Stop Paying the B2B Trust Tax

David: Marketers out here today, there is only one way to amplify a marketing message. Only one way. I have to increase the trust in the message.

Drew: We're trying to get our target to discover us and trust us enough that they'll actually spend money with us.

David: The only way as a human being to build a reputation is consistency. Show up the same way every time. It's the same with a brand. As a company, the only way to build a brand is consistency for good or bad.

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. You're about to listen to an expert huddle, where our flocking awesome community CMO Huddles gets exclusive access to experts, including the authors of some of the world's best-selling business books. In this episode, David Horsager, author of Trust Matters More Than Ever, put some hard edges around a word that often gets treated as soft. He explains how a lack of trust quietly slows everything down, and why clarity and consistency matter so much for leaders and brands. He also gets into rebuilding trust when it breaks, and why the rise of AI makes the human side of leadership even more important. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and chief marketing renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Trust has always mattered, but in an era shaped by AI-generated content, misinformation, and nonstop noise, it may be the single greatest differentiator a leader or a brand can build. And that's why I'm excited to welcome David Horsager, founder of the Trust Edge Leadership Institute and the best-selling author of Trust Matters More Than Ever. David has spent years helping leaders and organizations understand how trust drives performance, connection, loyalty, and growth, all of those things that I know matter to the CMO Huddles community. So today's conversation is all about becoming stronger, more trusted leaders in complicated times. So, hello, David. How are you, and where are you this fine day?

David: I am in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, at our offices, about 15 minutes from my home, a little hobby farm out in Stillwater, Minnesota. So, 30 minutes from MSP, if you know the international airport in Minneapolis-St. Paul. I'm home today, or at least in our area. It's a Minnesota, it's gonna, I love it. All right, beautiful time.

Drew: White Bear Lake, that sounds pretty cool. I'm expecting a wonderful view, and you should go after this call, go out and do a little fishing. But anyway, that's very cool, and of course I love your backdrop, so we have that in common. So let's get into it. So I think we prepared you for this question, but we love to start this way, which is just in case our audience needs to leave early or we need to convince them to stay. Please list three things leaders usually get wrong about building trust, and if you can, just list them. Don't go through them in detail, because then we can talk about them one at a time. Number one.

David: Number one, they misunderstand the cost of a lack of trust. They underestimate the cost.

Drew: Okay.

David: Number two, they don't understand fully how to build trust. They think it's character, the framework. Number three, they don't understand the key to rebuilding trust if they've ever lost it.

Drew: Got it. All right. Well, those are great. So let's talk about the cost then, up front, of what that looks like and how one sort of knows that they've underestimated the cost of losing trust.

David: Well, yeah, I believe, going back to my research a couple decades ago, you know, we found a lack of trust is the biggest expense they have, and I think you said it might be differentiator. It is absolutely the differentiator, and I believe the research proves it. We can get simple today. A leader, the core issue is a trust issue, so it's not a leadership issue. You follow someone based on trust. It's not a sales issue, you buy based on trust. In fact, the only way to speed up a sale is increase trust in the channel. Marketers out here today, there is only one way to amplify a marketing message. Only one way I have to increase the trust in the message. That is innovation. You want more innovation in your team? There is only one way to do it. If that team doesn't trust each other, someone will hide or not share ideas because they're scared, so they lose innovation, creativity. If you have kids in a classroom at school, there's only one way to increase learning, and that is increase trust in the professor, the safety of the room, which is trust, or the trust in the content. So even the Vegas Harvard study shows diversity of almost any kind pits people against each other in some way, unless we increase trust, and then we can gain enormous benefits. So I think our research shows that the leading indicator of anything great is trust. You want higher engagement scores? You don't get engagement with engagement, you have to increase trust. You want a higher net promoter score? What we learned, this and Bring In, was, I think, Procter and Gamble and Walmart together on a project. Actually, United Health Group also, and they said, "Oh, it's not a referral issue, I have to increase trust." So, one simple example to answer that question, I could give you loads from the research, but it would be this: a lock. There is only one reason I would put a lock on anything. I would not put a lock on my gate, my car, my home, my bicycle, except that I don't trust. So what is the lack of trust costing? Well, one, I got to buy the lock, that's money. There's always a money cost, but the biggest cost by far is time. Now I got to open it. What if it's a combination lock? Forevermore, massive cost in time. So you can think about it so simply. I mean, think of someone on your team that you trust. Write a text to someone you trust, boom, done. Now write a text to someone you don't trust. Ah, they'll take that wrong, rewrite that, I rewrite that forevermore. You got kids that are going out with friends to the ball game, you trust them, boom. You got kids going out to the ball game with, you don't trust, it's the biggest stress you have as a parent on your team. You got someone that's got your back, you trust them, ah, you got someone on your team you don't trust, biggest stress you have at work. A lack of trust is always the biggest cost. We have to shift our thinking and see the trust issue, then we can solve work, and it doesn't matter if it's marketing or marriage.

Drew: We have really tied that one up in a bow. Let's go onto the second one, about sort of that they don't understand the building process of trust. Well,

David: yeah. So the eight traits came out of the research, how you actually build trust, and I know everybody wants three points in a poem, but the problem is eight came out of the research, and I'm talking about trust. So, by the way, just letting everybody know, usually with me you don't have to go two times speed on your podcast later, I try to keep it tight, but anyway. So I mean, I'm passionate about this work. By the way, you know, I've seen it, people say it tripled their sales. I've seen it, you know, people say it saved their marriage. I've seen the Admiral of the Navy say it dropped suicide rates. I've seen one of the biggest companies in the world say they gained market share at 11% in a year in a billion-dollar business unit. I've seen people, I mean, and I've seen it change in my own life as a leader and a parent, and so I'm really passionate about this. But there's eight, you know, the eight-pillar framework we call it, is how trust is built, and you know, I know we want to go back and forth a little bit, but this one I think, just in a language, I got to give all eight very quickly because this is how trust is built. It takes all eight to have this thing we call the Trust Edge, and that's the greatest competitive advantage you can have in marketing and business and life. And I define them, I just want to say ahead of time, I define them by C words for clarity, but try not to think of this as some cutesy pastoral list. They each represent a different funnel, that is, research funnel, that's really important. So before

Drew: you go through it, I'm gonna stop you for a second because I do want to go through them, but in this section, I just wanna stop you there and I wanna wrap up on the third one, and then we'll go through. So yeah, yeah,

David: it's fine, I'll give it to you right now. How do you rebuild trust? Now, in that book you held up, Trust Matters More Than Ever, there's a 10-step process, but I'll just give you the nugget, and that is this: yes, go through all 10 steps, that's great, whether you've had an oil spill in your company or you've had a moral fail, you're at the top, it comes back to these eight. But I'll tell you what it absolutely is that people get wrong, and what it's not. It is not the apology. You never rebuild trust on an apology. "I'm sorry I'm late." "No, you're not, you're late every time." I don't rebuild, that doesn't mean that doesn't open the door of communication, start the process, but you don't rebuild trust there. The only way you ever rebuild trust, at the end of the day, and that's the 10th point in the process, is you have to make and keep a new commitment. It is the only way you will ever rebuild trust.

Drew: This, it's funny how certain things stick with you in your life. But Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a book called The Scarlet Letter, and in this book, the character is accused of adultery, and they put an A on her sweater. And over the course of the book, it goes from A for adulteress to able, to angel, and it is exactly as you're describing. You know, how do you rebuild brand? It is through all of those things. So I just, it's, thank you, Mrs. Betty Orbach, my junior year teacher, for instilling that in me, because it's come up. Anyway, we're moving on. And I do think that the process of rebuilding trust is really important. It's particularly important for certain types of brands. It can happen pretty quickly, like you can lose trust pretty quickly as a brand, and it can take years to rebuild it. We

David: say it's like a forest. You could take a thousand years to build the sequoias, and a camper can burn the whole thing down with a touch of carelessness and a match. So it's true, there isn't a complexity to that because people that are absolutely consistent,

Drew: right?

David: If they make a non-moral failure, often it's overlooked, or they get the benefit of the doubt because consistency is one of the pillars, and people do give grace if they're absolutely consistent and it's a non-character breach,

Drew: so I think it's important that you just define trust, and why, you know, you've already addressed sort of why it matters more, but just define it so we have a clear framework. You can

David: use a lot here. I mean, trust is a competent belief in a person, product, and organization. And if it's a person, it's to do what's good and right on a consistent basis. But really, it's a competent belief. So in fact, I could trust you for good or bad, if you're consistently late, I will trust you to be late. So it's at the core, it's this confident belief, or this faith, in something. But in the way we talk about it, it is this common belief in a person to do what's good and right consistently. So, if we were to

Drew: stretch that to a brand, a brand is a promise.

David: Totally,

Drew: and it is that you will deliver on that promise over and over and over again, consistency.

David: Right,

Drew: that's really helpful. So you talk about the greatest businesses of our time are differentiating with trust. I think it'd be great to give an example, whether it's an organization or leaders that are doing this really well right now.

David: Well, I kind of think it's better to start with the framework so we can tie back to it, but here's how trust is built, and there's more to them. I'll say these eight, and you'll be like, "Oh, I got it." No, I mean, there's so much more to each of them. Number one is clarity. People trust the clear, and they mistrust or distrust the ambiguous or the overly complex. And I will just, this one, I think we should spend the most time on today, of the eight, because I'm telling you, marketing people think they're clear when they're not, and I was too. It's just, think about it: a leader that's not clear about the vision, I might not follow; a salesperson that's not clear about the benefits; a manager that's not clear about expectations; a teacher that's not clear about assignments. People get frustrated with all of those, and especially marketing, marketing people just are not clear. When they get clear about the right thing, then the message sticks. So I can run through, I think at the end, how I would think about clarity for marketing and brands. But I'll give you one simple example on clarity, and we won't spend this much time on all of them, we'll come back to clarity. But I just will say this. So I'm being driven to an event, the CEO picks me up at the hotel, we go to the convention center, there's 100,000 people or something there, so it's like a few miles away. I'm looking at this highway out in California. There's all these, you know, stores and parking lots, and I'm just kind of glancing at it while I'm talking to them, and we're driving these few miles, and you know, there's a few cars in every parking lot, and then one of them, the parking lot is jammed full. It's like, whoa, and I look, and I look at the one-word sign above that spot, that store, and that store is winning on clarity. In fact, that one word, bold, big sign, is so clear it even tells out-of-towners why to get off the highway and get to that store. And what was that word? Liquor. So the point is, cleverness doesn't win today, and I think marketing thinks that cleverness wins. Barb wanted to have this really cool little hair-cutting salon, so she called it Whispers on Main Street. Nobody knew what she was doing there. She changed it to Best Haircuts by Barb, and people came for haircuts. So clarity, we want it crystal clear. Anyway, clarity is number one. Number two is compassion, we trust those that care beyond themselves. A lot to this, but if you don't show you care through your brand, it's not going to work today. Number three is character, that's doing what's right over what's easy. We get that, I thought that was the most important, it's very important. But I might trust Drew to take my kids to the ball game because of his character, but not trust him to give me a root canal because of competency. Number four is competency, we've got to stay fresh and relevant and capable. It turns out, in any way, whether marketing, whether brand, whether product, if we're not staying fresh, relevant, and capable, we're not going to win. And there's brands winning on this. The next pillar is commitment. It could have fallen under character, but it was enough different in the research to show that we trust those that stay committed in the face of adversity. If you have a pandemic or you have something else, and you're going to jump when it gets tough, I'm not going to trust you, that's what the science says. Next pillar is connection, which really, some of the words that came out of this one were collaboration, connection, the willingness to connect and collaborate with others, and there's counterforces to each of these. Counterforce to this one would be siloing. A counterforce to competency would be arrogance, "I already know it all." Compassion's counterforces could be any of the isms or hatred, but they would also be like apathy.

David: Under compassion, jumping backwards, you'll see words that came out of the funnel like empathy, or intent was a big word under that funnel, where we trust those that have intent beyond themselves. So here's where we are. We got clarity, we got compassion, we've got character. I'm totally imperfect at everything I teach, by the way, I just know it's true from the research. But we got character, we've got competency, we've got commitment, we've got connection. We have two more, which is number seven is contribution, and the number one word that came out of this funnel was results. You actually have to contribute results. You can be so kind, but if you don't get the lawn mowed, it doesn't work. You can have sold me that fertilizer, and you were compassionate, you were this, but if it doesn't help yield on my farm, it doesn't help. You could say this thing, but if I don't get the result, you said you're going to make that beautiful spread, but if it isn't beautiful, it doesn't matter, because that was the result I paid you for, asked for, or whatever. So you gotta contribute results at the end of the day if you want to be trusted. Might be the most compassionate surgeon I ever met, we go in for amputation, cut off the wrong leg, we still have a problem, and I'm not gonna trust you. The final pillar is the queen and king of the pillars, which is consistency. Sameness matters. Two things: the only way as a human being to build a reputation is consistency, show up the same way every time, whatever it is. It's the same with a brand, as a company, the only way to build a brand is consistency, for good or bad. You have a bank, you go into the bank, and the literature is really great, but the tellers are mean, and the ads are this way, but the this is that way, you just lost it, because it's so inconsistent. And so, whether you're an individual building a reputation or you're a company building a brand, it all comes down to consistency. Of course, we gain the Trust Edge when we're consistently clear, show we care, connecting with our people, and all the other eight.

Drew: It's funny, and I want to go through a few of these, obviously we're not going to be able to, but the compassion one really struck me. I just finished a book called The Mademoiselle Alliance, and it told the story of a French female resistance leader. She actually led up to 3,000 agents during World War II, and she kept, and this was a novelization of a real-life individual, but she was

David: Mademoiselle Lyons. Yeah, and it's

Drew: just a great story of leadership. But you would see the compassion coming through her, and in her monologue, she was worried, as a woman, "Am I being too compassionate and not strong enough?" So she had that, but her clarity about why we are doing this, the character came through, the commitment. I mean, she had a chance, she went to England during this thing, and then she went back, even though she knew it was quite likely that she would be caught.

David: Wow! And then

Drew: just the consistency, she was the longest, and her organization lasted from 1940 to 1945, but she also had her eye on contribution, which was, could they get a, there were two things they were trying to do: one, help the U-boats get bombed, and so they had to do that, and two, map the coast for the ultimate invasion. And they were able to do both of those things along with, I just,

David: I just bought the book.

Drew: Did you? Yeah, anyway, it's a, I buy it

David: right now, if I'm gonna do it, I'm getting it. I think you'll

Drew: find that it's like she checks all of these boxes under incredible. Like, at least a third of her organization was captured by the Gestapo and died. It was just fascinating, and you talk about the leadership challenge and being a woman. So, all right, you said earlier that you think clarity is the biggest problem for marketers. It's

David: I don't know if it's the biggest, I mean, if you have a character problem, you can look at any of these, they were relatively co-equal from the research, but it is a big problem for marketers because, yeah, it just is. Unless you have a gazillion-dollar brand, Nike and Adidas mean nothing, Google means nothing. So if you have a gazillion dollars to put behind marketing, you can change the name and make it mean something. But even then, clarity wins. People have thrown billions at things that didn't. No.

Drew: Yeah, I mean, we all can say, you know, "15 minutes will save you 15% on your car insurance." They've spent billions beating that into us, but it is there, you know, the clarity of that is hard to argue with. Most of the CMOs in our community do not have that kind of budget. So if you look at it that way, you'd say clarity is even more important.

David: It's more important, and say the thing, then say the thing. It's like, it'd be better to say "best shoes" than "Nike" if you don't have enough money for it. Just make it. What is it? What can I not use any brain calories to define? One idea under this one, that, if you're a leader, and I think we're jumping to this one later, but it fits here with clarity, I have, in that book you held up, that's my latest book, of the five books, and they all have different great parts to them, but they are really usable, there's 40 tools, and one of the tools is this MRA, and we check the message: if you want the message to matter today, is that message memorable? Is it repeatable by a third grader? And is it actionable? And people get this wrong, action, they skip, like in values, or ever, is it actionable? Well, let's just have a value of integrity. What does that look like? People even argue about what that word means. That's, what would make? Oh, let's see here, in my space of speaking on, you know, 100 events a year around the world, an actionable word way for integrity is "be the same on stage and off stage." That phrase is stickier and more actionable, and actually even more memorable than integrity, whatever that is, right? And I'm not saying we can't define integrity, but it's just like, what is memorable, repeatable by a third grader, and actionable? And an example here is Caribou Coffee. When they went number two to Starbucks, you know, they had a message for, I don't need to go into it, it's in a lot of my books, but they basically had this message that every barista knew, and it was actionable. One of them was "act with urgency." It turns out people that want their coffee want it fast. When we did the study 20 years ago or whatever it was, and we ordered mocha mochas, mocha mochas all over, it was 50% faster, without a better layout in a store, because the young people, the baristas, just thought, "Oh, I got to act with urgency when I do this." So make it, and I will argue, and I know the CEO then, Tattersfield, I know the CEO of Caribou now, they lost all that market share, and you got Dunkin' Donuts and everybody else. I will argue the reason they lost their market share, and they're coming back to clarity, but they grew so much they complexified everything, and they took that little BAMA phrase out that everybody knew. They lost because of clarity, because they're losing clarity. And Butcher, John Butcher, is a great CEO, bringing clarity back, but it'll be hard to ever gain that market share back because they lost it for a decade.

Drew: Yeah, one of the things that I suspect, so our community is all B2B marketers, many of them sell to enterprises, they deal with, you know, a buying committee of 14 people, a sales cycle of 12 to 18 months, and so the notion of this kind of, it's a complex selling environment. You know, there are different things that a CFO cares about versus, say, a security guy, if you're selling software. So they often try to have a story that ladders up to one story, but it breaks down pretty quickly, and so that's no excuse for the lack of clarity, but it is something that happens in B2B more frequently because, well, "I'm selling to a different audience here," and I've got to change our big story and make it relevant to this person. So that's their excuse, at least.

David: Yeah, the only thing I would say to that is, yes, you have complexity, and I can give you all the places that have complexity. And the only people that actually, the best, are those that say, "Yep, I've got this, but I've got to do all I can too." And you know, we, you remember the old VUCA idea? The U.S. military taught it for a long time. I asked one of my friends that landed in, you know, a CEO now of a great company, but he landed into Afghanistan. I said, "What was that like? You know, when you're there for real and guns could shoot you, and it's the middle of the night and you jump in from a helicopter?" And he said, "Well, it's different, let me tell you, it's just different than all the practices, it's different when you know it's real." But we got trained on something called VUCA, V-U-C-A: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. When things are volatile, uncertain, complex, or ambiguous, we got trained to ask two questions. And you know, this isn't in my, this is just off the rails here because it's hitting on something you're saying, although I do mention it in my Trusted Leader book, but anyway, it's like, ask two questions. You got all these things happening, you got complexity, and you could sit there and complain. I watched people in the pandemic that we consulted, you know, it's like, "Yeah, but I don't know when this," and there's problems, no doubt about it. Empathize with them first, and then you got to do something. And they got trained to ask two questions. Number one: amidst all this stuff, what can I do? Because those that paused and thought, "What can we actually do?" Oh wow, we could do this, oh wow, we saw immense creativity come out of it. And number two: you'll find you had more ideas than you ever thought. So, what should I do first? "I'm here in Afghanistan, they're shooting at me." In our case, I remember one of the biggest healthcare organizations, they had to wear hazmat suits and give shots to these three-year-old kids. They wouldn't take the shots because they remembered the nurse's smile, and they couldn't even see it. So they stopped, they put beautiful buttons on those hazmat suits of the smiling nurse, and the kid would come in, and in their nurse voice would say, "Remember me? Here's my picture," and they'd point at it, and the kid would take the shot from a nurse in a hazmat suit. Because they got creativity, and they said, "Okay, but what can we do? We could do this," and that's what you have to do. And those marketers that are going to win are saying, "Okay, I've got this against me, it's unclear, we're complex sales, we've got all this." And I'm not downplaying that, by the way. And but I'm just saying, "But what can you do?"

David: Right.

Drew: And what should you do first?

David: Yes.

Drew: And you can do more than you think. It's, you remember the Seinfeld deal, when he was asked, you know, what made him great or whatever, and he was, I think, the highest-paid entertainer for a decade in the U.S., and he said, "Well, of all the comedians, I just have one thing I'll do." He said, "I'll do the work of clarity, and I'll take a sentence in a joke from seven words to five, because if I cut out two words of fat, it's just that much funnier." And that's the same for marketing.

Drew: I love this, the "what can I do" and "what should I do first," because it simply says you are an action-oriented person. I have to tell this quick story because it will make you laugh. Years ago, I was working with this woman, Judy Fearing, who was a product manager at Pepsi. She was going to LaGuardia Airport for an airplane that was leaving at like 6:30 in the morning. The parking garage at the airport, the little wooden thing, was down. She drove a Jeep, and she said, and she drove right through, right through that thing, parked the car, made the plane. You know, she did what she had to do, that was one thing she could do. And now, it was breaking the law, but she made her plane, and that was her mindset. And boy, that was a message to our team as well: this is who you're working with, this is the kind of "can-do" adage that you need to be working with folks at Pepsi. And it was totally true, they were all like that.

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Drew: We've kind of talked about clarity, and I think it'd be good to move. Maybe we move to connection, and part of this is, while there is a tendency to get back to work, not everybody is, you know, their team might be there two days a week, three days a week, and also their team is probably remote all over the place. So I'm wondering about this notion of building connection, and you know, part of connection to me is, or maybe this is more about compassion, is the empathy. That's hard to do on a hybrid. I mean, in a hybrid work thing. And I'm sure I'm going to come up.

David: Yeah. So I'm going to recommend, I'm not trying to sell, like I don't make money on books, we give a lot of them away, but the newest, the actual newest book that I have that came out is just, it's right here, called Trust at a Distance: Six Strategies for Building Trust in Remote Work Teams and in a Remote Environment. Anyway, a few things that are key to remote and connection. Number one is a predictable next meeting with your supervisor. One of the biggest frustrations people have is losing, when they're not in person, a predictable next meeting with their supervisor. So people, turns out, they can carry a lot if they have a predictable next meeting with their supers. Even if that's ten o'clock in two weeks, they go, okay, I can handle it. But that gets moved again, they get shunned again, that gets, just, oh, I'm not in person again, I don't get that meeting. They lose people and engagement and a host of other things on the connection side. You have to amplify connection, but it's not always the way people think. So you have CEOs saying, "What do you mean? Now that we're hybrid, we got to do, you know, coffee chats for hours on end, and we got to do this, we got to do that." It's like, take five minutes, five minutes at the top of a one-hour meeting, and just connect personally. Even set an alarm that goes off. I'll tell you, I already gave a nurse example, but I'm sorry about that, but I was training, one more example, because it just shows the creativity that you can think of. Think of, two months, this is relevant today even though I'm going back to the pandemic, two months into the pandemic, nurses are, they are worn out, they're overworked, they're all these things, it's remote except for they got to be there. So I'm doing a training in our studio. I've got, I don't know how many, a hundred nurses in one inch screen, I have a studio, you know, five camera, whatever, and all this stuff. But you know, they're worn out, right? And I'm like, they're not gonna engage in this. They don't, they're, you know, they're seeing death, they're all these things. So I said at the beginning of the training, I just said, "Hey, everybody, virtual, all this." I said, "Just take, a piece of paper and a post-it note, just take 30 seconds right now and just draw a picture of how you're feeling." And they took 15 seconds. I said, "Okay, on the count of three, we're just going to hold those up to the camera. One, two, three." And people held up a picture of crying, anger, mad, whatever it was. And they held it up for five seconds, they put it down, and that amount of connection, we were able to go forward and do the training in a meaningful way. But it's getting a little creative of saying, how can we connect virtually? Now I told the publisher, by the way, and I'm seeing the data on virtual, and I'm seeing how much, it's still, in person is better in many ways, and so I said, I'll write the book if I can open with, "If you have to, you know." So now I have virtual people, and so there's a lot of benefits. I can hire this lady from Penn State out in Pennsylvania that's brilliant on my team, and she doesn't have to be in our institute offices here where I am today. So that's all good, but there are things you can do to make connection happen. One of those is be creative. One of them is, if you can get teams together a certain amount, hybrid a certain amount. You know, even I work with the organization that brings, you know, that is basically remote, but they are in charge of our power grid across North America.

David: High stress, big challenge, but they get the CEO, senior leaders together three times a year, they're able to do that, not everybody can financially. They get, under the sub groups, together two times a year in person. They're able to sharpen each other. So getting some in person together meaningfully, and also in virtual meetings, even taking a few minutes, what we do is something called the connection question, and we just go around the room, and you have, 15, the Zoom room, 15 seconds each, and just do this, because we are humans, we need to humanize things, we need to do that to collaborate more. So I can give you lots of other ideas, but there's two, predictable next meeting. Yeah,

Drew: that's great. Okay, so I like to give folks some really tangible examples. I mean, and in your book, there are lots. Those trust tools, there are 40 of them. But one of them was 25, which is about curious questions, that great leaders often seem more curious than performative. What kind of questions build trust faster, or how do you think about that?

David: The curious question piece. I mean, just curiosity is so critical, and the point of that curious question portion, two things. A mentor, Patricia Fripp, brilliant lady, who said the key to connection is conversation, the key to conversation is questions, therefore learn to ask great questions. And we know they're open ended and that kind of thing, but this teaching in curious questions just gives a flow. So I see different leaders or people stay in one or the other too long. So there are discovery questions and there are solution questions. And this is almost a way of getting to an outcome or coaching people on your team. And so discovery questions, make sure you start there. Where, you know, hey, what do you think a home run looks like on this project? That's a discovery question. By the way, try not to use the word "why." Why is abrasive. Think of a way to say "how" instead. How... do you come to think that, instead of why do you think that? You know, it's like, "how" softens it. But just say, hey, what do you think a home run looks like? What's the outcome we would, we'd be best for this? That kind of discover, discover, discover. But some people stay there and want to do a SWOT analysis forever more on every little thing. And so I want to point them to get to, at some point, solution questions, because they get to hope. So once you've discovered whatever, if you're coaching your employee, or you're working with someone, or you're on a project, discover, you need enough time there. And I give several in the book as options, but then you want to get to solution questions, like, how many people do you think we need on this project? What do we have for a timeline? Just the solution of, like, when that outcome happens, what's next after that? Or just, you know, and I give lists of questions, but it's just to think in terms of, if you're a leader, marketing leader, or if you're working on a project and you want to extract from your marketing for that company, and you only have, you know, a half hour with the C-Suite that wants to speak into it, just think of that. Get enough discovery, but get to solution questions, because you want to put those together to get to the outcome you want.

Drew: I think it's such a great, just the notion of not asking "why" but asking "how." It's so smart, because once you ask "why," you've got the person on the defensive, exactly, who can be

David: that way too, by the way. Who did that, you know, blame, "why" and "why," and who can take people out, back into PTSD childhood. So, yes,

Drew: indeed. This is, I'm almost afraid to go here, but I loved your list of magnetic traits: grateful, listener, encouraging, humble, honest, and respectful. I wonder if there's one trait in those traits that leaders underestimate the most today.

David: Absolutely, 100%. If I said right now, everybody, um, I'll sometimes joke on stage, are there magnetic, do you think there's magnetic and repelling traits in people? Traits that draw you in, traits that push you away. They're like, absolutely, there are. And I'll say, first, you know, they, old joke, like, yeah, there's people that walk into a room and they light it up, and there's people that walk out of a room and they light it up, right? So what is that about the people that are repelling? And people quickly say, it's, you know, arrogance, and it's, you know, this. They'll even jump into like, its body odor, all kinds of things, right, push away. And I say, okay, what do you think the most magnetic trait is, according to this study, in first interaction? And, oh, it's smile. A smile is good, but it's not even, it's not even the top three. Humility, true humility, not false humility. Empathy, you know, all these things. Number one in this study, by the way, and the trait that, by the way, if people have this trait, I'm going to say almost all the negative traits go away. People that have this trait, they're not entitled, they're not complainers, they're not whiners, don't have high ego. This trait was by far the most magnetic trait, and it was gratitude. We love to be around people that are grateful, and I'll even have salespeople say, "Yeah, well, I can't be too grateful, it'll seem like I'm going to give too much or negotiate too much." Yeah, no, be grateful, you, they took the meeting, be grateful for them. Don't be weird, thank you, thank you, thank you, but be like just genuinely grateful. Everybody responds positively to that,

Drew: right? Let's talk about that then in a little more detail. What does gratitude look like? I'm thinking of a Chief Marketing Officer. They interact with all sorts of different aspects of the organization, plus they have direct reports, and you know, there's the superficial "attaboy" kind of thing, there's the employee of the week, there's, you know, there's record. Let's attack

David: that really quickly, first. Yeah, so first of all, in one of the parts of the book, I give a feedback framework, which is positive and negative. Funny enough, in the last research we did, people want negative feedback as much as positive, they want to know where they stand. So this idea that they only want positive, you know, isn't true. And by the way, people can tell if you manipulate. If you do the old, I don't know where this training idea came, where, you know, a feedback sandwich or something, where you start with a good, then put in a bad, then put in a good. It's like, you know what? Just tell me the truth of what's going on right now. So, feedback, we say, see it, say it, listen, and move on. And of course, if it's a problem too many times, then we give an accountability framework for how you move on, which can be releasing people, by the way. But anyway, if you're going, yeah, if

Drew: you want to know where that compliment sandwich came from, it's coaching seven year olds on a soccer field. That is how coaches are trained. If you want to get a seven-year-old, I don't know

David: if I want to even do it there, because I don't want to teach the manipulation, because we can tell, you know, it's like, yeah, I've seen it. But we do, yes, but we do need appreciation. Okay, yes, yeah, compliments, we do need it, and people are doing great things around you. So, to get away from, I'll give you a really quick tool for getting away from "attaboy" or "good job," that was just kind of like blah. An acronym you can remember: SPA. SPA. If you want to make your appreciation more powerful, it's true, it has to be more than a plaque once a year, as far as a culture of appreciation. So, how do we show that gratitude? Here's one way: SPA people, SPA. S means specific. The more specific, the better. Instead of saying "good job," say, "Drew, I noticed when you came up and you shared those three ideas, and you didn't even take the accolades for them, you gave that to people on your team, the way you did that," that's specific. Or, like, Drew, instead of, like, when we had the big dinner at your house, saying, "I had so much fun, it was such a great time, thanks, Drew," I say, "Drew, you're an amazing host, wow, that was," and that feels different when it's about you, specific. P stands for personalize it, if you can. So I did this work with someone at the Yankees, and you'd think, what would they give me? Okay, well, by the way, this, you don't have to have an expensive example to personalize, but just this example was, they sent me a gift after I'd done some work, of cufflinks, and you'd think they'd give me Yankee cufflinks, which is what they have in the gift shop, but I'm in Minnesota. They, instead of doing that, the chief, I think it was the chief operating officer, sent me fly fishing cufflinks because he knows I love to fly fish. And now, instead of, when I get in cufflinks only five times a year, I'm not a big cufflink guy, but for that gala I go to every year, and that black tie thing, I don't put my great grandfather's cufflinks on anymore, I put fly fishing cufflinks on from the New York Yankees, and when I do, I think positively of the Yankees, even in Minnesota, because he personalized it a little bit. So just think of, by the way, this can even be a note, a handwritten note, or whatever, but personalizing a little bit. The A, of course, in SPA stands for authentic. If it's not authentic, we can smell it a thousand miles away. So one way to just simply get your mindset and act out gratitude more specifically would be to SPA people.

Drew: Now, not to read into the Yankees' gift, but because the Yankees have been more dominant against the Twins than any other team in the world for the last 50 years, I think they probably could have, you know, cufflinks were just a minor thing they could have done for you. But that's a complete aside. Okay, we've now talked for 42 minutes, and we haven't mentioned AI. And I think, because it is on our mind, I would love, how you're thinking about, hey, how AI potentially undermines trust, and in an AI era, particularly as brands are increasingly creating content, emails are going out that are, help, written by this, how are you thinking about AI as an undermined of trust, and what guardrails marketing leaders need to be thinking about when it comes to AI?

David: I think the most interesting part of the research here, I'll give you a one-minute history of trust. A long, long time ago, we did not trust, for two reasons. Number one, I didn't trust you because I didn't know you, you're from the other side of the mountain, you have different customs, you look differently than me, you speak differently than me. The number two reason I did not trust you, I did know you, and I've seen how you act personally. Trust was extremely personal. Hundreds of years later, trust was institutionalized. That was largely a good thing. We could lose trust in one senator but still trust the government. We could lose trust in one teacher but still trust the education system. We could lose trust in one, you know, pope or religious figure and not lose trust in religion. Maybe institutional trust tanked after Nixon, about 30 years ago, was 80% of our government trusted, our, 80% of people in America trusted our government to do basically what was right for most, and now it's like less than 7% or something. The only thing worse is the institution of media. You remember when we had the news? Not anymore. Where do you get your news? What's your special news? Used to know someone by their checkbook or their date book, now I can ask you where you get your news, and I know a whole heck of a lot about you. So institutional trust tanked, and there's a lot we could say there. But I want to get to the point that's most helpful for marketers. But first, we went to distributed trust. When I grew up, you weren't supposed to get in a car with someone you didn't know, now we call it Uber and jump on in. Don't go to someone's house you don't know very well, bring your own mattress, call it Airbnb. Trust became distributed, and now even certain types of distributed trust can increase trust, for example, blockchain or other things. But what's most interesting to your marketers and everyone right now today is, about two years ago, and not because of COVID so much as a lot of other things, trust came back to more personal than it's been in 100 years. We are craving personal. Why? AI deception. We have no idea the number of, YouTube, the number of references, recommendations online that are true or not, we know many are manipulated. Deep fakes are a massive reason. Number one question, one study of senior hires in America was, they said the number one question they are asking is, "Is it real? Are you real? Is this real?" That's what they're asking every time they look at a marketing message. Is it real? And so this is the problem with AI, and this is the big undermining challenge, is, how can we, the question you need to ask today is, how can you be more personal in an AI world? So, I mean, what do we know today? We just talked about thank you notes, right? We know the massive difference in feel and power of a handwritten thank you note is more powerful today than it was 20 years ago because it is so uncommon and personal for people. So the question I would ask is, how can you, even in a technological world that we're not going to get away from, how can you be more personal? I mean, there's a load of things, I'll go simple. I mean, look, here's one way. Right now, you're with me, we're going to send this, put this on YouTube. It's dumb little things often that make it more personal, handwritten notes, this, that. But right now we're on here looking at our screens. Most people look at, either have their screens off, or they have their screen, their camera way down low, looking up in your nose hairs. Just that, you put your, and I put my screen eye level, that was one little action that made it more personal to people, and frankly, more believable.

David: There's a load of things you can do, but this is where you need to think. The question is, in this AI world, how can I be more personal? Of course, I'm pushing ethics and AI rules, I think we need, I'm not a big regulation guy in every way, but we need some regulation here, because just like when they dropped regulation from news, there's no need to be true, you know, true news no longer needs to be true on cable. We need some regulation here.

Drew: It's so funny, so every day I get at least two emails, at least, of some guest requesting to be on the podcast, and now there are automated tools that can go and listen to the last two or three episodes, and say, "Hey! I listened to your last episode, and I saw this and this and this, that's why my guest will be really, really great." Well, today, funny enough, I got two emails that were, one was for CMO Huddles, and the other was for a different company, and the AI had screwed up, and so there, it was in plain thing, boom, oops. But what's interesting is, they're so close, because they are getting closer to things that are relevant, too, and so there have been a couple times where I looked and went, yeah, I can't argue with that, that's pretty damn accurate, that person would be an interesting guest. So, you know, relevance, is, there's this interesting moment in marketing where it's relevant, but it's not creepy.

David: Adjacently to all this, I teach in the book the key question you need to answer, one of them, whether you're a marketing message person or a CEO, is: take the message you're saying, thinking, and say what... this means to you is what this, this is what you got to answer. A lot of times AI isn't doing this yet, it will, but take the concept, the content, the message, and answer the question of what this means to them right now. That's just a little side note.

Drew: Right. Okay. We have some very personal questions that have come up, but we have a CMO starting a new job, and they want to show up and build trust as quickly as possible. What advice do you have for that marketing leader?

David: I talk about sometimes, I'll give one framework, there's a lot I could say here, but how do you get buy-in when you don't have power over? So I'll give you a few ways to get buy-in. I'll give you five steps, actually I'll make it simple here. Five steps to get buy-in, whether it's on a project or, you know, in a new space. Number one is empathy. You have to even think about this, someone's, if you can just put your feet in their shoes for one second. Like, let's say you're trying to get buy-in on a project, "Hey, Mr. Boss or Mrs. Boss, I know you have all these things to choose from," just that one sentence of, oh, you get me a little bit, empathy. So just when you go in there, just, like, no, this has been some little feel of empathy. Number two, if you're trying to get buy-in, or if you're able to bring in an idea with credibility beyond yourself, which means, hey, I don't know if you've seen this research, or I don't know if you've seen this Harvard Business article, I don't know if you've seen this book on trust, I don't know if you've seen just some, if, when you're going in the first time, not "I'm so cool, you should have me," the ideas I bring from the last company, but if you could bring in credibility beyond yourself. Number three is anticipation of better. If you can paint the picture, not about you being there, but paint the picture of, if we do this, or, "I'm so excited to be here because I think this can look this way down the road." You think of the Abernathy, or whatever it was, Abernathy, of the 1980s, the pictures were, you know, "not ripped dude" and "ripped dude," like you get both shirts off of these two guys, what were they selling? If you buy this thing, you can look like this guy. And they, it was just purely anticipation, turns out you have to use it, but what they're selling was, you buy this thing, you look like this. And if you can paint that picture early on, when you go in, of, "I'm excited to be here," but don't forget the next one, which is humility. When you go in there at the first, be, have some humility. And number five, in the process for getting buy-in early on, is solutions, but just be really careful with how you bring them right away, not arrogantly, remember humility was number four. But if you can bring in a simple idea, they could do, like, oh, we needed, people need solutions. So if you can bring ideas in marketing, they want those. It's that you follow the process of all five of those, but if you bring some solutions with empathy and humility, and that they can see the picture of what's better ahead, and you've got some credibility, not yourself but something else, those can get buy-in quickly. Those five steps.

Drew: We're running out of time, so I want to quickly try to address one other question and then get your final thoughts. So, you're a leader, and your CEO says, "So, does your team trust you?" What are the sort of indications that you do have trust, and are there sort of actual measures that you recommend that folks do?

David: We have, you know, six powerful, I think we're the best at measuring trust, six powerful, five powerful assessments for measuring trust in leaders, teams, organizations. Trusted 360, Enterprise Trust Index, Team Trust Index, those ways that you can measure. No, absolutely, they're very valuable. So at the Trust Edge Leadership Institute, if that's interesting, TrustEdge.com, happy to help. But there, of course, are indicators. Are people sharing things with you? Are people able to tell you negative? If they're not telling you any negative, they don't trust you, because you're not that good. So that's, there's more signs, but if they aren't telling you negative and they're not sharing fully with you, you got to be really sensitive. A lot of narcissists just overlook this and plow through it. But those are a couple of signs that I want to look for.

Drew: Got it. Okay, so to wrap up, first of all, thank you for this amazing input, and I

David: didn't have AI try to get on this podcast, so there you go. And that I

Drew: appreciate as well, although a lot of folks did. Where, I'm just, where can people find you?

David: Well, TrustEdge.com is the institute, DavidHorsager.com is where, you know, my speaking, books, and advisory work. So either one of those is good, and then you can, LinkedIn is easy for me personally, or others, but you can find me any of those places, and

Drew: perfect.

David: Honored to be here. Love what you're doing, Drew. And so

Drew: give me, give me two key takeaways you want every CMO listening to remember.

David: Okay, CMOs, I'll give you two things that jump in my mind. Number one, as leader, here's the question for you, and this gets to the character pillar, but it is, would you follow you? You want everybody else to follow you, want everybody else to listen to you, would you follow you? And the greatest leaders are most loved by those closest to them. It's easy, you got follow, you know, you got TikTokers and whoever, that people like fans from afar, and nobody likes them inside, and they're not living it out. Would you follow you? So you got to be a leader first, and a marketer second. Number two would be, under the last pillar, and that is both marketing and leader, and that is, I can't walk out into our main room of our office right now, but I have this sign up really big to remind me every day: it is the little things done consistently that make the biggest difference, not the big things. If I'm overweight, I've had too many mocha lattes over years. If I'm a good husband, I've loved my wife over years. If I'm a good marketer, a good salesperson, it's little things done consistently. If I'm appreciating my team, it's not just a plaque once a year or sharing a vision once a year, it is sharing it consistently, because if you're not sharing a message every 14 days, nobody knows it. So it is little things done consistently that make the biggest difference. Those would be two that jump to my mind. I love

Drew: those. I think one of my biggest takeaways from this book is that you can always be better at this, because there's always new things to be thinking about. And that trust is something that you need to understand, but as a marketer, obviously that's what we're trying to do, we're trying to get our target to discover us and trust us enough that they'll actually spend money with us. So you really need to understand the notion of trust. And two, you can do things,

David: Yes, both as an

Drew: individual to build that trust, and as a leader of a group, and obviously help your team become more trustworthy, if you will, and ultimately get your company more trust. I

David: want to give a simple process, in 20 seconds here, because, so for marketers, here you go. You want to check if a marketing message is powerful. Okay, of course we have the deep assessments and consultant and all this stuff, but if you just want to do it in one minute, take the marketing message, let's take a, I'm just going to look at an old magazine ad here, let's just put that as my hand, I'm just gonna go and look at it. Say, okay, clarity, number one, one out of ten, how clear is it? Number two, does it show compassion for the people we serve? Compassion, one out of ten. Character, is it on brand for our character? Is it, you know, we're selling to Amish people and it has beer in it, I don't know, whatever, like it, oh, that's off character. Number three, our, number four, does it show competency? Does it show we're able to help them with this thing? Number, one out of ten. Does it show that we, you know, that we connect with our people? Does it show happy people using our products? Does it show contribution? Does it show that the result, oh, the lawn is green and mowed for that landscape company, the result. Does it show consistency? Is it consistent with everything else, colors, brand, other? If you just, one out of ten, go through the eight, you will have a more trusted message.

Drew: I love it. All right, David Horsager, I so appreciate everything that you're doing. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, audience, for staying with us.

Drew: If you're a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!