Trust matters in B2B, and it’s getting increasingly harder to earn and sustain.
In our previous article on how B2B brands build trust, we split trust signals into two groups: signals about the company, such as credibility, reputation, expertise, stability and customer references, and signals about the people, such as chemistry, shared values, quality, responsiveness and transparency. Marketing communicates the first group well. The second is harder, because trust in people is built through experience of them, not a description of them. That gives marketing an important job: give sales more reasons to have useful conversations with prospects.
Content should open conversations, not just generate clicks
This is where Edelman and LinkedIn’s research on thought leadership gets interesting. The 2025 study reports that 95% of “hidden decision-makers” said strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to sales and marketing outreach. Yet Edelman frames high-quality thought leadership as a way of building credibility and drawing these hard-to-reach people into a conversation.
There’s an important distinction worth highlighting here The job of the content isn’t to close the sale. Rather it allows companies and individuals to earn permission for the conversation. That conversation is what gives the prospect a chance to experience the expertise, responsiveness, transparency and chemistry that actually builds trust.
So in your next strategy meeting, rather than asking “what content should we create?”, try asking “what conversation would it be useful for our sales team to have, and what could we create to make that conversation happen?”
Get creative about the conversation
A conversation doesn’t need to be a 30-minute Teams call It can take far more useful forms. Here is our list of conversation starters we like to recommend:
- Dinner: Face-to-face matters. Put interesting people around a table, get rid of the sales deck and allow relationships the space to form.
- Private events: Bring together people facing the same challenge, share insight, introduce experts and let sales become part of a genuinely useful peer conversation.
- Audits: Apply your expertise rather than claiming it. Review something real and give the prospect a useful point of view on what could improve. Or even what they are doing well. It pays to be kind.
- Site visits: Let prospects meet your people, see your operation or invite your team into theirs. Transparency is a powerful trust signal.
- Requirements reviews: Create a structured opportunity to listen before proposing. Being understood builds more trust than being presented to.
- Proofs of concept: Replace claims with evidence. Let the prospect experience the quality of the solution before committing to the bigger decision.
- Business cases: Help your contact convince everyone else internally. That moves the relationship from a supplier selling something to a partner helping them succeed.
- Pilots: Reduce the perceived risk of saying yes. Start smaller, work together and give both sides the chance to prove the relationship as well as the solution.
These are only starting points. A cybersecurity business could offer a risk review. A precision manufacturer could invite prospects into the factory. An InsurTech provider could examine an existing workflow. An EdTech company could run a small learning pilot. A consultancy could bring five senior leaders together to debate a difficult industry issue. The creative opportunity here is significant: marketing creates the conditions, people earn the trust.
Sales enablement is often reduced to decks, case studies and battlecards. Those still matter, but enablement can be bigger than collateral. Marketing can create experiences, occasions, evidence and ideas that give sales a credible reason to engage.
That matters because our own trust framework shows buyers are assessing far more than whether the product works. They’re asking: will I enjoy working with these people? Will they listen to me? Will they respond when I need them? Will they tell me the truth? Can I trust them to deliver? No campaign can fully answer those questions. A good conversation can start to.
When you plan your next marketing activity, map the conversations as well as the content, channels and conversions. Give your prospects good reasons to talk to your sales team. Marketing can build credibility at scale, but trust becomes real when people experience it for themselves.