Putting the "u" in Trust

Trust is the lubricant that eases the frictions of life and business…but now we’re just grinding our gears!

Trust is one of those words everyone throws around—especially in B2B circles—but ask a dozen people what it really means, and you’ll get a dozen different answers (and half of them will contradict each other). The sad truth is that we all agree “trust matters,” yet we routinely break it, often without even realizing it. That irony becomes painfully clear when you dig into the little things—because, these days, everything really is a game of inches. But for all the nods to nuance, most revenue teams treat trust like a checkbox rather than something that demands constant care.

Why “Trust” Feels So Elusive

• Everyone Talks, Few Understand

  
  

  We’ve all seen corporate mission statements blather on about “building trusted partnerships.” We spout it in sales pitches: “Our clients trust us.” Internally, we trot out trust as a KPI. Yet when push comes to shove, so many of us treat trust like an afterthought. The result? Clients feel betrayed, teams become cynical, and everyone ends up worse off.

• Details Matter—Until They Don’t

  
  

  You’ll hear leaders preach, “It’s all about the details,” or “Success is a game of inches.” But when quotas and dashboards take center stage, details vanish. Promises are made (and broken), prospects are misled (even if unintentionally), and the “trust” we brag about evaporates, and we don’t seem to notice!

  
  

Listen to the Pod:

A Cautionary Tale from Maddie Bell Maddie Bell (CEO over at Scheduler AI) recently called this out on LinkedIn, spotlighting the dangers of poorly qualified (or downright bogus – my words) sales meetings. Revenue teams are so measured by and rewarded according to hit rates—number of meetings booked, demos delivered, SQLs created. Not surprisingly they’ll take a meeting with anyone who can fog a mirror.

That’s our first betrayal of trust. By agreeing to talk to someone who clearly doesn’t belong, or want to be, in our funnel, we’re telling prospects: “We care more about hitting our numbers than helping you solve a real problem.” We’ll come back to this.

Defining Trust: A Confident Relationship with the Unknown At its core, trust is about embracing uncertainty. It’s establishing a more confident relationship with the future. If I’m going to rely on you, I must believe you’ll do right by me when the unexpected happens.

The Two Pillars of Trust: Ability and Character It helps to break trust down into two main components: Ability and Character.

1. Ability (Competence + Reliability)

   • Competence: Do you actually know how to cut the grass, or in our world, deliver on a complex software integration?

   • Reliability: Can I count on you to show up every Wednesday (or hit your project milestones) without fail?

 → Both are conditional. I might trust you to cut my grass every Wednesday, but I probably wouldn’t trust you to cut my hair!  

2. Character (Benevolence + Integrity)

   • Benevolence: Will you put my interests on par with—or preferably ahead of—your own? In other words, do you genuinely care about my success, not just your commission/results/revenue/goal?

   • Integrity: Are you basically honest? If you say you’ll do something, will you?

 → Character is far more decisive than Ability. A technically brilliant partner who treats you like a number is far less trustworthy than a “good enough” partner who genuinely has your back.

Why Character Always Trumps (and Then Fuels) Ability Think of Character as the engine that powers Ability. If someone has the skills (competence) and shows up (reliability) but doesn’t care about your success (benevolence) or fudges the truth when it suits them (lack of integrity), trust implodes. In contrast, a vendor who might not be the absolute top expert—but who consistently tells you the truth, not just what they think you want to hear, —wins every time.

Back to BDRs Booking Bad Meetings: A Trust Meltdown BDR teams, measured and rewarded on “meetings set,” will chase any lead, no matter how irrelevant. Why? Because we’ve turned business development into an engineering problem: pour X contacts/leads into the top of the funnel, churn them through a process, and out pops Y “Sales Qualified Leads.” Numbers make neat PowerPoint slides, but they do zero for trust.

• Prospect’s Trust Is Lost: When you schedule a call that’s obviously irrelevant, the prospect feels like you wasted their time. They walk away thinking, “These folks don’t care about my business. They only want my calendar.”

• Sales Team’s Trust in BDRs Shatters: AEs get a set of meetings that look good on paper but are cluttered with unqualified leads. Suddenly, AEs start rolling their eyes at every “SQL” that comes their way. They don’t bother preparing, because they assume it’ll be another waste of time. Now the entire revenue machine grinds to a miserable halt.

This is a textbook case of promoting your interests (hitting meeting quota) above everyone else’s (prospect relevance and AE productivity). It’s a betrayal of benevolence: you’re not putting the prospect’s interests first, you’re putting yours.

The Ripple Effect of Betrayed Trust

1. Prospect Disengagement: They ghost you or, worse, bad-mouth your company.

2. Sales Team Cynicism: AEs become “meeting skeptics,” assuming every BDR lead is junk, so they don’t prepare which means they’re more likely to fumble the real ones as well.

Welcome to the culture of distrust. Trust is the lubricant that eases the frictions of life and business allowing them to run more smoothly…but now we’re just grinding our gears!

So, What Now? Building (and Keeping) Trust

• Measure the Right Things: Instead of “meetings set,” track “meetings with a clear business outcome.” Reward BDRs who qualify ruthlessly, even if their numbers look lower.

• Train for Character, Not Just Competence: Role-play scenarios where a “no” is the right answer. Celebrate BDRs who walk away from weak leads.

• Foster Cross-Functional Respect: Get AEs and BDRs to collaborate on ideal customer profiles (ICPs), so qualifiers don’t feel like gatekeepers, and AEs see the value up front.

• Embrace Transparent Communication: Encourage everyone to flag when a metric is pushing them to cut corners. If a BDR says, “I feel shaky about this appointment,” dig in rather than shrug it off.

A Final Warning: Greed and the VC/PE Factor There’s a more fundamental problem underpinning the whole mess: greed. Founders think they can launch a startup, raise VC or PE dollars, and cash out for millions in a few years. So they take investment capital from firms that only know one language: numbers.

Venture capital and private equity firms structure everything around hitting quarterly targets, scaling revenue at all costs, and pumping up “valuation multiples.” If your cap table is full of investors demanding 3× returns by next year, guess what happens? You’re incentivized to push numbers—any numbers—knowing full well that spreadsheets don’t care about trust, nuance, or genuine customer success. Until founders and their investors shift from a purely financial mindset to one that values trusting relationships as much as short-term metrics, this cycle of trust betrayal will never change.