Recently, leading American academics such as Professor Louis Stern have deconstructed the notion of trust, and shown how suppliers can win trust through certain types of behaviour.

A survey of 1,000 intermediaries that was carried out by Xerox in Europe has underlined the importance of trust. It found that the quality of the relationship between the supplier and the intermediary was the single most important factor in determining sales growth and channel satisfaction.  But how can suppliers apply all this to their channel strategy?  This is the question that this September’s RTMA conference set out to answer.

First, Tarek Sherazee, a director at VIA International, went through Stern’s trust model. This was followed by a workshop where suppliers scored their own organisations.  Richard Gibbs, Channel Strategy Manager, Europe (responsible for European channel strategy and policy at Xerox) then showed how the trust model could be used to profile your partners.

Finally, Adrian Bird, EMEA Marketing Manager for Alliances & Solutions at IBM, looked at how IBM had analysed the needs of big IT consultancies and systems integrators. IBM then set about ensuring that it met this wish list, with startling results.

So what is trust?
Sherazee says that in Stern’s view you have to be seen as competent, honest and benevolent before you can win trust. Competence means being able deliver what you say you will. Honesty means making people believe that, when you say you will do something, it will happen. But competence and honesty alone are not enough.

You might believe Mike Tyson when he says he is capable of hitting you and that he intends to do it – but you wouldn’t trust him.  The third magic ingredient is benevolence.  Before you can trust, you have to believe that your supplier is working in your best interests as well as their own.

Justice is the framework upon which to build trust. And there are two types of justice – distributive and procedural. The first is about who gets what slice of the cake. The second is about how you behave in your relationship. At first sight, the size of your slice of the cake might seem the most important element, but Stern’s research shows that it is how you treat your partners – procedural justice – that is really important.

“Imaginative, lateral thinking is vital if you are to maximise the effectiveness of your channels!”

Sherazee then went through the seven types of procedural justice, mapping out where different types of behaviour would fit. We have incorporated his comments on all seven measures into the survey opposite.