In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner explores how establishing trust through collaboration can greatly enhance an individual's impact on new audiences.
Have you ever considered the role of trust transfer in borrowing audiences for relationship marketing? In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner explores how establishing trust through collaboration can greatly enhance an individual's impact on new audiences. The key to success lies in whether the host understands and values the guest's expertise, facilitating a smooth trust transfer between the guest and the audience.
Through real-life examples, Michelle contrasts successful collaborations, where the host is well-informed and invested, with less effective partnerships based on transactional motives. She highlights how to vet opportunities by assessing the potential for trust transfer and explains why working with collaboration-minded partners can lead to long-term value, even when the immediate audience fit may not be perfect.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist. And in the 15 years I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first.
And what they need to be centering is sequence. Because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly following someone else's strategy.
Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy. In every episode of this show, I answer a real question from a real entrepreneur struggling with a real challenge in their business. And today's was submitted by somebody who's working on implementing relationship marketing in their business. And relationship marketing is something that we talk a lot about on this show. We don't always have a chance to get into the individual steps that we need to take in the correct order, in the correct sequence, to pull off correct relationship marketing. So we're going to talk about one of those today via this question.
And the question is, how the heck would you personally vet someone once you've found them and are considering them for a pitch or collaboration? What signs do you see that someone is worthy trust transfer person or partner when much of the intel you need is behind the scenes? So a couple of words in there that you may not be familiar with, a couple of phrases, one being trust transfer, another being when we're talking about collaborating. And that's all where this concept in this question has to do with relationship marketing and where it fits in the sequence. So we're going to answer that.
What the heck is a trust transfer? What am I talking about? And we're also going to get into the specifics of this question in terms of how to vet someone for a trust transfer. So if you are someone who has tried to gain clients through collaborations, through joint ventures, through what I maybe call audience borrowing, aka going on somebody else's podcast to be interviewed, or speaking in front of a group, guest teaching, joint trainings, any of that sort of thing that has you getting in front of someone else's audience or some organization's audience and it hasn't worked or maybe it doesn't consistently work, listen up today. Because you might be missing this hidden but important piece and step of the sequence of how you have to set these events up so that they do convert for you.
And yeah, that hidden piece, it's a thing I call the trust transfer. So before I get into the answer for this question, we better define what a trust transfer is. And a trust transfer is a term I use to describe what we are trying to have occur when people meet you.
So in relationship marketing, one of the major concepts is that you don't want people to meet you to become aware of you initially through one of your platforms. We don't want people to first find you on your own social media channels or on your own podcast. And that might sound a little weird, but there's something to this.
Because if you think about it, if somebody stumbles across you on the internet, they don't really know who you are and you have to spend a lot of time building up trust. Sometimes that's completely appropriate. But in relationship marketing, where we are attempting to essentially create leads that act a lot like referral leads, we want to skip that step. We do not want people having to learn how to trust you only through your own material. We want to cheat a little bit and think about how you can be introduced to them in a more impactful way. And that's where the trust transfer comes in. Because in relationship marketing, I encourage you to attempt to meet people, to attempt to meet your leads on platforms other than yours. Get off your own platforms when you are trying to meet people. Go speak.
Go to somebody else's audience or some organization's audience where your audience is already gathering and meet them there. And there's two reasons that you want to do that. Number one, you can just find more of them quickly in this day and age when maybe algorithms aren't necessarily our friend and it can be difficult to be seen in all the noise, especially if you're a small service provider who isn't generating tons and tons of content and isn't able to go viral. That's a really difficult burden these days. So instead of attempting to hope that the algorithms bless you and get you in front of people, let's go look at where people already are and go and meet them there. And so what is required when you have to go meet people where they're already gathered? Well, they're already gathered for some sort of reason, meaning they're already gathered because some person or some organization has brought them together. Maybe they're gathered as members of an audience. Maybe they're gathered as people who are attending a conference. Maybe they're gathered as clients of somebody else, but they've already gathered in some place.
And so if you're going to meet them through that place, you need whoever, quote-unquote, owns that audience to welcome you in and to put you in front of their audience. This is speaking. This is being interviewed on a podcast.
I'm going to keep using the same examples because we see them over and over. This is guest teaching. This is going to speak at a lunch and learn, going to speak at a fireside chat. All of these things are examples of borrowing audiences where an audience is already gathered. You're going to go insert yourself into that at the invitation of someone or some organization, and you're going to go talk to them there, and they're going to become aware of you. They're going to meet you in a place where they already gather.
And what happens when you meet them in a place that they already gather? Well, as we just said, number one, it's just easier to find a number of them in one place. But number two, what happens is a trust transfer, or we want a trust transfer to happen because whoever invited you to come into that space has the power to influence the audience that you're going to talk to and you're going to interact with. They have the power to tell that audience what to think of you. They can go up there, and they can offer a trust transfer because if an audience has already gathered because of them, because they're a person who has gathered a community together or because they're a professional organization, the audience that has already gathered trusts that person or that organization. If they didn't, they wouldn't be in the audience. So there is already hard-won trust there.
And if that person or that organization then invites you to speak to their people and when introducing you to their people gushes about you and talks highly of you and tells those people to trust you, there's a trust transfer that happens. And your marketing job just got much, much easier because now everybody in the audience is going to give you the benefit of the doubt. And this is where I say we're trying to engineer leads that look like a referral, because think about when a referral comes to you.
There has been a trust transfer. When a referral comes to you, somebody who probably worked with you or knows you and knows your work well has recommended you to a colleague or a friend. And when that recommendation happened, a trust transfer took place. I use the example, and you may have heard me say this before, but I was replacing my driveway this summer. And I have no idea how to vet concrete providers. That is not something I'm an expert in.
But what I did do was ask my neighbors who had the same job done five years prior and are thrilled with the work that they had done. I said, hey, who did you use? And they gave me the name. And guess what? I called that contractor. And that contractor was going to have to screw up really badly in the proposal phase for me for me to look elsewhere because my neighbors trusted them and my neighbors transferred that trust to me. When my neighbors said, this is who we use. They did a great job. You can see it for yourself. It's held up so well. I said, okay, I trust them. And so now that burden of trust is not actually on the concrete contractor to convince me that they're great. I'm already convinced. So they just have to get me across the finish line. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. So they don't screw up during the process of finalizing a sale with me. They're in.
And that's the benefit of having a trust transfer because if you don't have a trust transfer, if I was starting from scratch with concrete providers, I cannot even imagine the array of questions that I would come up to ask them or I would try to figure out if they were legit or not. And the same thing is happening when you are going out and speaking. If you are going out and you're speaking or you're being interviewed on a podcast or again, insert all the different strategies you could do to do what I call borrow an audience and go meet people where they're already gathered.
You can do that. And if whoever is introducing you, if whoever has opened the doors to you, says trust this person, now you have such an unfair advantage because you have already gained their trust. You have already gained the benefit of the doubt.
So you have to, instead of trying to win their trust, you now have to screw up to lose their trust because they are ready to embrace you. They are ready to believe in you. And so this now, insert the place where people screw this up, is we hear about speaking strategies. We hear about going on podcast tours. We hear about doing all of these things, but sometimes people don't know and don't understand that making sure a trust transfer is in place is a really important part of that strategy. Because if you go out and you do all those things, if you go out on a speaking tour, if you go out and you're giving webinars to a software company's client base, if you are out there doing a lunch and learn for a company, if you do some B2B work, if you are out there doing fireside chats, whatever you're doing, if you are doing that and no one is giving you a trust transfer at the moment that they introduce you, then you are going to be in trouble in terms of getting clients.
Because you're not going to have that benefit of a doubt, so you're going to have to try so much harder to get them to trust you and to get them to be interested in you. So it's really, really important that when you're looking at these opportunities, you are looking at who the host is going to be. Again, whether that's an organization, right? If it's a conference or a professional development organization of some kind, so whether it's an entity or whether it's an individual, you have to look at what your relationship is like with that person, how that person interacts with the world, how collaborative are they, and how much of a trust transfer are they going to offer you in that moment when they introduce you to their audience.
Because if it's a significant trust transfer that they're prepared to offer, guess what? That's going to go really well for you. If they're not going to offer much of a trust transfer, well, then it's going to be more of a struggle to get folks across the line. And let's look at a couple of examples of what this actually looks like in reality. Because what we're talking about is if that trust transfer is not in place when you go and meet people, you essentially have what is a traffic strategy. You're just meeting people without any benefit of the doubt, so you're not having the impact that you need to have in order to build a relationship and get people kicked off in a relationship marketing arc. So you could think that you are doing relationships and relationship marketing.
You could think that you are going and doing all these high-level things and spending time with people and speaking to them. But if you're skipping the step of making sure the trust transfer is there, well, then it's really just a traffic strategy and you're back at square one. So here are some examples of things that might feel like relationship strategies, might feel like positive collaborations, but do not have a trust transfer in place and therefore aren't going to work that well for you if you're trying to relationship marketing.
One of those is, remember those old blog post summaries, the roundup summaries, where people would reach out to 20, 50 people at a time and say, hey, could you share one piece of advice and we're gonna put it all into a blog post and won't that be great visibility for you? And people will find your quote or your piece of advice or your little snippet that you offered and they'll come and they'll follow you because of that. Well, what's missing from that? There's a lot of stuff missing from that when you look at it through the lens of relationship marketing. But one thing is a trust transfer because whoever asked you for that quote or that snippet of advice and is gonna go publish that blog post with 50 other quotes and snippets of advice in it, guess what? They're not offering any of you a real trust transfer. They're just collating a bunch of advice. And so their audience has no real reason to want to follow you or to want to do more because the leader of the audience, the owner of the audience, for lack of a better term, has just said, oh, here's what some people think. They haven't taken the time to introduce you specifically and tell the audience how smart you are and how great you are and how useful you are.
So there's no trust transfer and therefore you have a much higher hill to climb to get people across the finish line. Another one that is a little sneaky is a speaking gig or a podcast interview or maybe, again, a fireside chat where there's a canned list of questions that they ask the same thing of everybody who might go through that experience. And podcasts are a good example of this, actually, because we know of some podcasts that are out there who have different entrepreneurs on or who have different service providers on and they ask every single person the same question. And in some ways, that's interesting. I'm not bashing those podcasts, but if you go on that as a guest, you're not gonna have a way to differentiate yourself in a meaningful way from anybody else. And the host is just churning through all these different guests, asking them the same exact questions.
So that host is not doing any real research on you or not doing any real effort when they introduce you to differentiate you or to create any type of trust transfer. You are just one more person in line who is answering all of the same questions. So can it be good for visibility because those podcasts tend to have really high listenership? Sure, and that's a traffic strategy. But is it good for a relationship marketing strategy? Is it an impactful way to meet people? No, because you're being asked a series of the same questions they ask of everyone else. So whether or not you're able to share something that has impact is pretty questionable. And the host probably doesn't know you from any other entrepreneur who comes on the show. And so they're not gonna take that time to really offer a type of introduction that you are looking for. So instead we're looking for what I'm gonna call like these real trust transfers. When you are in front of an audience where the host of that audience, the owner of the audience, whatever we wanna call them, is ready to highlight you and is ready to tell the audience, this person is special and this is why and you should trust them.
And now let's talk through and understand why. So we're talking about a podcast where the host, if you're an author, the host has at least skimmed your book, knows who you are, they've spent time on your website, they know your information inside and out, and they're gonna give you a quality interview. They're going to allow you to talk about your best stuff. They're gonna allow you to really have an impact for their viewers or their listeners. And they're gonna tell their listeners at the same time, again, how smart you are, how great you are, why they should matter. And that's a trust transfer. And if you are trying to borrow audiences and do relationship marketing and you are not capturing or at least thinking about a trust transfer, again, you're gonna struggle. So we go back to this initial question and it's an important one because when you say you want a relationship market and now you're aware of a trust transfer and so you're out there and you're researching different opportunities and how can I get in front of audiences and which audiences should I get in front of, you now have another question to ask yourself. And that question now is what type of trust transfer am I likely to be offered? So let's talk about this in real life.
And I'm gonna use examples from my business and my own research as to how you determine this because again, this was the question. How, when you are presented with an opportunity or when you are off researching opportunities of where you might be able to speak, where you might be able to borrow audiences, how can you know what is going to result in a solid trust transfer and what might be a little bit of a shaky trust transfer that's not going to get you what you need to have the impact and to kick off your relationship marketing in the way that you need this to. Okay, let's look at a couple of real life examples.
And again, I'm gonna keep names out of it because these are recent examples that have happened to me during my own research or just during my own running of my business as opportunities come my way. And neither of these are wrong by the way, right? I'm not bashing anybody who has approached me or who has presented an opportunity to me because it's just what's in alignment. Nothing is ever wrong with a strategy. The only thing that's ever wrong is whether that strategy is in alignment for you or not. And so these podcasts or these opportunities that don't necessarily offer a trust transfer, they're not doing anything wrong. They're not bad people.
They're just not in alignment if you are trying to relationship market because if you are trying to relationship market, you need to go find other people who are thinking in that same way and will present you in that same way. So example one that has happened to me recently. If you know me and have heard me talk about my marketing, you know that I do a lot of guest teaching. So when there are masterminds, when there are programs who are teaching people how to grow businesses or how to manage their business or how to kind of navigate life as an entrepreneur, those are great spaces for me to come in and teach and guest teach and I do that frequently. And so recently, someone who had been in that room when I borrowed that audience and when I taught, approached me and contacted me and said, hey, I have my own group. And I think what you provided in that group teaching moment, in that guest appearance that I was a member of, I was in the audience for, that was so valuable to me.
And I got so much out of it. I am hoping you would consider coming to talk to my group because I think they would get just as much out of it as I did. Would you consider that? Does that sound like there's going to be a trust transfer in that moment? The answer is yes, right? What are the conditions? What about that moment tells me that there's going to be a trust transfer? Well, this person had already seen me guest teach and it had been very useful to them. So that tells me that they really trust me. They understand my material. They know what I'm talking about.
So that's going to be a win in the notch. And then they also say, my audience can really use this information. So they know that I can come in and be helpful to their audience. They are not just looking for anybody to fill time, right? They're looking for a specific need that their audience has inside of their group. And they experienced that with me. And so they want to invite me in. So that is a condition under which I can be very certain I'm going to get a trust transfer. And honestly, I can even coach that person up. We can talk about it.
And we can say, hey, you know, when you introduce me, it's important that they're going to trust me so that they can take in this message, et cetera. There are ways to coach people. But this person is clearly collaborative, clearly understands my material, values my material, and wants me to come in to provide a very specific type of value to their audience. That is an opportunity with a very high trust transfer potential. We're going to say yes to that one. Now let's contrast that with an email I recently received.
And I received this email, no joke, from a podcast host who said in the first sentence of the email that they had no idea what I did, but that someone had shared one of my other podcast episodes with them. So they just figured we should probably get started on a podcast swap. This person did not know what I talk about, who I talk to, or that I don't have guests on my own podcast show. They just reached out because they had kind of heard my name and figured, oh, she has a podcast as well, let's do a swap so we can get in front of each other's audiences. So there is a great example of something that feels the complete opposite of the first example I just gave you. If I were to say yes to this opportunity, this podcast host is not going to know what questions to ask me.
Even if I were to provide some, they probably wouldn't have enough background or wouldn't do enough research to really be able to sink into it. I have no idea who their audience is. I could figure that out, but I'm already getting the non-collaboration vibes here or the traffic collaboration vibes of, hey, let's just transactionally get in front of each other's audiences and hope that there's some transfer there. And I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in bringing someone onto this podcast as a special guest who I have no idea who they are or what they do or if they provide value to you. That's never gonna happen.
And I'm not interested in wasting my time and going on their podcast. If they're approaching me, telling me within the first sentence that they have no idea what I do, but hey, let's jump on the show and we'll figure it out and we'll just trade audiences. That is somebody who is thinking about collaboration and borrowing audiences from a traffic mindset. They're just thinking about numbers. Whereas the first example, they're thinking about the value transfer and why this makes sense for their audience. So it's very obvious. First example, I'm gonna get a trust transfer there. Second example, there's not gonna be any trust transfer. So great example of here where the strategy is basically the same in both of these. It is me going and speaking in some format. And so normally speaking is a good relationship marketing strategy. But this is where you have to look at all the components and all the sequence of it because that strategy can be pretty worthless if all the components are not in place before you agree to it.
So let's look at kind of a middle ground and this might get more to answering the question of how do you vet these things when they come in? Because I'm not sure how this one's gonna work out but I'm gonna give it a try because someone else contacted me to be on their podcast. I am fortunate that I get outreach for this relatively frequently of people asking me to be on their shows. It was a referral from a colleague and they knew specifically what they wanted me to talk about.
So it was clear that they knew my work and wanted to feature it. But there were some signs when I looked at some other elements of their model that kind of looked kind of traffic-y and generic and so I'm not completely sure who their audience is. We had a conversation about it. It sounds like it's a match and this person is clearly very collaboration-minded and excited and knows who I am and is going to speak highly of me and so I'm gonna give it a try. And these are the obvious collaboration-minded things to look for because honestly if you're collaboration-minded I'm probably gonna agree to go on your show or do whatever we're talking about in terms of meeting an audience because if I can tell that you're collaboration-minded there's a couple of things. Even if I don't know if your audience is an exact match like we're gonna make sure we're pretty sure that obviously there's some similarity there that I can provide some value.
But if I'm not completely sure if they're at that correct stage of growth or if they're at the correct budget amount that I would want them to be at I'm still gonna give it a chance if the person who is hosting me is clearly collaboration-minded and clearly ready to give me a trust transfer. And the reason I'm gonna do that is because I have no idea what other things might spring from building a relationship. A, maybe the audience is a match and is great. Sometimes that's hard to tell from the surface. Sometimes it can be pretty obvious other times not. But even if the direct audience isn't a match it can be a really great way to start a relationship with somebody who is truly collaboration-minded.
And that's one of the struggles that we have is finding those people who understand collaboration want to know you at a level they can provide you a trust transfer and vice versa and actually want to collaborate. And so even if that initial opportunity may not be a grand slam in terms of finding me potential clients I'm gonna say yes. Because if it looks like you may be what I would call one of my ideal connection avatars and you approach me that's a pretty low risk situation for me unless you're asking me to travel the country or something.
If you're asking me to hop on a Zoom to do something that's really low risk for me. And I don't know where that relationship's gonna go. Again, if I don't get clients immediately that's okay. Maybe we can collaborate and there are people we can connect each other to. Or maybe there are other opportunities we know about. Maybe we can help each other in other ways.
So I'm always gonna give that one a shot. And that kind of comes down to the answer to this original question of how do you vet people? Well how I vet people is I look for those two extremes that I shared at the beginning. Is this a slam dunk for my business? Like the first example of the person who had already known me and knew exactly why she wanted me to come into her program? Or is it a complete no where the person is obviously either not collaboration minded or very traffic transactional collaboration minded where you can tell that there's not gonna be another step.
This person wants to forget I exist as soon as we would complete that interview. And so there's not gonna be any other things that come of that relationship. And that's where that middle ground example comes in. Is if I'm not sure because you can't always tell exactly what might happen at one of these things. So if I'm not sure but you are collaboration minded again as long as I don't have to get on an airplane I'm probably saying yes. Because that means it's low risk and it might be a really fruitful relationship.
Even if that first step of what we do doesn't come to anything. I've had examples of this where I have gone on people's shows where I thought there might be an audience match but it turned out there wasn't. But two, three years on we continue to collaborate in other ways and help each other in other ways via introductions, via resource sharing, via other things. And of course some of those haven't panned out as well. But I find that if I find someone who's collaboration minded who would understand the concept of a trust transfer and is just going to do that naturally again I'm going to say yes because that's such a valuable asset in my business that we're going to see where it goes and see if something can come of it. So if you kind of want to poke around the show, ask about audiences, figure out what might be going on do that.
I think those are all fair questions. But if you find someone who's collaboration minded and you're not sure if it's a perfect audience match say yes anyway and find out. So put people into those three categories when you're looking at these opportunities and when you're out researching. If you are out doing research on your own and people aren't approaching you you want to be doing research that clumps people into these three categories. Yes, grand slam, slam dunk, we're doing it. No, that person looks really transactional and I can just tell from the flow of shows that they don't actually know their guests and they put no time into it.
Well, that tells you that's a no. Don't pursue that person. Or number three, if it's somewhere in the middle but you can tell they're collaboration minded yeah, they go on the list. Maybe they're a lower priority than some of the grand slams but you know what, it's hard to find grand slams. And so you can be a little experimental with folks who are in the middle and take a chance just because it might be a hit. And again, if it's not there may be other ways that you can help each other and have each other in your support networks which is really, really valuable. So that's how I vet that trust transfer. Is number one, I recognize that the trust transfer better exist. If I'm out there doing relationship marketing I need to account for a trust transfer. And I need to know that when I'm putting myself out there to meet people off of my platforms it's not just that I'm talking to some people but it's also that a trust transfer is going to happen before I talk to them. Somebody is going to tell them to trust me. Somebody is gonna tell them that I'm fantastic. And those are really, really helpful things to have.
So again, let's sum this up. Trust transfer.
It's a term I made up for a thing that needs to be in place for your relationship marketing to work. And it just means that when you go collaborate with somebody or some entity that whoever is introducing you is telling everybody that you are great and trustworthy because that skips a step. It takes the burden off of you to have to earn that trust and that just takes a long time to do. And that is how we engineer leads to look like referral leads because that's what referrals are. Referrals come in with a trust transfer.
And so why aren't we out there creating that for ourselves in our marketing to make our lives easier? And when you're spending your time and when you're looking ways to divvy it up and this is where the, again, the original question came from.
You just wanna think about those three categories and you wanna think when you're out there researching like is this gonna be a slam dunk trust transfer? Is one not gonna exist at all? Or is this gonna be middle ground and prioritize accordingly? That's how you vet those opportunities.
So thank you as always, my friends, for being here. And I want to hear from you. If you are out there researching people who you might want to collaborate with, you might want to figure out a trust transfer, you can always drop me a line.
You can go to my website, themichellewarner.com, and send me a note from there. Let me know what this is looking like for you out in the trenches when you are out there trying to set up opportunities that include trust transfers. I would love to hear about it, and I would love to cheer you on.
And as you do that, keep tuning into the show, because I'm going to keep breaking down some of these hidden steps that exist within our business models and within our marketing that can trip you up and leave you really confused why things might not be working as well. Because you could be doing everything right, you could be pulling off the perfect strategies, but if you're missing some of these components, missing some of these sequences, it's just not going to go the way that you want it to, and I want to help you fix that and change that and find some of those hidden things that you might be missing in your business that are causing you some unneeded frustration. So you can always find me here every other week on Sequence Over Strategy, and I would so much appreciate it if you haven't already hit the subscribe button, come back every other week, get a new episode, share it with your friends who may be struggling with the same thing so I can help them all, and I will see you back here in two weeks.