Transparency as Trust: How Open Processes Win When Selling Services

Theories and Predictions

“To make progress in any field, it is explanations in existing theories, not the predictions, that have to be creatively varied in order to conjecture the next theory.”

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity.

Selling services is all about predicting the future. Unlike products that may be demonstrated, the value of services is in the imagination of the buyer.

Success in sales means increasing a buyer’s confidence in achieving an outcome. There are a variety of ways to do this, depending on the role and personality of the purchaser.

The mistake is believing your offer to be a one-size-fits-all solution to any problem. This, as Deutsch describes, would be varying the prediction and not the explanation. Let me explain.

A Sustainable Solution

I worked with a sustainability company. It calculates the dollar amount of a broad range of positive and negative impacts that companies have on the economy and society.

Rather like OTAS Technologies, where we learned to use one product feature to generate the sale of many, sustainability centres on carbon footprint.

If potential clients were unconvinced, the CEO pivoted to talking about biodiversity. The clients understood the difficulty in estimating a biodiversity footprint, and the significance of being able to do so, but were unconvinced we had an answer.

The problem was we’d spent half an hour talking about how we supplied a more accurate carbon footprint, and then claimed the same system solved the more intractable issue of biodiversity.

Clients were happy to talk about the difficulties of doing their job, especially to an expert and sympathetic ear. But they were not about to uproot their process for a carbon measurement service that suddenly handled biodiversity.

Confidence and Control

Particular personalities are attracted to the benefits of an outcome. These people respond well to success stories. Case studies and testimonials appeal to this type of buyer.

Others gain confidence by having control over the process. These people are more risk averse and require fallback options.

Trials and guarantees work well for this second type of buyer, when they are the ones authorising purchases. If they are users or implementers of a service, then they want to be involved in how it works.

This was the type of buyer the sustainability company came up against. The clients already had a way of working. They were not about to outsource their intellectual input to a system over which they had no control.

Transparent Value

Increasing certainty involves being transparent about a process. Meta’s reasoning for giving away Llama 3 is a textbook example of how to do this.

A YouGov survey in the UK, showed the most valuable brand factor for consumers is transparency.

The important point is that your intellectual property must be evolving. Giving away a snapshot is an opportunity rather than a risk.

An alternative is to provide a sample of the value of your service. An operational example in the hero section of your website is invaluable.

The sustainability company chose a third way. It would develop its service by working with alpha clients. This evolved into paid pilots, then subscriptions, with attractive discounts for early adopters.

The investing world already had a way of judging sustainability criteria. The company had developed a better way, but found it hard to prove.

The answer was to work with industry leaders to create a service that they valued, would pay for, and provide the social proof that it worked.

The company was no longer trying to fit one way of working to a variety of client needs. It changed its processes and in so doing, delivered different outcomes.

This is the same as Deutsch’s reasoning that new explanations are necessary to vary theories, and to create new knowledge.

Questions to Answer

1. Can my service be demonstrated in a working version?

2. Am I transparent in how my service works and is implemented?

3. How can I work with alpha clients to make my service more valuable?

I’m Simon Maughan and I write The Profit Elevator as a guide for B2B firms seeking faster growth.

Reducing risk for buyers is included in The Streamlined Selling System as part of my Business Accelerator Community for busy executives.

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