A Question of Trust : A Conversation with Vanessa Hall Part Two

This article originally appeared in The National Networker

Last month I introduced you to Vanessa Hall, the award-winning speaker and author of Trust in Business. Vanessa outlined her model for understanding the foundations of trust and what you need to do to maintain trust in business relationships and ensure it doesn't erode and destroy relationships.

In the second part of the interview I asked Vanessa to elaborate on the role of trust in referral relationships and how to approach referrals with trust in mind.

A: In my new book I’ve been talking about how a trusted introduction can help a salesperson reach their prospect far more easily than cold calling and trying to get past the ‘gatekeeper’. Clearly that’s valuable for the salesperson, but how can the person passing the referral protect the trust they have with the prospect?

V: One of the key things about referred trust that I talk about is understanding both the benefits but also the risks involved, so we have to be quite careful when we’re referring someone else to somebody with whom we have a trust relationship.  This is where my theory of situational trust comes in as well. One of the important things which a lot of people don’t do when they’re giving referrals is to understand in what situation or what context does their trust relationship with this person exist.

Often what happens, for example, is that I might know somebody through the fact that our kids play soccer together. There’s a trust relationship that’s been built around picking up kids, dropping them off, those sorts of things. There’s still a trust there, but it’s very specific to that particular situation. If I refer somebody into that person, somebody else with whom I have an element of trust, but they’re looking for a business type referral, the person who we’re referring them to trusts me more from a social context. If I’m not clear about who this person is that I’m referring them to and why I’m referring them you can actually open yourself up to some confusion.

In understanding the situational trust that exists between two people we can also begin to develop and understand the expectations that we have, and the expectations that the person referring into them might have as well. The process of referrals works much better when you acknowledge the trust relationship that you have and then communicate the context of that contact.

Often what people do is refer people and then leave the relationship up to them but I’ve been caught out a number of times.  Just giving a contact is not enough if we want to build trust. If we don’t frame it properly, not only is the relationship not bridged between this new person and the contact but it can also damage the relationship between that person and you – the person who’s giving the referral in the first place.

A: Framing is vital. I talk a lot about ‘qualified’ and ‘unqualified’ referrals, based on the relationship you have with someone. You may, for example, pass a ‘qualified’ referral to someone you have only just met, by making that clear to the prospect. Where you know and trust the person you are referring though, the referral is ‘unqualified’. You are clearly recommending their services, by saying for example, “talk to this person, they’re superb’. 

How much time do you spend following up the introductions you make to ensure both parties are working well together? 

V: I like to know and I always ask for feedback whenever I’ve given a referral because there are a number of referrals made and if one of them doesn’t work for some reason then I have to sit back and ask what’s happening in this process. Am I not connecting the right people or am I building up an expectation that’s not being delivered?  What’s actually going on?

If you never ask for that feedback you simply don’t know.  You just keep referring people and sometimes you can really end up wasting a lot of people’s time if you’ve not done it properly, so I certainly look for feedback.

Just going back to your point before about when you say, for instance, talk to this person, they’re superb, what can happen in making a statement like that is you can certainly build up an expectation but there’s also an implied promise.  I talk about the difference between implicit and explicit promises, there’s an implied promise – the minute you give somebody a referral, there’s a very good chance that this is going to turn into a business referral, which to me is the implied promise that can break down trust more quickly.

So in not being clear about that and making a simple statement like “this person’s fantastic” or “they’re a real go-getter” or “they’re really friendly” or whatever, you’ve made an implied promise and built up an expectation in that person’s mind about how their interaction might play out, and if it doesn’t play out exactly in the way they expect and the way they believe it was promised to them and it doesn’t meet their needs then their trust in you can break down very quickly.

It’s about respecting the trust that you have and I talk about handling it with care. I compare trust to an egg, it can break very easily so you need to handle that trust very carefully and respect it for what it is.
It’s a gift when people trust you.

A :  Would you introduce someone you’ve only just met to somebody who is a very important client of yours?

V: If I’ve got a very strong sense about the person, but again I’d make it very clear that I’ve only just met them, and I can’t vouch for them other than I’ve got a sense that they were nice, or the right sort of person, but yes I certainly do qualify it in your terms.

A:  Do you find yourself from holding back from introductions that you could make until you feel the trust is at the right level?

V: Yes definitely. I think to some extent it depends on the nature of the contacts. For example, the more work that I do in senior government levels and with people connected with the UN, a lot of people want to know the people who I know. I don’t believe it’s my place to just suddenly open the doors and pour all these people to them, so it’s also being clear about what’s the nature of the relationship between me and these other people and what are their expectations in terms of protecting that relationship too.

It’s a difficult one, because on the one hand you certainly want to help people and help their business to grow and networks continue to increase, and I love connecting people but there is an element of – you know – I’d really love to understand more about you as a person and what you are trying to achieve; what’s the goal?

And what are you expecting out of this connection as well, because I’ve seen it go terribly wrong in many situations

A: You talked about referred trust, you talked about situational trust, can you just explain the other types of trust in your model?

V: In the book I talk about blind trust. With blind trust we jump in, we don’t think about what we’re expecting, about what we need, and we don’t articulate that. And so what happens in a blind trust situation is we are often left quite disappointed and we often blame the other person. But we had a role to play in that by obviously not being clear about what we expected out of this relationship, this interaction and what we need? You should also ask can this person actually promise to deliver on those, are you trusting the right person for the outcome you are looking for?

I talk about sceptical trust, which is the opposite.  We’re very, very clear about our expectations and we want to get right down to the nitty gritty detail before we step into the trust relationship. Very, very clear about our expectations, very clear about our needs, We’ll only trust somebody who will 100% promise to meet those.
I talk about middle ground. There’s a balance between those two, both of them can work very well in some situations but both of them can be very detrimental so there’s a middle ground there. We have to articulate and be clear about our expectations and needs and be sure that the person we’re dealing with can make promises to deliver that.

We can’t go down to the nth degree and people can’t always promise every little detail and so there is a point where we have to step into the relationship but by understanding the model of trust we can also continue to communicate effectively as well.

A Question of Trust: A conversation with Vanessa Hall (PART ONE)

This article originally appeared in The National Networker


“Building and retaining trust is the cornerstone of every business and personal relationship”.

The quote above sits inside the jacket of Vanessa Hall’s book ‘The Truth about Trust in Business’ and highlights the importance of trust in networking. With networking being founded on relationships, one could argue that trust is the ‘cornerstone’ of networking, and I don’t think you would find many people who would argue.

Certainly not Vanessa Hall. Vanessa is the Australian based Founder and Director of Entente Pty ltd and an award winning speaker and author who advises everyone from individuals to major global organisations about the importance of trust.

Yesterday Vanessa launched the International Day of Trust, with the aim of ‘getting trust into the hearts and minds of people around the World’. I took the opportunity to ask her a few questions about the importance of trust and the different ways in which we trust others.



A: Tell me a little bit about your business. It’s clear that trust is at the core of all that you do.

V: It’s everything that we do. We’ve only been around for four years, so still babies in the trust world but in the beginning we made quite a big impact. I work with businesses but also with personal relationships and more broadly in communities. It’s now expanding into international relations, so we’re working at a very senior government level and with the UN.

Probably the key difference with what I do versus everyone else is how I define what trust is. The model that I use actually describes in a visual way and a structural way how trust is built and how it breaks down so it sheds a lot of light for people in relationships, whether those relationships are in business or personal, in terms of what might have gone wrong in the past, how to get better at communicating and actively building trust on a daily basis.

A: Can you give me an outline of the model of trust that you use and the different types of trust?

V: The first thing I noticed when I was doing a lot of research on trust and asking a lot of people about trust was that it’s a word that we use all the time, and everybody in business that we speak to will say “Yes, trust is critical to my business. I need trust with my customers, need trust with my staff”, and yet when I ask people “what is trust, how would you define it?” I got so many different responses, it wasn’t funny.

I found that when we talk about trust we’re often talking about different things and when I asked people who said that trust was critical in their business “what do you do, how do you build trust?” less than 5% of the hundreds of people that I spoke to in the early days, said that they actually did anything.

The reason they said they didn’t do anything was because they didn’t know how to. There’s no practical guidance or model really for how to go about building trust, so that’s where the conflict started for me. I looked at where there is trust and where there is no trust, when trust breaks down, what does that feel like for people, when there is trust and when there’s none and I worked backwards then to come to a definition of trust.

So the way I define trust is that it’s our ability to rely on a person or a group of people or an organisation or on products and services to deliver a specific outcome. There are actually thousands of points of trust in our day, every single day. And we’re often unaware of those. Everything from the alarm going off in the morning to wake us up, the shower being hot enough, the toothpaste tasting the way you want it to taste.

We generally just trust that all those things are going to work for us and play the role and deliver the outcome we expect from them and we become aware of it when that outcome is not delivered.

So then I looked at what it is that we actually want. What happens that makes us feel good and what happens that makes us feel bad? And I came down to these three core things that I talk about.

The first is understanding that we have expectations. Those expectations come from previous experiences, if we’ve had a previous experience with that person, that organisation, that product or that service. It comes from things that we read or things that we see. Marketing material, for example, creates expectations of what our experiences are going to be like.

It comes from things that other people tell us. Referrals actually create expectations about our experience. And they come from what I call “similar experiences”, so I’ve had and experience with one bank, therefore I think all banks are going to be the same. I’m going to have the same experience in all of them, so it’s going to be generalised.

So we all have these expectations, but we often don’t articulate them but we expect people to meet them and we get disappointed when our expectations are not met.

The second thing is our needs. So I draw on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. From a trust point of view we buy products and services and we engage in relationships with people to meet those needs. I’ve found that there is generally a core driving need for people and that need drives them in all the different kinds of relationships and interactions they have. For example somebody who’s esteem-driven will buy a car because it makes them feel good about themselves, they’ll buy the clothes that they buy for the same reason. They’ll engage in relationships, they’ll take a job; they’ll do all sorts of things that all feed that need for esteem.

Likewise all the relationships for somebody who’s insecurity-driven will be centred around feeding that core need.

So we have expectations and needs, the promises are made to us by the other person, the other organisation or by products and services. The promises could be implicit or explicit, so they’re either very clearly stated or we had a conversation about them, they were implied, they weren’t really stated anywhere and they weren’t written down. We can’t recall a conversation but it was implied in a word that was used, or the body language for instance, or the size of the organisation, they can all provide implicit promises. So there’s a combination of these expectations, needs and promises which I draw like a wall, with two pillars of needs and expectations and promises along the top.

I would expect a structural engineer to understand how the wall would break down, how quickly it would break down in certain circumstances.


There are some expectations and needs that are more important to us than others and there are some points on the wall that are more sensitive. If you took certain bricks out the wall would collapse more quickly. We know that to be true, there are some expectations and needs that if they’re not met by that person or organisation or that product where we might be a little disappointed but we still stay, we continue to engage. There are others that, if they’re not met we’re gone. As a customer, we’re gone, we just never buy again.

We found that the explicit promises sit in one part of the wall and when they’re not met, there are generally cracks in the wall. We tend to complain about an explicit promise which hasn’t been met because we can. Whereas we tend not to say anything about an implicit promise because we’ve got nothing to point to, no conversation to recall. So we let it simmer away and eventually the wall collapses.

So the base of the model is about these, what I call ENP’s and trust actually sits on top of this wall, so it ends up looking like Humpty, and I talk about all the kings horses and all the kings men, can’t put that trust back together if you allow it to get to the point where it completely breaks.

Sometimes there are bricks that drop out, and we’re feeling very unsettled, and disappointed but if it gets to the point where enough of those important bricks fall out or enough of those implicit promises are not met, the whole thing will collapse and it will break and 98% of the time people say they would never go back there again

So the whole purpose and the whole process of building trust is understanding the expectations and needs and being clear about those, knowing which ones are the most important to people and being very, very clear about what promises we’re making and delivering on those promises. Its one thing to make them it’s another thing to deliver them

We also need to understand what are our expectations and needs in this engagement and what are the promises being made to us, so there are two sides, two walls within that relationship. It’s the basis of the trust model. The book, “The Truth about Trust in Business” actually has diagrams all the way through it showing the wall in different stages, in different situations, and how it might play out and how it might break down.

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In part two of my interview with Vanessa Hall next month we talk about the different types of trust and how to apply them, the role of trust in passing referrals and some of the pitfalls.