The Secret Sauce of B2B

As reported by by Thornton May, Line56, the autumnal celebrations of B2B ego - auction/exchange fetishism and industry eccentricism - are in full swing. As they progress, the industry illuminati will have before them a golden opportunity for serious thought and brilliant synthesis on a crucial topic that I believe lies at the center of the evolutionary direction of this industry: computer-mediated, globally scaled, and digitally enabled trust. After all, at its essence, B2B is not about technology. It is about how markets coalesce, how geographically noncontiguous parties come together to create mutually beneficial alliances, exchanges, and relationships. At the essence of this "coming together" is trust. Trust is the secret sauce of successful B2B-ing. It lies at the core of how we allocate the three behavioral levers of the new economy-time, talent, and managerial attention. And yet most people in the enterprise space-and certainly most vendors-have little or no training in the creation, management, and expansion of trust networks.

Putting Trust in Societal Context

The Magazine Publishers of America (which, of course, has its own vested interest) commissiond a survey to gauge how people responded to advertising in magazines, on television, and via the Internet. Only 10 percent of respondents found Internet ads reliable, whereas 32 percent and 15 percent said the same about network- and cable-television advertising, respectively. Not surprisingly, given the source, 43 percent of the respondents said they trusted magazine advertising. One would not have to go out on a big limb to conclude that a presumption of trust has disappeared from commercial communications.

Closer to home, B2Bers are surrounded by paradox. We love the abundance of choices we are presented with, yet most of us feel less than satisfied. We have 500 channel TVs and can't find anything to watch. We spend extravagantly on time-saving devices and yet have no time. We buy volumes of self-help books and yet remain imperfect. We enjoy a plenitude of information, and yet key issues receive a scarcity of attention.

During his second inaugural address, Bill Clinton lectured the American electorate about the need for "each and every one of us to assume personal responsibility not only for ourselves and our families, but for our neighbors and our nation." So we are instructed to be responsible while our Commander in Chief smokes but does not inhale, engages in intimate relations but does not have "sex," and embraces a Republican / centrist agenda without ceasing to be a Democrat. The Clinton administration defines the contradiction-rich paradoxical world in which B2Bers must operate, a world where no choices need be made, when everything may easily coexist with its antithesis.

Hence, we join e-markets and yet transact no e-commerce. And yet we must have trust in all our digital interactions.

Digital Trust

The dilemma facing managers and executives as they build e-businesses today is how to scale networks of trust from their predigital beginnings around the campfire and cocktail parties to globalized operations around the world. Learning to trust without the assurance of face-to-face contact is tough. We must learn to trust without the crutch of up-close scratch-and-sniff physical intimacy. Digital trust may perhaps be created using different criteria, such as quality, timeliness, and integration of information.

In his brilliant tome Firebrands: Building Brand Loyalty in the Internet Age, Michael Moon asks what Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Steve Case, John Chambers, and Steve Jobs know about how to succeed in the networked economy? His answer: "They know the power of trust networks."

Trust has not emerged as a breakpoint in the move to online interactions - yet. This is probably an awareness issue. People may assume that their digital transactions are safer than they may actually be. We predict that digital security and privacy - the consistent behaviors upon which digital trust will be based - will become the litmus test for e-business competence in the new economy. Incumbent organizations, organizations that have invested billions over the years in customer goodwill and brand equity, will need to protect those investments as operations become more digital. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus: untrue in one thing, untrue in all.

Trust is the glue that makes knowledge whole by holding human networks together. Networks-both human and electronic-are based on trust.

Questions Facing Executives

America trusted Walter Cronkite, a reassuring voice for troubled times deemed to be "the nation's most trusted person." How does a firm attain that Cronkite-esque status as a trusted digital partner? Cronkite became the "mouth we believed" on the basis of his quadruple Es: exposure, environment, empathy, and experience. Every night we saw his face (exposure). Every night he demonstrated insight and previously unknown information about the environment, and we came away feeling that he empathized with us as viewers. We experienced a consistent performance complete with his deep voice delivering well-reasoned analyses of a world gone mad. Herein lies the challenge and the point of failure of so many legs-up B2C players. To get exposure (or eyeballs), B2C sites had to violate trust - they overpromised, used gimmicks, and gave stuff away. What B2B needs to learn from this: Work the four Es in the right order, and digital trust will follow.

One B2C player who grasped this was Ted Waitt, of Gateway 2000. He used the four Es well. First and foremost, he empathized with consumers who wanted to play in the digital game but were afraid of making the wrong choice. By taking away the agitation from hardware upgrades, Gateway spoke deep to the hearts of mainstream nongeek computer buyers in their environment. Exposure came with informed media placements and memorable cow packaging. Experience - dealing with customers and making them happy - followed (especially after some initial problems with reliability). From the outset, he was determined to build a company that people would trust enough to pick up a telephone and agree to an average credit-card charge of $2,500 for a computer they could not see, touch, or hold.

We are at a crossroads - a departure point in how society thinks about trust. One might go so far as to say we are at the end of an era. Are we living in a world fundamentally different from the one we came from? At first glance, digital trust and trust in the physical world appear to be not so different. One endeavors to understand both the "roots" (i.e., where we have been) and the "routes" (where we are going) of trust in the world of B2B. The lessons of our early moments in digital transactions indicate that in these early stages of B2B, we have to get over a blunt mistrust of electronic data. Initial efforts by lawyers and CIOs have been geared toward establishing, psychologically and intellectually, the legitimacy of the data and its representational power. The next step is to establish a framework and language that allow organizations to substantively discuss who their "trusted" online partners will be.

Whether we like it or not, we have entrusted the basic functions of our modern existence to institutions and devices that many of us cannot name, using tools many of us cannot operate and certainly cannot fix when they break. But do we really trust them? Do we want to increase the amount of trust we put in them? I predict that trust and its twisted sister, betrayal, are going to be big - real big - in the future. Ask yourself what you're doing to substantiate the trust you ask people to put in your system.

Thornton May is the Corporate Futurist for Guardent, a digital security services firm.