Okay, I know. If your customers won’t answer the phone...or if they’re telling you they have no budget, it feels like it’s the economy.

But is it?

The other day a friend of mine lost a project to another firm. They said they enjoyed meeting her and she gave a very good presentation. It turns out the CEO had a relationship with another firm that had done superior work for them in the past. It wasn’t her company’s reputation, their quality of their product, capacity to deliver or customer service. And it wasn’t simply familiarity. He knew both firms. It was trust that tipped the scales the other way.

In business almost nothing happens without trust. That means you need to have a lot stored in your “trust banks.” When customers have choices, they care about a fair deal, but they pull the trigger when they trust you to deliver.

Friends in financial services tell me that they are running into a lot or resistance related to trust right now. Clients keep asking the same questions, over and over again. Why? The lack of transparency and the foolish risks some investment companies took, has created a crisis of confidence that’s shaken the industry. Whether or not they were culpable, everyone in the industry is paying a price.

How do you win back trust? That’s a long, tall order. However, I believe that if you apply these three principles you will succeed.

3 Principles for Communicating to Build Trust

#1: Transparency. People don’t believe in anything they don’t understand, and they hate it when they sense you’re trying to hide something. This is why Obama’s health care plan has not succeeded. No one knows what’s in the plan. The administration’s promise of transparency sounds hollow when you have 1,000 pages of unintelligable gobbldygook masquerading as some kind of plan. Take heed in business. If you don’t disclose something, and people learn about it later, it will haunt you forever.

#2: Proof of Performance. In the above case, it would have been difficult to compete with a firm that has already proven itself to a decision maker. At the same time, when you’re communicating with a prospective buyer, you need to go the extra mile. It’s great to build rapport and have a good product or service, but what people want to know is, does it work, and how do I know for sure? This means you need to have proof of performance that’s tied to results. You can communicate this by sharing testimonials, written, or on video; by demonstrating the direct link between the product or service and results. The more clearly you communicate the proof the more opportunity you have to build trust.

#3: Authenticity. When you sit down to talk with a prospective employee, you size them up not only according to their resume or answers to questions, but also by whether you believe they are who they say they are. The same thing happens when you sit down with clients and customers. They are evaluating to determine whether you’re authentic. Authenticity is an intangible asset - essential to trust - you don’t need to posture, preen, prance, bully, brag, nag, prod, or ping if people see you as the real deal.