Know, Like & Trust

Some years ago, a Columbus-based financial services firm ran a small survey that has stuck with me ever since. They asked two groups the same question. The first group was two hundred financial advisors. The second group was high-net-worth investors — the advisors' ideal prospects. Each group got the same list of ten characteristics, and each was asked to rank how much those characteristics mattered when an investor chooses an advisor.

The advisors ranked "rate of return" first. The investors ranked "trustworthiness" first.

Sit with that for a second. The people selling the service assumed the buyers cared most about performance. The buyers cared most about whether they could trust the person holding their money. As the old line goes, the investors were less concerned with the return on their money than with the return of their money. Trust came first — and the professionals whose living depended on understanding that had it ranked dead last among the things they thought mattered.

That gap is what this whole idea is about. "Know, Like & Trust" has become a mantra across the business landscape over the last few decades, to the point that most of us nod along without really unpacking it. It's the namesake of our marketing framework at SYP Media, so I've had plenty of reason to unpack it. And what I keep coming back to is that it isn't a slogan. It's a sequence — the actual order in which another human being comes to do business with you.

Let's take the three factors one at a time.

The KNOW factor

Nobody can choose to do business with you if they don't know you exist. That sounds obvious, and it is, but it's the step most professionals quietly skip because putting yourself out there is uncomfortable.

Being "known" doesn't mean everyone has to know you personally. You became aware of me and this program through some form of media — a post, a referral, a search — and we've likely never met. In most relationship-based sales environments, though, a more personal level of knowing will eventually be required. Either way, the burden is on you to make yourself and your brand known. The primary ways professionals do that are familiar ones:

• Networking — showing up where your market already gathers and investing in people before you need anything from them.
• Social media — connecting and staying visible in the channels your prospects actually use.
• Public speaking — putting yourself in front of a room, which builds awareness and credibility at the same time.
• Social mobility — genuine involvement in your local community, not as a tactic but as a way of being present.
• Advertising — traditional and non-traditional, when it fits the market and the budget.

The list goes on, and you get the point. What this means to you is simple, if not always easy: if you're unwilling to put yourself and your brand out there, you're going to have a hard time prospecting — and a hard time flourishing. The KNOW factor is the price of admission for everything that follows.

The LIKE factor

All right — so people know you. Do they like you? And does it really matter?

Naive folks like to separate emotion from business, to deny the role our feelings play in our commercial relationships. That's a paradox, because without emotion you can't have a relationship at all. You can have transactions — short-term, forgettable, no lasting impact on either life. But a relationship runs on emotion, and pretending otherwise doesn't make you more professional. It just makes you easier to replace.

Look at the most successful people in your industry. Are they cold, heartless corporate salespeople? No. They're passionate — not necessarily about annuities or real estate or whatever sits on the shelf, but about helping people. That's the belief underneath the likeability, and it's what lets a professional push through the fear, anxiety, and insecurity that stop everyone else.

Here's a question worth asking your own clients: "Plenty of people can provide what I offer. Why do you do business with me?" You will rarely hear "because you had the right product" and almost never "because your price was lowest." What you'll hear instead is some version of "I like you," "I feel comfortable with you," "I feel like you understand me," "I trust you." When we like someone, we simply enjoy being around them. This isn't rocket science.

Now, you might think likeability is beyond fixing — you're either a swell person or a complete jerk, and that's that. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former. But likeability is more built than born, and four habits do most of the heavy lifting:

• Be punctual. Don't make people wait. Chronic lateness quietly tells the other person you're disorganized and don't respect their time. Punctuality signals the opposite — humility, empathy, and care.
• Be honest. Say what you mean and mean what you say. If you can't be relied upon, everything else you offer is worth very little.
• Be polite. Treat people the way you'd want to be treated. Please and thank you still work. Be the kind of person others actually enjoy being around.
• Be responsive. Reply promptly. Follow through on what you promised. In your prospect's mind, a quick response is a small gift — and a slow one is an answer of its own.

None of these are clever. That's the point. Likeability is mostly a byproduct of respect, shown consistently in small ways.

The TRUST factor

Which brings us back to where the survey started. Trust is the deepest of the three, and I'll be honest with you: it deserves more room than I'll give it here, because it runs through the entire program and it's the very fabric of prospecting.

The core idea is this: being trusted matters more than being liked. I'd like to think I'm reasonably likeable (my friends tell me so, and I'll take it), but being liked has never been my primary goal — and it shouldn't be yours either. Let me clarify before that gets misread: being liked shouldn't be the goal, but neither should being unliked. The point is that trustworthiness sits above likeability, because it determines your ultimate worth. You can have the most valuable skills on the planet, but if you can't be trusted, how valuable are they really?

That's why the survey lands the way it does. The advisors were optimizing for the thing they could put on a chart. The investors were quietly asking a different question entirely — can I trust this person with what matters to me? Every prospect you meet is asking some version of it, whether they say so or not.

I'll go deeper on the nature of trust elsewhere — how it's built, why it can't be faked, and why the industry keeps trying to sell it as a formula. For now, hold onto the sequence: known, then liked, then trusted. Skip a step and the next one has nothing to stand on.

Why the order matters

Here's the mistake I see most often. A professional gets impatient and tries to jump straight to trust — leading with credentials, testimonials, and "here's why you should believe me" — before the prospect even knows who they are or has any reason to like dealing with them. It doesn't work, because trust isn't a thing you can assert. It's a conclusion the other person reaches, and they can only reach it after the earlier steps have done their quiet work.

What this means to you is that Know, Like & Trust isn't a box you check. It's a progression you honor. You make yourself known so there's someone to like. You become someone worth liking so there's a foundation to trust. And you conduct yourself, over time, in a way that earns the trust you can't demand. Do that in order, and prospecting stops feeling like pushing a boulder uphill. Do it out of order, and you'll spend your career wondering why the boulder keeps rolling back.

How Prospect & Flourish approaches this

In the program, Know, Like & Trust shows up early (Module I, Unit 1) as a foundational principle — and then it never really leaves, because the rest of the curriculum is largely an expansion of these three factors. The networking work in Module II is the KNOW factor, made deliberate. The service posture and moments-of-truth material — the eight rules of outstanding service — is where LIKE and TRUST get built in the actual moments that matter. And in Module III, the Know, Like & Trust Funnel™ takes the same sequence and turns it into a marketing system that warms prospects up before the first real conversation ever happens.

So consider this pillar the introduction. It names the sequence. The rest of the program teaches you how to walk it, one factor at a time.

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