Why Trust?

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My latest book, Shift to TRUST, releases October 19th—ebook preorders are open now.

It’s true . . . these buttons prove it.

And for the next few days, we are pretty much giving this sucker away (when you speak of me—speak well.)

But, first—why the hell did it take me this long?

It’s been almost three years since I published Passing Notes to Strangers. 979 friggin days to be exact. Not that I’m keeping tabs . . .

I had plans. Big plans. I was gonna be somebody.

I’d pump out books left and right. A Jon Gordon–style parable about the power of empathy in business. A coming-of-age tale—picture Stephen King’s The Body meets Steven Spielberg’s The Goonies.

But first, I needed to finish what I’d started.

The plan was a trilogy. Passing Notes was just the beginning.

Then would come Ready to Buy—the whole psychology of sales from the buyer’s perspective. What got them “ready to buy”?

And last but not least, Long-Term Partners, highlighting the attributes of those long-lasting relationships we’re all after, in our businesses and beyond.

So I got to work on book two.

After Passing Notes, you get the first meeting. You break the ice, gain some interest. And then what? What was the next logical step?

I kept coming back to what we called the sales cycle. And I kept thinking about how much I hated it.

The sales cycle is this process where you take prospects from the “top of the funnel” through to the close, one step at a time. It’s the genesis of all sorts of cringy ideas—the tie-down, SPIN Selling, the alternative close—and most of them use some form of what Robert Cialdini would call influence.

I love the psychology of influence. Scarcity, reciprocity, liking. It’s fascinating. And when it comes naturally, it’s wonderfully useful for understanding human behavior.

But when it’s contrived. Invented. When it’s part of a pitch, engineered to lead someone toward a close, it’s gross.

And that was the turn.

That was the moment I realized, I didn’t want to write another book about getting people to do things.

Every outline fell apart—collapsed into the same handful of questions.

Why do we really choose one company over another?
Why do some partnerships last for decades while others blow up?
Why do referrals just . . . happen?
Why do some people get invited into the room—and others never even hear the meeting happened?
Why do some companies get a second chance while others never get a first?

The answer kept coming back the same.

Trust.

Trust?

Yeah, trust.

That wasn’t the answer I expected. I thought I’d uncover instructions. A process. A checklist. Instead, every trail led back to one word.

Trust.

In one sense, it was a relief. It felt like a silver bullet—a single answer to a thousand business questions.

In other ways, it was daunting. Because trust isn’t simple. It’s nuanced, contextual. Easy to recognize. Hard to explain.

The answer was in that one word but understanding it took a lot longer than anticipated.

Every story I found seemed to explain a different piece of it.

You’ll trust someone with your life, but not with your checkbook.

You’ll trust someone at the office, but not around your wife.

The subject of trust is as thick as two-day-old gravy, and just as chunky. There’s a lot going on under the surface.

(Sorry, always wanted to use that line but couldn’t work it into the book. How great are blogs?)

But the deeper I went, the more I saw that trust wasn’t one thing. It was a spectrum. A moving target.

It was a shift.

And those shifts are what became the book:

Amazon

Apple Books

Of course, once I had a tidy little acronym, I became suspicious of it. Was it true? Or did I just like it because it fit? Because it oh so cleverly spells TRUST?

But if you want to know where trust really got its hooks in me, it wasn’t in the research.

It was at a happy hour.

In the book, I sing a song about my time working with Starbucks Coffee Company. Terrific clients. We did a lot of business. And I thought I had tremendous relationships.

When I accepted a job leading our work at Microsoft, I had to transition the account. Lucky for me, I got to choose my successor, and I picked one of my buddies from college who’d been hired on at the firm.

It was a good account. Lucrative. I wanted my friend to wet his beak.

Plus, I trusted him.

So we set up a happy hour. To celebrate my decade working with Starbucks, and to introduce Geoff.

And do you know what happened?

Most of those terrific “relationships” didn’t show up. They had other stuff going on.

It felt like a real kick in the nuts.

I’d spent years believing relationships were my greatest strength. But, if I couldn’t get people to walk three blacks and grab a Manny’s, what kind of relationship did I really have?

Heading into the biggest challenge of my career that following Monday, I wondered if I’d misunderstood my own success.

I did some soul searching.

I was confused.

Starbucks still called. Even after Geoff took over, they’d ring me up with needs and opportunities and gossip.

They still gave us their business.

They just didn’t want to grab a beer and have a hang.

So maybe I shouldn’t have been so deflated?

It was starting to come together in my mind.

Maybe they’d chosen us for something bigger than the relationship. Bigger than on time delivery. Bigger than some beers.

Maybe they picked me because they trusted me.

And what the hell is wrong with that?

At Microsoft, and later with our software and gaming clients, I carried that lesson with me. I stopped trying to be the guy with the best relationships, happy hour guy, SWAG guy, tee time guy.

I started trying to be the guy worth betting on.

But I was moving that direction much faster than my company was. We were still a lowercase-trust shop—still stuck on relationships, on utility, on solicitation. That old language was everywhere, from proposals to pipeline reports.

Activity, activity, activity.

I’d started feeling cringe, a little flush of embarrassment, when coworkers talked about locking up deals and boxing out competition. Capturing market share. That’s the language we spoke. Those were the terms.