When Trust Is the Goal, What Does Your Marketing Plan Actually Look Like?
Most senior B2B marketers will tell you, without much prompting, that trust is what really drives buying decisions. Ask them how their marketing plan is built, and you’ll get a very different answer: pipeline targets, MQL conversion, attribution models, intent data, sourced versus influenced revenue.
This is the gap our recent Ada Create roundtable kept circling back to. We brought together senior demand gen and channel marketing leaders, along with Ada’s world-renowned chartered psychologist Dr Paul Marsden, to interrogate what we called The Trust Deficit. The honest finding from the morning: B2B marketing teams know perfectly well that trust drives buying. The problem is that almost nothing in their operating model, the metrics, the budgets, the targets, the attribution, is set up to reward it.
Here are five tensions we kept returning to.
1. You’re being measured on the 5% you can see, and ignoring the 95% who actually buy from you later
Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls it the 95:5 rule. At any given moment, only around 5% of your potential B2B buyers are actively in-market. The other 95% will buy eventually, just not now, and no amount of bottom-funnel pressure will move them up the timeline. Buyers move themselves into market based on need, not your campaign cadence.
One demand gen leader in the room described the practical problem. Attribution models reward responses. Targets reward downloads and demo bookings. Almost everything happening in the dark funnel, the conversations buyers have privately, the trusted advisors they consult, the back-channels where opinions are formed, is invisible to the metrics that determine your performance.
The result is a marketing function structured to harvest demand rather than build the trust that makes you the brand a buyer thinks of when they eventually move in-market. As one marketing VP put it: “You don’t need a lot of money to invest in brand. The trick is being simple and sticking with it.”
2. If you’re not A/B testing prevention against promotion, you’re probably defaulting to one and missing half your audience
A senior campaign manager running EMEA for a global software vendor shared a useful finding. Her team tested the same content asset with two different messaging frames. The first was a promotion frame (here’s how to grow, accelerate, win). The second was a prevention frame (here’s what to protect, what not to lose, how to safeguard what you have). For that particular campaign, prevention outperformed.
She runs her personalised EMEA campaigns through Ada Create across multiple markets and audience personas, and has seen LinkedIn click-through rates as high as 5%. The prevention versus promotion finding came out of that broader test-and-learn approach.
One data point from one brand doesn’t make a rule. The more important takeaway is that most B2B content teams have never actually run the test.
Paul Marsden gave the room the psychological context. Daniel Kahneman won his Nobel Prize partly on the principle that losses loom larger than gains. Humans feel the threat of losing something they have far more sharply than the appeal of gaining something they don’t. A given audience often splits. Some buyers respond to promotion language, others to prevention language, and the same individual can sit in either mode depending on what’s happening in their organisation that quarter.
This connects directly to trust. Buyers extend trust to a brand that demonstrates it understands their situation, including what they’re trying not to lose. A campaign that talks only about growth to a buyer whose current quarter is about protecting headcount or defending budget lands as tone-deaf, even when the product is a fit. Prevention framing is a signal that you understand the buyer’s real psychological state.
The problem is that most copywriters have a natural default, usually promotion. Hero headlines, campaign concepts and ad copy lean towards growth almost by reflex. Without testing the alternative, teams systematically miss the prevention-oriented segment of their audience, often the segment most actively in-market.
In an era where AI makes it trivial to spin up parallel variants, there’s almost no excuse not to test both.
3. Your channel partners aren’t a distribution channel. They’re your trust layer.
For the channel marketing leaders in the room, this was the dominant frustration. The partner ecosystem (resellers, distributors, system integrators, MSPs) is fundamentally a trust relationship. End customers buy from partners they’ve worked with for years. They trust the partner more than they trust any individual vendor, and when a partner recommends a vendor, that recommendation carries the partner’s reputation on the line.
As one regional marketing director described it, vendors often produce co-branded campaign content with the expectation that partners will run it verbatim and drive pipeline back. Partner communities are dealing with content from many vendors at once, often inconsistent, often heavily Americanised, and none of it sounds like the partner’s voice to the partner’s customer.
The most forward-thinking distributors are reframing themselves as the translator layer: taking vendor messaging and adapting it to fit the relationship the partner already has with the end customer. Done well, this turns the distributor into the trust amplifier in the chain rather than a passive logistics step.
That only works if vendors fund the trust work alongside the lead-gen work. The same director described a shift over the past five years. Vendors have prioritised investing where they can see immediate pipeline, and have steadily defunded the things that build relationships over time: co-hosted events, networking moments, the slower work of bringing customers and partners into the same room. As she put it: “I’m not going to invest in your network, I’m not going to invest in making sure that people are together. These things should just happen.”
They don’t just happen. They get built, by humans, with budget, over time.
This is the shift Ada Create is now working on with a specialist channel marketing agency in the room, building tools and frameworks designed to help distributors do the translator work at scale, without losing the human relationships that make channel partnerships valuable in the first place.
4. Events are an under-leveraged trust engine in B2B marketing
Most B2B marketing leaders spend a significant portion of their budget on events, and most events are measured purely on pipeline generated. As one MD in the room observed, this creates a strange situation. You have eight hours of physical proximity with potential customers, a rare commodity in a dark-funnel world, and you spend it putting them in rows to watch presentations.
If trust were your event KPI, the agenda would look different. It would be designed around the peak-end rule, Daniel Kahneman’s finding that people don’t remember experiences as continuous sequences but as two moments: the most intense point, and the ending. The question becomes not “what content did we deliver?” but “what is the peak moment we engineered, and how did we close?”
It would also lean on the things AI can’t do. Eye contact. Reading a room. A real conversation where a vendor admits what they don’t know. One channel leader described an experiment of bringing back-office staff, the people who’d actually pick up the phone when a customer placed an order, to a customer event. The customer-facing impact was immediate. The next call wasn’t a procurement call. It was a relationship call.
The hardest internal sell is replacing the pipeline narrative an event is currently expected to deliver. The marketers who can hold both, defending the investment commercially while redesigning the agenda for trust, are the ones whose events will still be worth attending in three years.
5. “Unthoughtful thought leadership” is a real internal threat to your brand right now
AI has made it trivially easy for anyone in the organisation to produce content, and people at every level are doing so. The result is what one VP of Marketing called “unthoughtful thought leadership”, a flood of indistinct, AI-assisted posts going out under various names, none bad enough to ban and none good enough to differentiate.
The damage is a trust problem. Buyers grant their attention to brands that consistently sound like they have a sharp, specific point of view. When that voice fragments across a dozen mediocre internal contributors, the brand stops feeling like a credible source and starts feeling like a content factory. Trust takes years to build and a few quarters of generic LinkedIn output to erode.
Paul Marsden left the room with a related provocation. AI’s reasoning capabilities are getting good enough to see through promotional content. As buyers increasingly outsource their initial vendor evaluation to AI assistants, generic positioning won’t just fail to differentiate. It’ll be actively filtered out. The marketers still pushing volume in 2027 will find themselves invisible to the systems their buyers are using to decide.
The answer is fewer voices, more conviction. Narrow down to a small number of genuinely sharp voices internally and invest in amplifying them, while putting governance frameworks around AI tools so that “anyone with a ChatGPT login” doesn’t become the brand’s de facto spokesperson.
The volume strategy was always a bet on being seen. That bet is about to stop paying out.
What changes if trust is the KPI?
None of the leaders in the room had this solved. B2B marketing is in a transition, and the organisations that come out of it strongest will be the ones willing to argue for new metrics, new investments, and new internal narratives, even when the pipeline pressure is still pointing the other way.
A few questions worth taking to your next planning session:
• If trust were your primary KPI, what’s the first thing in your current plan you’d cut?
• Where in your current funnel is “scale” actually eroding the relationship you’re trying to build?
• What would your next event look like if you measured it on what attendees said about you to their network three weeks later, rather than on pipeline sourced?
• Are your channel partners a trust layer you’re investing in, or a distribution channel you’re squeezing?
The trust deficit isn’t a content problem or a targeting problem. It’s a measurement problem. Until what gets measured changes, what gets built won’t either.
Sources and further reading
• Dawes, J. (2021). The 95:5 Rule: Marketing in the B2B sector. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute / LinkedIn B2B Institute.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. (Loss aversion and the peak-end rule.)
• Huang, J. (2025). NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang on Securing American Leadership in AI. CSIS event transcript, December 2025.