Yesterday, I spoke to David, a CEO in the packaging industry. Halfway through the conversation, he said, “Hannah, everyone is scared right now!
Whether they admit it or not, business leaders are worried. Leads are down. AI creates a lot of uncertainty, and then there is the global economic situation, …” And David isn’t alone. Just this week alone, I had multiple conversations with business leaders who shared the same sentiment.
Most B2B leaders are wrestling with the same symptoms:
It is tempting to diagnose these as marketing problems, sales problems, or even product problems. But, truth be told, they are probably none of those things. Most likely, these leaders have a trust problem. And once you understand that, everything else finally makes sense.
I have spent more than 25 years in B2B marketing and sales, including ten at SAP in competitive strategy. Over those years, I worked with leaders who were doing everything “right” — solid product, competent team, smart execution — and still not seeing the results they expected. And when you start digging a bit deeper, you often see the same pattern: random acts of marketing rather than systematic trust-building. That is why I founded TrustLeader. This work came from years of watching companies exhaust themselves fixing the symptoms instead of the cause.
In this article, I will give you the clarity I wish every leader had before they spent another dollar or hour trying to remedy the wrong thing. Here is what you will walk away with:
My hope is that, by the end of the article, you think to yourself, “Oh, that makes sense,” and embrace trust as the foundation for your marketing and sales going forward.
But before we get there, let’s start at the beginning.
As leaders, we tend to assume that when our pipeline slows down, marketing must tighten execution. If deals stall, sales need better messaging. If inbound dries up, we need more content, or more distribution, or a new channel, or a new agency. But here is the uncomfortable truth:
Your pipeline is not slow because awareness is low.
Your deals are not slow because your messaging is weak.
Your inbound is not slow because your content is bad.
They are slow because your buyers do not trust you. It’s that simple.
If you sell into committees — and nearly everyone with larger B2B clients does — you will need to multiply those hours and touchpoints across every stakeholder involved.
This is not random. Buyers are spending all this time for one reason: They are reducing risk.
Generally, there are three reasons why a buyer feels distrust or skepticism toward a vendor. Those reasons are:
Our job as vendors is to do everything in our power to close that trust gap by eliminating the information, interest, and power deficits. Until those gaps are closed, trust stays low. And when trust is low, buyers delay, hesitate, push off decision-making, or choose the safest option: doing nothing.
We all can agree that a buyer needs to trust us enough before they become willing to make a purchase. They need to trust us on a deeper level to stay customers and buy from us again. And even more trust is required for them to recommend us to their friends and family. We all know trust is critical.
The problem with trust is that it isn’t measured as easily as website traffic, MQLs generated, or sales closed. And we tend to ignore what we cannot measure. So trust falls by the wayside while more measurable activities get the budget and resources.
But here lies the crux of the problem: If we don’t invest in building trust systematically and intentionally, trust-building is left to chance. This creates low-trust situations. Low trust manifests as dozens of small frictions across your marketing, sales, and customer experience — each one subtle, easy to dismiss, and seemingly unrelated.
But together, they create the pattern most leaders recognize today: Everything feels harder than it should, and incremental improvements no longer move the needle the way they used to.
Let’s have a look at how low trust plays out in different scenarios:
Of course, this reality was always true for marketing, but it is now getting much more exaggerated because of the way modern buying behavior has shifted in the last two to three years. Even before then, well-planned and well-executed marketing campaigns never reached their full potential unless they built enough trust with their buyers.
But now, marketing struggles to convert at all. Today's skeptical buyers filter information differently. They approach everything you publish with a degree of caution. They need more proof, more authentic transparency, more clarity — not more generic content. Without trust, even your best assets cannot build momentum.
You probably have felt the role of your salespeople shift over the last two to three years. Before, you could have a “Contact Sales” or “Request A Quote” button on your website, and buyers would have to engage with your sales team to get more information, whether they wanted to engage or not. Sales would deliver their pitch, and then it was decision time.
Now, your buyers insist on doing all of their research and due diligence without involving sales. Once they finally do bring sales into the process, it is as a trusted advisor helping them make the right decision for them.
Instead of gatekeeping information, your sales team’s superpower is now consultative selling using active listening, empathy, and respect. Trust is absolutely critical, and without enough of it, selling becomes difficult because buyers have not yet resolved their internal risk. What looks like “no urgency” is often a buyer who is still trying to close their trust gaps. What looks like “lack of alignment” is often a committee that is not confident enough to champion you internally. The more uncertainty buyers feel, the more they delay decisions, ask for additional validation, and extend timelines.
The less they trust, the longer everything takes.
When trust is low, price becomes the only lever buyers feel confident using. It is the one variable they can control to protect themselves. They negotiate harder, ask for concessions, or default to the cheaper option simply because it carries less perceived risk.
In a low-trust relationship, price becomes a proxy for safety.
In a high-trust relationship, price becomes a detail.
You can deliver excellent service and still have customers who remain quietly cautious. Without trust, clients do not fully anchor. They delay renewals. They hesitate to upgrade. They listen more closely to competitors. Not because they are unhappy — but because the emotional foundation that supports long-term loyalty is not solid yet.
This kind of fragile loyalty is expensive. It limits lifetime value. It increases churn risk. And it forces you to win the same customers over, again and again.
When trust is missing, internal effort drastically increases to make up for the trust gap. Marketing produces more assets to generate the same level of engagement. Sales follow up more often to maintain momentum. Leadership adds more tactics to “fix” performance. Activity increases while effectiveness decreases — an exhausting equation. This is how teams burn out while results stay flat.
Because of the low trust, your organization starts moving in a state of strain rather than flow. Every new initiative feels heavier than the last. Even small wins require outsized effort.
This is what low trust looks like in practice. Not dramatic failure — but the steady erosion of ease, speed, and quality. And once you see these symptoms through the correct lens, the conclusion becomes obvious and unavoidable:
Once you begin to see your marketing, sales, and customer challenges through the lens of trust, the patterns become impossible to ignore. What looks like a slow pipeline, weak inbound, stalled deals, discount pressure, or fragile loyalty is not random. Neither is it personal. It is structural. These are the predictable outcomes of low trust inside a system that was never intentionally designed to build it.
This is the aha moment many leaders never get to — the moment where everything that once felt confusing suddenly becomes coherent:
If trust is low, everything becomes harder.
If trust is strong, everything becomes easier.
This is not about soft skills. It isn’t about esoteric or idealistic ideas. It is about understanding that trust is measurable, improvable, and foundational to modern B2B growth. '
Until it becomes the anchor of your go-to-market, you will always be working harder than you should for results that do not match your team’s effort. But the good news is this: Now that you understand the real problem, you can finally start solving it.
To build trust systematically, you first need clarity on where your trust gaps actually are. And you need language — shared language — so your leadership team, your marketing team, and your revenue team can all see the same picture.
Here are the first two steps I recommend:
First, I recommend you take our 45-question TrustLeader Assessment. This is a free, deep-dive diagnostic tool that allows you to determine where your trust gaps are quickly. After the assessment, you will know:
Most leaders are surprised by how quickly the assessment pinpoints issues they have felt for years but could never name. It gives you clarity — and clarity gives you direction. It takes about 12-15 minutes to complete.
Once you complete it, you will know exactly which trust deficits (information, interest, or power) are slowing your growth. And you will know where to begin.
If you want deeper insight into how trust operates across marketing, sales, leadership, and culture, the book will provide a solid foundation. It will help you understand the layers of trust (cognitive, emotional, and unshakable) and why each one influences buyer behavior in different ways. Think of it as the reference point for everything that comes next. Lead With Trust will add even deeper insights to what you learned in the assessment and provide your team with shared language for systematic, intentional trust-building.