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Nearbound Daily #526: You're the Guide to Your Customer's Promised Land

Happy Monday!

I was in a local bookstore this week when I picked one up by Steven Covey called The Speed of Trust. It caught my attention because of how closely intertwined nearbound is with trust.

I started reading and I couldn’t put it down.

So in today’s nearbound daily newsletter, you’ll get:

• A simple, but useful trust equation from the book
• A breakdown of the "Promised Land" idea
• A scorecard to map out your nearbound surround health

A simple trust equation

This might be one of my new favorite equations.

Covey shows that as trust goes down, speed decreases, and cost increases. Likewise, as trust increases, speed increases, and cost decreases.

Last week I shared that Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius, one of the biggest review sites out there, is seeing distrust impact the way buyers buy.

In the buying journey, he’s now seeing:

• Increased risk aversion
• Purchase decisions require more information
• Time to close is longer
• Each decision requires more decision-makers
• Scores, demos, or even base-line product, feature, and pricing information isn’t enough

So, as trust goes down people become more risk averse which requires more information and the need to pull in more opinions from trusted sources before a purchase decision is made. That slows deal cycles and leads to more costly customer acquisition costs (CAC).

In an era of distrust, business runs slower and becomes more costly.

The path to the promised land

Trust comes from helping others reach their promised land.

However, many sellers still operate in the opposite way, not fully understanding buyers’ desired outcomes.

 

—Jared Fuller, Nearbound and the Rise of the Who Economy

Let’s break down why and what this practically means.

(BTW, this is a great email to send to your sellers!)

Help your customers get to their promised land

Every person, driven by the human instinct to grow, wants more for himself. He looks at the world, identifies what he wants, and strives toward it.

But the idea of the promised land isn’t enough for us humans. We need to see proof that others have made it there before us.

We identify with those already living in the reality we seek…Their journey inspires trust because of their likeness to who we are and/or the vision of who we want to be.

—Jared Fuller, Nearbound and the Rise of the Who Economy
 

We like people who have been to our promised land because they prove it’s possible and teach us how to get there cheaper and faster.

In the B2B world, everyone thinks they’re selling a solution when really, they’re selling a promised land.

Unlike outbound and inbound, nearbound taps into the trust of those who have already succeeded at getting to the promised land.

The most effective sellers are advisors who help their customers get to a promised land. But you can’t advise on things you’ve never done or seen before.

Jared uses this example in the book:

Think of a sales call with a CIO.

As the rep, we may pitch our platform’s technical capabilities and ROI models, but have we actually been a CIO managing complex infrastructure at scale before?

No wonder the CIO will be skeptical of a seller’s guidance.

Sellers aren’t helping them reach their promised land from a place of shared experience.

The beauty of nearbound is that instead of pretending to understand, you can partner with those who do.

Here’s a quick tip for Sellers and Partner Pros—the most effective way to sell and partner is to help others reach their promised land.

Evaluate your nearbound surround health score

In Nearbound and the Rise of the Who Economy, Jared defines nearbound in a sentence.

A business strategy that connects to buyers with and through the network of partnerships and relationships that surround them.

When you’ve effectively executed a nearbound strategy, your result is nearbound surround—you will surround your customers with networks of trust that amplify you.

Here’s a quick resource you can use to test how well your company is running its nearbound motions.

Use this to determine if you’re really surrounding your customers with the people they trust, those who have been to their promised land.

If your answer is yes, then congratulations! You’re in a minority of companies leveraging nearbound tactics.

If, however, your answer is no, then backtrack →

• Do you understand your customers?
• Do you understand your customers’ promised land?
• Have you identified the people they trust who have already made it to the promised land?
• Have you established relationships with those people?

Every department needs to understand the customer and how they’re partnering to help those customers get to their promised land.

But that’s where partner pros are the heroes of the nearbound era—they identify customers’ networks of trust, develop relationships, and help each GTM team tap into trust at scale.

Tip for Reveal users: If you’re having trouble identifying trusted sources, lean into account overlaps. Who else are these customers using? What can that tell you about the promised land they’re seeking?

Nearbound in the Wild

I was walking through the airport, listening to a podcast with Codie Sanchez, a journalist, investor, entrepreneur, & founder of the Contrarian Thinking newsletter, when she said something that stopped me about 100 feet from my gate.

I am always looking for my who, not my how.

I rewinded the episode and listened to her explain that the reason she’s successful in her career is because she looks for the who, not the how.

And then she shared something that should be the motto for the nearbound era,

I think you should be a collector of humans.

The most successful people in the nearbound era will establish networks of diverse expertise. Instead of trying to do everything, they’ll lean on the people who have already been to their promised land.

The ’who economy’ is not a new phenomenon.

But like Codie pointed out, when the internet connected us to everything, we stopped going to other people and we started going to Google. 

Now, we’re going back to people. And this time, we can connect and build networks at scale using tools like social media and CRMs.

Watch the episode at about 30 minutes to hear it for yourself.

Who = you

We have the information, you have the trust. You are someone’s ’who.’ Share this email with them.