Thanks so much. And for those of you watching and listening today, your time and attention me the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Natalie Doyle Oldfield
Natalie Doyle Oldfield has been named one of the world’s Top Thought Leaders in Trust for five consecutive years by Trust Across America. Other leaders named in this list include Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks, and author Steven Covey. Natalie is recognized as one of Canada’s Most Inspiring Women Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs and has been nominated for the 2023 RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneurs Award of the Year award. Natalie’s training programs, trust measurement system, tools, and proprietary trust-building framework are based on science and evidence. A regular podcast guest and writer, she is a contributor to Forbes and featured in Economist Impact as a “Business Trust Expert.”
Want to learn more about Natalie Oldfield’s work at Success Through Trust Inc.? Check out her website at http://www.successthroughtrust.com or connect with her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nataliedoyleoldfield/
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