Marketers say trust is the new KPI, but most don’t know how to build it. Here’s what actually moves B2B buyers from indecision to commitment.
“Trust is the new KPI” isn’t just a line from LinkedIn’s 2025 B2B Marketing Benchmark; it’s echoing across LinkedIn posts, emails, and industry content I’ve seen in the last few weeks.
Here’s what I’m reading:
“AI is not replacing search; it is replacing trust.”
“ChatGPT isn’t search—it’s trust-based recommendations at scale.”
“Trust is the new conversion rate.”
These and more declarations touting “trust” seem to be everywhere right now. But something is missing. We bandy the word around as if there’s universal understanding among marketers about what it means — and takes — to build trust.
I beg to differ, given the findings of B2B buyer research:
- Indecision shows up in 87% of all deals.
- 40 – 60% of lost deals are due to indecision
- Buy cycles take 10 months, on average (300 days)
- 41% of B2B buyers say they struggle to source content they can trust
- 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience
While I agree trust is critical for doing business, I think it’s important to explore the concept of trust and why marketers struggle to build trust within buyer decision environments.
Defining Trust and Distrust in B2B Buying
Let’s start by asking, how believable is your brand?
Trust is the ability to rely on the truthfulness, reliability, or accuracy of something or someone (Merriam-Webster). Trust is a gauge for believability. In a marketplace where vendor similarity is abundant, trust is a differentiator worth pursuing.
It’s also important to understand what trust is not. In buyer-driven B2B decisions, visibility is no longer enough. Nor is attention. It takes much more to earn the right to influence buyers. Influence depends on your buyers’ perceptions of your brand’s credibility, consistency, clarity, and contextual relevance.
Fluency also plays a role. Given the length of the buying process, the channels in play (including back or dark channels), does your brand experience match expectations, flow smoothly and naturally, resulting in progressive engagement? Is what your buyers’ peers say about your brand fluent with their experience of it, given relevant context?
If not, your buying experiences may be introducing distrust. Distrust is the result of a noticeable gap between expectation and reality. This gap can result from inconsistency in messaging across experiences or channels. It can also result from promises and bold claims made by the vendor not reflected in customer testimonials or verifiable proof points. One bad review that negates a vendor’s publicly made promise can raise a seed of distrust in the mind of the buyer who sees it.
The Challenge in Building Trust Is Not a Lack of Information
At about the time that B2B buyers started preferring self-education over seller interactions, GenAI made it infinitely easier to source and parse information. Yet marketers responded by producing even more content and flooding buyers with content that sounds the same as competitors’, making it even harder for buyers to find the clarity they need.
What good is it if your content is polished but doesn’t mean anything? Just because AI allows us to churn out content faster doesn’t mean it’s what buyers want. We read research that says buyers want to buy faster and interpret it to mean we need to throw more content at them faster. Yet most companies I speak with are not seeing buying cycle time shrink. Buyers say they’re overwhelmed with content and find the buying process frustrating. Think about the friction this misinterpretation introduced.
Here are two reasons why Forrester finds that only 47% of marketers create content specifically designed to directly answer the questions buyers are asking. And 60% or more of marketers recognize they are personalizing content based on what they want to say, not what buyers need to hear.
Therefore, if information isn’t the bottleneck holding up buying decisions, more content won’t solve the problem. Instead, it’s the hidden delays of the internal buying process, including trying to reach consensus across stakeholders, confidence in defending the choice, and an acceptable level of career risk. In other words, trust in themselves, and you.
If you’re going to create more content, address those factors.
GenAI: Helping Build Trust or Brand Incoherence?
Revisiting the statements at the top of the article, if AI is now a mediator of trust, how are trust signals playing into building buyer confidence?
I find it a bit ironic that trust signals for synthetic mediators are pretty much the same as for human discernment. This includes credibility, authority, depth, corroboration, and contextual, semantic relevance. How they arrive at that outcome varies between LLM models. The outcome is that AI systems infer credibility with the answers they present—whether on point or off.
There’s an opportunity here given that Forrester finds only 50% of B2B marketers are currently optimizing content for AI-powered search. If marketers are still optimizing for obsolete trust signals like rankings, impressions, clicks, and traffic volume and relying on chest-thumping terms like “best,” “revolutionary,” and “world-class,” they’re hoping positioning will win out over proof and credibility.
As this shift to AI mediation continues, marketers who count on their brand carrying the day without shifting their objective from ranking to recommendations may be disappointed. It will take a determined effort to protect against the narrative drift AI interpretation could introduce that dilutes your brand’s true value to buyers.
Ask yourself and your team:
- What happens when your brand narrative is fragmented?
- What if customer and peer reviews contradict your positioning?
- What impact do inconsistencies across channels have on an AI’s evaluation of your brand as an inclusion in its answer?
We need to get our messaging house in order. If your messaging is off, an LLM will amplify brand incoherence, leading to distrust. In the past we could skate past a bit of inconsistency without notice. Now all it takes is a prompt to expose conflict. You create distrust in the gap between expectation and reality when your content and messaging can’t survive scrutiny—whether by an LLM or your buyers.
Revisit your content and messaging and ruthlessly add substance, specificity, operational reality, and verifiable proof points. “Listen” for emotionally empty writing and evaluate depth. If your messaging and strong POV engage humans, chances are they will work for AI.
How Content Contributes to Building Trust with B2B Buyers
If we want our content to play a role in building trust, we need to look beyond vanity metrics to how shareable it is. One of the things I’m seeing in a current campaign for managed security services is the progression made when a group of people in buyer-level roles from a target account all engage with the same content. In this case, predominantly VPs and C-level roles in IT at enterprise companies.
When two, four, or more of the buying committee download a pivotal piece of content like a buyer’s guide, RFP checklist, or executive thought leader content, it’s not unusual to see them show up in intent data for visiting your website. We’re seeing site exploration across services, customer stories, the blog, and industry pages. It’s not instant, but it does occur within a couple of weeks from when the group downloaded. The other scenario is one buyer downloads and others from the company follow suit within days. Because this is a complex sale, it’s encouraging to see engagement proactively expand in that short a timeframe.
The content creating this level of engagement isn’t about features or feeds and speeds and platform superiority. It’s honest thought leadership white papers about operational reality, such as what successful adoption requires, common implementation pitfalls, organizational readiness needs, and timing baselines. We designed the content to help buyers visualize getting the outcome promised.
I can’t tell you how many instances of “I wish they’d told me ‘that’ before we’d tried to roll it out,” over the years of customer interviews I’ve done. Not because they wouldn’t have purchased, but because they’d have prepared for the launch differently to set team expectations, ensure effectiveness, meet timelines, and shorten time to value.
If you’re trying to build trust with buyers, transparency goes a long way toward building confidence that mitigates the risk of making a choice by reducing the fear of failure. Content that inspires internal discussions is critical for gaining consensus from hidden buyers.
What internal conversations is your content designed to encourage?
Building Buyer Trust Isn’t a Single-Step Process
If the content we’re presenting to buyers doesn’t enable decisions, just adds noise, we’re hurting pipeline velocity, not speeding it up. We’re making our buyers work harder to find the information and build the self-confidence (or collective confidence) they need to make a purchase decision.
Trust isn’t a single-step process. Similar to how your B2B buyer “talks” to an LLM in an ongoing conversation that evolves along with added context, trust is built with compounding, consistent, and credible experiences that build to create the overall buyer-driven experience.
Rob Mitchell, founder of FT Longitude, sums up the criticality of trust in an episode of Trust and Influence in B2B podcast with Joel Harrison:
“Knowing that you can trust this brand to have reliable and accurate information, that it’s not trying to trick you into thinking something about a particular topic—that’s going to be a massively important currency going forward for thought leadership.”