Recently, I heard Dan Priestley reference the 7–11-4 rule several times. I was intrigued. The 7-11-4 rule states that buyers need to be exposed to your brand through roughly seven hours of content, across eleven platforms or touchpoints, and in four locations/deep experiences before they are ready to buy. Now, depending on the industry you are in you will need 30-60 (sometimes even more) leads to close one good customer. If you do the math, even with significant overlap, that is a lot of content to consume, touchpoints to activate, and locations to appear in.
It is very powerful. I spent last week considering this and realized that while 7–11–4 once did a great job explaining how trust forms, it no longer addresses the trust gap buyers face today. I have been thinking deeply about this question: How has the trust gap evolved—and how can we realistically quantify the level of trust a buyer needs before they’re willing to identify themselves, speak with a sales representative, or make a purchase?
That’s what this article is about. By the end of this article, I hope to not only give you a better understanding of the trust gap (or better chasm) you face, but also the levers you have to overcome it.
One of the most groundbreaking studies in marketing and sales in the last few decades was probably the Google Zero Moment of Truth Study of 2011 and 2021. Initially, the study revealed that the vast majority of buyers now inserted an additional phase into their purchase process between being exposed to the stimulus (e.g., seeing a newspaper ad or a billboard) and the so-called First Moment of Trust (FMOT), such as reading a brochure or talking with a salesperson in the store.
This phase became known as the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT), which included searching for products online, comparing products, and reading information on vendor websites. Once buyers opened Pandora's Box of online searches and self-guided research, the volume and complexity of the buyer's journey exploded:
The 11-7-4 rule was born. No one knows exactly who coined it, but Google's ZMOT study is most often cited as the source. At its simplest, the model suggests that before a buyer was ready to purchase, they typically needed:
These numbers were not intended to be precise thresholds, but rather guidelines for marketing teams to better understand the effort, time, and resources required to overcome the trust gap. It also implied a broader insight: trust tended to follow repeated exposure across time and context.
Underneath the neat shorthand was an implicit logic that looked something like this:
Trust Gap ≈ Time × Touchpoints × Locations
In other words, if buyers spent sufficient time engaging with a company’s ideas, encountered the company often enough, and saw it appear consistently across different contexts, familiarity would increase and perceived risk would decrease. Trust, in this model, was somewhat a function of presence.
That assumption was reasonable at the time, given the conditions under which it was formed: Information was relatively scarce compared with today. Most touchpoints (e.g., websites, sales conversations, events, ads) were controlled by the brand itself. Messaging across those channels was comparatively consistent. And perhaps most importantly, buyers still extended a baseline level of institutional trust to companies simply by virtue of their visibility and professionalism. In that environment, repetition worked. Presence signaled legitimacy. Being “seen enough” often translates into being “trusted enough.”
However, simplified 7–11–4 rule did not attempt to account for emotional risk, the possibility of credibility erosion over time, or the role of independent third-party corroboration. It implicitly assumed that exposure itself was neutral or positive—that more contact would naturally move a buyer closer to confidence. It did not describe how buyers evaluated risk. It described how buyers became familiar with a brand. At the time, familiarity and trust were much more closely aligned.
Today, things aren't that simple.
Today, just obeying the 7–11–4 rule is no longer going to get you the same results.
Buyers today can reach the exposure thresholds implied by that model more quickly than ever, often with minimal effort. Today, thanks to generative AI, we can create content at scale with a single click. We can repurpose content more quickly and efficiently than ever before. We can spray social media messages across all channels via automated scheduling.
Consequently, buyers encounter brands across:
Despite this constant exposure, trust forms more slowly than before.
And here is where things go sideways: If we keep applying the 11-7-4 rule in its original form, the consequence is that we need to do more of the same: create more content and be present across even more channels and locations. But the rules of the game have changed because the meaning of time in the equation has changed.
Time is no longer primarily spent engaging with a brand’s message.
Instead, time is now spent making sense of competing, contradictory information. Buyers are no longer asking, “Do I know enough about this company?” They are asking, “Which of these conflicting signals should I believe?”
Instead of resolving uncertainty, additional exposure often introduces more variables, especially when we produce generic content as if there were no tomorrow. The result? Different vendors claim similar outcomes. Thought leadership converges into generic language. AI-generated explanations sound plausible but lack context. Peer opinions conflict. The result is not clarity, but more cognitive load (or mental calories, as Donald Miller puts it).
More exposure now frequently produces outcomes that would have been counterintuitive in the 7–11–4 era:
Contradiction has become the dominant buyer experience. Buyers are not starving for information; they are drowning in it... I know, I am being a bit dramatic, but I have lamented the content collapse since 2015...
But this situation points to a deeper issue rarely discussed in B2B marketing: an epistemic trust problem.
Epistemic trust is defined as “the capacity of the individual to consider the knowledge that is conveyed by others as significant, relevant to the self, and generalizable to other contexts” (Campbell, 2021). It refers to a buyer’s willingness to accept information from a source as reliable, relevant, and worth integrating into their own understanding of the world. In practical terms, it answers the question: “Is this a source I should allow to shape what I believe to be true?”
When buyers face confident but conflicting claims, epistemic trust builds very slowly and sometimes erodes. Buyers do not simply question individual vendors; they begin to question the credibility of information itself. This creates a paradox at the heart of modern B2B buying: Buyers have more information than ever before, yet feel less confident in their decision-making.
They lack of epistemic trust. When epistemic trust is low, exposure no longer reduces uncertainty. It amplifies it. This is also why the traditional response—more content, more channels, more touchpoints—often backfires. When exposure is increased without addressing epistemic risk, buyers are pushed deeper into comparison, skepticism, and delay. Instead of helping them reach clarity, we inadvertently increase the cognitive and emotional cost of deciding.
Your buyer does not need more information. They need a way to know what to believe—and when it is safe to stop searching. That's your new job.
So should we do away with the 7–11–4 model entirely? No, I believe there is still significant value in it if we reframe it slightly to reflect today's situation accurately. In other words, time, touchpoints, and locations remain integral to the buyer journey, but their meaning has changed, and they no longer function as the original model assumed.
In the original interpretation, time was essentially synonymous with engagement. More time spent with a brand meant more familiarity, and more familiarity meant less perceived risk.
Today, time functions very differently. Buyers use their time to compare claims, test assumptions, cross-check sources, and resolve contradictions. This is especially true in complex B2B purchases, where the cost of being wrong is high, and a single person rarely makes the decision.
As a result, time no longer acts as a straightforward trust builder. In many cases, unmanaged time increases uncertainty. The longer a buyer remains exposed to conflicting information without clarity, the more effort is required to move forward. Time has become a measure of cognitive load, not brand affinity.
This helps explain why buyers now consume more content and spend more time researching than ever before, yet still report high levels of purchase regret and stalled decisions.
Old logic
New logic
Consequently, we must rethink how we let our buyers spend time with our content:
- How do we ensure all of our content is up-to-date, accurate, and conveys the same message?
- How do we proof that what we communicate is trustworthy (make it evident, not merely claim)?
- How do we create content that helps buyers reach confidence sooner rather than search longer?
- How do we build a content system that actively reduces epistemic risk instead of increasing it?
Touchpoints were once largely brand-owned. Websites, sales calls, events, advertising, and marketing materials made up the majority of buyer interactions. Because these touchpoints were brand-controlled, they tended to reinforce a coherent story.
That is no longer the case.
Today’s touchpoints are ecosystem touchpoints. Buyers encounter brands through a mix of sources that include, but are not limited to:
Most of these touchpoints are not controlled directly by the brand. Many of them reinterpret, summarize, or even distort the brand’s message. This fundamentally changes what touchpoints signal.
Buyers crave more self-directed interaction, but they will punish you for irrelevant, repetitive, or inconsistent exposure, including third-party-created exposure. It's no longer about quantity alone. It is about consistency and coherence. In other words, touchpoints now function as tests of consistency and coherence for what buyers have learned so far, rather than as signals of legitimacy. When different touchpoints independently tell the same story, trust increases. When they contradict one another, trust erodes quickly. Irrelevant or misaligned touchpoints now actively destroy trust.
You should ask yourself:
In the original model, locations referred to channels, platforms, or contexts—places where buyers encountered information. These locations were relatively visible and measurable.
However, today:
Buyers now complete most of their journey out of your view in dark social, private communities, and private chats with AI tools (hence all the talk about Zero-Click and No Attribution).
LLMs are used to research vendors before website visits.
McKinsey and Gartner both show buyers prefer digital self-service and delay human contact
Locations have multiplied, but visibility and attribution across them have declined significantly. Rather than going through a neat funnel (the good old 2015), buyers now go through a pinball machine, as Rand Fishkin so adequately puts it.
Instead of viewing locations as specific platforms (e.g., LinkedIn) or channels (e.g., email newsletters), we should view them as decision environments. Some are public and observable. Many are not. Buyers make sense of information in private conversations, internal meetings, direct messages, Slack channels, WhatsApp groups, AI chats, and meeting rooms. These environments are largely invisible to vendors.
This shift explains why many companies experience long periods of apparent inactivity followed by sudden buyer action. The work was happening all along, just not in places that could be tracked. Again, this does not mean fewer locations matter. It means you must show up consistently across more locations than before — and be coherent when you do.
Ask yourself:
At this point, the role of exposure becomes clear. Time, touchpoints, and locations still matter, but they now serve a narrower function. They tell buyers that a company exists and that it is present in the ecosystem.
They do not, on their own, establish credibility.
They do not resolve risk.
And they do not guarantee trust.
By now, we understand why exposure alone can no longer explain how trust forms. Time, touchpoints, and locations may establish awareness and familiarity. Still, they do not resolve the central problem buyers face today: their willingness to be vulnerable and their perception of the risk they are taking.
The question becomes: How do we increase epistemic trust as a gateway to build cognitive and emotional trust? Exposure alone cannot do that work. What buyers need are mechanisms that reduce risk—first, the risk of being wrong, and then the risk of being vulnerable. Therefore, we need two additional dimensions to understand how the modern trust gap is crossed: Validation and Emotional Safety.
These dimensions were present in earlier buying environments, but they were not structurally necessary. Today, they are decisive.
At its core, validation addresses epistemic risk—the risk that a buyer’s understanding of the situation is flawed, incomplete, or based on unreliable information.
This distinction matters because visibility is no longer scarce; validation is. Buyers are surrounded by brands that appear competent, confident, and well-positioned. The challenge is no longer determining who exists, but determining who can be believed.
Validation has three defining characteristics.
Research consistently shows that B2B buyers consume a large volume of non-vendor content during the buying journey, often delaying direct engagement with sales until they feel confident in their understanding. Gartner’s finding that 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience reflects their desire to independently assess epistemic risk before committing to a conversation.
When multiple independent sources converge on the same conclusions, buyers gain confidence that their interpretation of reality is sound. This convergence is critical when facing so much contradiction. When buyers encounter confident but conflicting claims, validation doesn't simply confirm the truth, it restores that possibility that the information could be true. Validation assures buyers that multiple people share the same belief about something, and it isn't just speculation.
In other words: Validation reduces the fear of being wrong. But it does not yet make action safe. That's why we also need emotional safety.
Even when buyers believe they have all the information they need, they still often hesitate.
Why? They perceive a risk so significant that they would rather not act on their beliefs. They are asking themselves: “If I choose this, what happens to me if it goes wrong?”
In B2B buying, the risk a person takes when making a decision is often more than financial. It can usually impact their professional reputation, career, and political risks within an organization. Buyers must justify their choices to colleagues, defend tradeoffs, and accept responsibility for outcomes that may not be entirely within their control.
In fact, buying committees have grown in size to distribute those risks—now commonly involving eight or more stakeholders—as the perceived cost of vulnerability has increased. Decisions are more visible, more scrutinized, and more challenging to reverse. In this environment, even credible solutions can feel unsafe to advocate for.
This is why buyers often say things like:
These are not objections rooted in misunderstanding. They are signals of unresolved perceived risk.
Emotional safety reduces that risk by making vulnerability feel acceptable. It does so by clarifying tradeoffs, setting realistic expectations, acknowledging limitations, and demonstrating that choosing a particular path will not leave the buyer exposed or alone if challenges arise.
If you take nothing else away from this article, take this: the trust gap didn’t just get bigger — it changed shape.
Buyers still need exposure across time, touchpoints, and locations, but exposure no longer does the heavy lifting it used to. Your buyers are constantly facing contradictory signals and AI-accelerated content; the real bottleneck is epistemic trust and unresolved perceived risk.
Key points to remember:
7–11–4 still matters, but it no longer equals trust. It describes exposure and familiarity, not whether buyers feel safe believing you or choosing you.
Modern buyers face an epistemic trust problem. They’re not short on information; they’re short on reliable ways to decide what is trustworthy versus merely visible.
Validation reduces epistemic risk. It helps buyers feel confident that what they believe is likely true because it holds up beyond your own narrative.
Emotional safety reduces perceived risk. It turns belief into action by making vulnerability feel safe — especially in high-stakes, multi-stakeholder decisions.
Three ways to make this tangible right now:
Run a “coherence audit” across your top touchpoints. Pick your website, your last 10 LinkedIn posts, your top sales deck, and your most-shared case study. Ask: Do these tell one coherent story — including tradeoffs — or do they create contradictions buyers have to reconcile?
Design for validation, not just visibility. Identify where belief should form without you (partners, communities, customer advocacy, third-party content). Then ask: Are we making it easy for those voices to repeat and reinforce our message accurately?
Reduce perceived risk at the moment of commitment. Review your conversion points (forms, demo requests, sales calls). Ask: What might make a buyer feel exposed in this situation? What would make it safer to raise their hand? Then add one concrete safety signal: transparent expectations, more precise next steps, tradeoff language, or “who this is not for.”
If you want to understand where your leadership currently builds trust and where it quietly limits it, the Trust Leadership Scorecard is the right next step. In ten questions, it reveals your strengths, blind spots, and opportunities to elevate your influence as a market leader. It is free and designed to provide clear direction on where to focus next.