Learn why buyers do their own research instead of talking to sales—and how missing information creates distrust. Join our free live webinar to learn more: https://founder-trust-webinar.scoreapp.com

If you have noticed buyers avoiding sales conversations, doing their own research, or questioning everything you say, you are not imagining it. Buyer skepticism is at an all-time high, driven by misinformation, past experiences, and a growing lack of trust in business leaders. This conversation dives into the mindset shifts and practical strategies B2B leaders need to reduce uncertainty, overcome epistemic vigilance, and earn trust before a buyer ever speaks to sales.

📘 Recommended Resources

Lead with Trust: https://www.trustleader.co/lead-with-trust-book

Berg, Dickhaut & McCabe (1995) — the original Trust Game experiment.

Epistemic Vigilance research

⏰Episode Timestamps:

00:00 The Importance of Transparency in Trust Building

09:21 Understanding Complete Transparency

11:51 The Role of Epistemic Vigilance

14:00 Building Foundational Trust

18:21 Practical Steps for Transparency

🧠 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why trust cannot be built long-term without complete transparency
• How epistemic vigilance shapes modern buyer behavior
• What information buyers need to make independent, confident decisions
• How transparency signals competence, reliability, and integrity
• What practical transparency looks like in real B2B organizations

👤 About the Host

Hannah Eisenberg is the founder of TrustLeader and creator of the TrustLeader Framework. With 25+ years of B2B marketing and sales experience, including a decade at SAP Global Marketing and 10+ years as a HubSpot partner, she helps leaders worldwide achieve market leadership by making trust their most significant competitive advantage.

🔗 Connect With Me

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannaheisenberg/

🎧 Listen to the Podcast

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@trustleader-lead-with-trust

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/lead-with-trust/id1732848496?l=da

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2LYVbwkrkTuJKh3mHGNLBH

Captivate.fm: https://feeds.captivate.fm/leadwithtrustpodcast/

Welcome to another episode of Lead with Trust.

Now, today's episode is all about transparency.

One of the core principle, and it's actually the first trust leader principle of building trust, is that you have to have complete transparency in order for the other person to trust you.

Right?

But I've seen this thrown around so many times and so often as, yeah, we need to be transparent in order to build trust, but it's really hard to pin down, what does that actually mean?

How far do we go?

When are we just making excuses not to be transparent and when actually does it not make sense?

So in today's episode, I want to give you a little bit more clarity around what complete transparency in trust building means, how transparency is actually contributing actively to trust building.

We're going to explore an academic concept around transparency and trust building and how that can help you not only shift your mindset a bit, but really clearly make a decision of what needs to be shared and whatnot.

And then we're going to explore some examples of how complete transparency can show up in your work today to build more trust with your buyers.

But before we go down and explore how transparency works in trust building, I want to share with you an amazing experiment.

And I want to share that with you because it illustrates sort of the point of transparency, even though that was not the original purpose of the experiment.

So imagine you are in a research lab.

You've been told there's a little psychological experiment going on.

You're being put in a room and someone comes and says, Here's $10 for showing up.

Thank you so much.

Now you have the option of sending it to the person next door, however little or much you want from that $10.

But whatever you send will be tripled.

Person B, your neighbor can decide if they want to send something back, but it's entirely up to them how much they will send back and if anything at all.

So what would you do?

An economist would say it makes no sense whatsoever to send money to someone else that you don't know.

You cannot see.

You can't evaluate if you can trust them or not.

You cannot talk to.

So there's no communication.

You just blindly have to trust that that person will send you something back.

So you're better off just keeping the 10 bucks for yourself and call it them.

Now, the experiment didn't go that that way because most people would decide to send something or maybe all of the money because they hope and they trust that the other person will send money back, right?

So if you sent all of your $10, you, the other person gets $30, maybe they divide in the middle, they send you 15 back.

Now all of a sudden you made five bucks.

That's 50% ROI on your trust.

That's pretty awesome.

But the point that I'm trying to make with telling you the story is a, it's a good story, but B, there is a element of you have to blindly trust.

How different would this experiment be if maybe both people sat in the same room and they can talk to each other or they know each other?

And that is what transparency does here in the trust building.

If I sit next to the person, I say, look, I.

If I give you this 10 bucks and we triple it and we share in the middle and we all get 15 bucks, we're all good?

Yep, we're good.

No trust is needed.

Right?

Because you are completely breaking down those barriers that you needed to overcome by trusting.

So I hope you're getting my point here.

So the problem is though, that's not the real world, right?

We are having those barriers.

We are having that distrust that our buyer feels.

It's a normal thing.

Now that buyers are distrusting more than ever, they have less confidence.

Businesses or in the world in general, including governments and journalists.

They have.

68% feel that businesses are misleading the buyer on purpose.

That is a massive wall you have to overcome or a massive obstacle that you have to overcome.

Now here's the problem, though.

Most buyers have a point.

There is so many industries that have, as a standard operating procedure, smoke and mirrors.

They are maybe not misleading on purpose, but they're withholding deliberately important information because they feel like the buyer has to come into a sales conversation so we can properly explain it to them.

But that's not how today's buying environment works anymore.

According to Gardner, 75% of B2B buyers want to have a completely sales rep free experience.

3 out of 4 don't want to talk to a salesperson at all.

There's other studies that have shown that making a half a million dollar purchase, even a million dollar purchase, without talking to a sales rep is completely acceptable to a lot of businesses today.

That's how far we've gone.

And the reason is not that they're trying to avoid salespeople per se.

The reason is that they don't trust you enough that you're not going to persuade them that you're not pushing through what benefits you more than them.

They want to make sure they have unbiased information, they have enough information and they have the right kind of information and they can verify the sources it comes from.

They don't want to trust you as the only source.

So that's why they're doing a lot of audience due diligence.

And there's a lot of mental energy involved in doing that research by themselves, because this is most likely the first time they're going to be doing this, or it is not very often that they have to go through the process.

So there's a huge learning curve involved, but they're willing to do that rather than go and trust you.

So here's where complete transparency comes in.

So imagine every single piece of missing information that you should have shared or misleading information is a brick in a wall that you're building that now you're a buyer has to overcome.

And if you share all the information that a buyer needs in order to make the decision by themselves, am I a good fit for this?

Can I afford this?

Does this include the right functionality?

Will I regret this?

All of these doubts, fears, worries and concerns, if you're addressing them in a complete, transparent, unbiased, honest and proactive way, that wall doesn't exist.

But every time you choose not to share this, you're building this invisible wall that someone has to overcome.

If you look back to the experiment story that I was telling you, that was a huge wall that's physical, but it was a lot of trust that needed to be given.

And we want to reduce that uncertainty as a vendor as much as possible.

So complete transparency is an absolute must.

So what is complete transparency?

I've been throwing around this term mean by that?

I mean by that that we are communicating in an open, honest and proactive way.

We're sharing our information, intention and processes with those people that need to know about them.

What I do not mean by that is sharing obviously any confidential information.

When I say complete transparency, there is a clear line between this is this makes sense to share that type of information and do not share.

I am not encouraging you at all to share any type of confidential information.

And you always have to check if, for example, of partners or other shareholders, if that is confident information before you share it.

Anything else that the buyer needs to know and should know in order to make a complete independent decision should be shared.

So in trust building, complete transparency refers to our willingness to disclose relevant and non confidential factors in a clear, accurate, non distorted and timely manner.

Even when those facts might be inconvenient or expose vulnerabilities that should be public.

I want to be very clear.

I'm sorry if I sound like a dead beating a dead horse, but when I say expose vulnerabilities, I'm not talking about confidential information.

I'm talking about every product or service has a inherent trade off.

It might not be a good fit for someone where it's a good fit for another person or you have gaps that your competition can fill, but that makes you a good fit for other people or for different people.

Or another example is you just had a data leakage that needs to be shared, right?

You have been hacked, you have a performance problem that you encountered, there's a bug in your software, there is a problem with your product that needs to be addressed.

Maybe there's a.

Recall those other things that I'm talking about when I say expose vulnerabilities or even if it feels uncomfortable or inconvenient and then you share that.

But I'm not talking about confidential information.

Okay, Just want to be clear here.

So as a quick summary, complete transparency reduces uncertainty if we're sharing clear and factual information.

Now I want to take this one step further and explain and share with you a psychological concept called epistemic vigilance and epistemic trust.

Because I find that so fascinating, I think you will appreciate it too.

That is the psychological reasoning behind what I just explained.

Epistemic vigilance is the cognitive safeguard to help us detect misinformation or deception.

It's also defined as the human capability to assess the trustworthiness of of a source.

So who are we hearing this information from?

Who should we believe?

And the message itself.

So what do we believe?

Or the credibility of the content.

Now, in non scientific terms, I refer to that as a BS monitor.

And I don't know if you have any teenagers.

I have two.

Their BS monitor is off the charts.

I don't know if it's because of all the social media today or if they're just much more, but this generation seems to have almost a too big of a BS monitor.

And their epistemic vigilance is off the charts, sometimes to the detriment of real information.

So very interesting.

And I think all this misinformation and the global situation, let's just put it that way, isn't necessarily helping to lower that epistemic vigilance anytime soon.

All right, not getting into politics here.

Let's move on.

So now that we understand what epistemic vigilance is, it's clear that our job as vendors trying to be building trust is to overcome the epistemic vigilance, right?

To make sure that person trusts us as the messenger and the content of the message that we deliver and build epistemic trust.

So overcoming the epistemic vigilance and then building epistemic trust, and if we are able to do that, we're building the foundations of building that foundational trust that is fact based, that is cognitive, that is enough for the first purchase.

So it's completely clear that without being completely transparent and without disarming epistemic vigilance and it's companies have to work so much harder to overcome that those buyers doubts, those that mental wall that I was referring to earlier.

Now, complete transparency, as I mentioned before, is the first principle in the trust builder framework in the first phase.

Now, a principle, if you are not familiar with it, is sort of a price of admission to doing everything else in that phase of the trust leader framework, the entrance price or the core principle that you have to adhere to in order for everything else to work in that phase.

And the first phase of the trust leader framework is that we're building foundational trust.

We're building that cognitive fact based trust that is needed for a first or initial transaction, right?

So that someone just buys your product.

In order for someone to buy your product, they have to believe that you are competent so that your product will deliver, that your product will stay true to its service, to its promises, that you are reliable, that you will deliver on time, you will deliver on budget, you will deliver in the quality that you had promised and that you treat them with integrity so that you will treat them not only with respect, but you will treat them ethically and you will actually deliver.

So those three things have to be true for someone to go and purchase a product, right?

They have to believe in your competence, your reliability and your integrity.

Now, how does complete transparency help us achieve this?

Well, first of all, competence.

If we are being transparent in the way we communicate our competence, it helps us showcase our expertise through educational content.

It helps us to explain our rational behind a specific process that we might have developed or a specific decision that we're making that might be counteractive to or counterintuitive to what you might expect as a buyer or how the industry does it.

But by being completely transparent about it, people understand why we're doing things the way we're doing things.

And when they understand why we're doing things in a certain way.

They understand that we're competent.

They believe in our competency.

Okay?

The second thing is reliability.

So it's extremely important that we're honest and open about our processes, our results, and our intentions and our actions.

If we are completely transparent about those things, people will believe that we are reliable.

That includes, as I meant before, that if we have a breakdown that we openly communicate.

But essentially what this helps us do as buyers is we align our expectations to the reality of what is happening in the company.

And that way we perceive them as being reliable.

And last but not least, integrity.

Transparency is literally the manifestation of integrity.

It signals to our buyers our commitment to ethical behavior.

And that's why it reinforces integrity.

And that's why it becomes that that price of admission or that core principle, that has to be true for those three things.

Now, if we are completely transparent in those three three areas, we can build that cognitive trust much easier and we help break down that wall.

Less trust is required.

Trust comes easier because we're reducing uncertainty.

We're in decreasing uncertainty, we're decreasing doubt and we're increasing the knowledge, the certainty.

We're our credibility.

So all in all, this helps us overcome epistemic vigilance and build epistemic trust.

I talked a lot in concepts right now.

I just also want to show you how that actually shows up in practice.

Okay.

And I chosen five things that you can actually go and start this week and implement them and see how that much how it makes a difference in your business.

The first thing I want to share with you is pricing.

You must address pricing on your website.

It's table stakes.

There's no way around it.

And I can hear you say in your head, but wait, Hannah, we have so much customized pricing.

We can put a pricing on our website and that's fine.

I'm not saying you have to put a dollar and cents on the website like a SAS company, for example, is able to do, but you must give a clear indication of value.

Your customers must be able to understand value without talking to you.

That includes giving a range of typical.

A typical buyer that has these conditions usually pays between X and Y.

Here's what makes the price go up.

Here's what the price.

What makes the price go down.

Here are the factors that the price depends on.

Here's the actual the additional fees add ons options that you choose that make the price go up and down.

Here is where we fit in the industry.

Here is where why some competitors are more expensive than others.

And here's where you find us.

This helps your customer to understand value.

And that is absolutely crucial.

B2B websites, excluding e commerce, less than 10% have pricing on their website.

Absolutely astonishing.

So if you do not have pricing on your website, I absolutely encourage you to do that.

Bonus tip here.

I recently had someone who was resisting for years to put pricing on their website.

So I went to ChatGPT and I said, okay, give me, I'm looking, I'm a buyer for this and this and for their product.

Obviously I have this in this budget.

Give me the top three options.

And it did.

But that company wasn't part of it.

Then we implemented a pricing page and the next week I asked the same question.

And that company was the number one choice recommended by chat simply because they now have transparent pricing.

If you are only doing it for this reason, fine, but you should do it for the sake of your customers.

But you have to understand that with A.I.

now, if you're not giving pricing information, you're not being recommended because it always needs a budget.

If you're not sharing that publicly, you're not part of the list.

Right.

Second is somewhat related to this.

You have to answer your buyers burning questions.

You know those questions that we as buyers always have, but we as businesses really like to shy away from and we're like we're going to privately answer that in a sales conversation, you have to answer them publicly.

If three out of four buyers don't want to ever talk to a salesperson and they don't find the answers on your website, they will go to someone else who does answer them before, simple as that.

So in practice that could look like something like X versus Y.

Which is the better choice in your situation.

And you have to be transparent and honest and unbiased about this.

Even if you're comparing yourself to your competitor, you have to say where they are good and where you are not good.

Because you have to address the bias.

Biggest mistakes buyers make the truth about common misconceptions like mention it, what to expect in the first 90 days.

So you're really going through what is called the big five.

It's an endless customers principle.

And what the big five are is pricing.

So anything related to pricing, cost saving, ROI, financing, etc.

Potential problems.

So what could go wrong?

What are the trade offs where am I?

Maybe not a good fit, etc.

Number three is versus in comparison.

So this means you compare yourself against a competitor.

But your market category or solution approach could also be compared to another alternative.

You could, for example, if you're a software company, write an article about buying this solution, whatever your solution is, versus building it in house and under.

Making people understand what goes into building a software, what is the infrastructure?

What are all this.

They're not.

That's not their main core thing that they do right.

But a lot of companies think it can't be that hard.

And then they start and everything goes right and awesome for the first three months.

But then things go downhill.

And if you're a software company, you know what I'm talking about.

So it's your job, it's not their job to know that.

It's your job to explain that and honestly compare those two options and share that knowledge with them.

Because you know.

So you should share that knowledge if that's what you're encountering as a question.

We also have best off, just to finish off the big five best of.

So who is the best in this industry?

What are the best 5?

Manufacturing for X, Y and Z.

And yes, you're naming your competitors.

And now the guidance is actually to include yourself because as you're making a listicle, you want to include yourself as well in this.

While previously we said don't include yourself because people are already on your website and it might look biased, now we want to include ourselves because AI is going to take that list and spit it back to people.

So we definitely want to include ourselves.

But again, under the hood of complete transparency.

All right, and the last one is customer reviews.

So what are the customer case studies, the journeys, the problems that your customers struggled with?

How did you help them overcome?

Okay, so that's the second way of how you can be completely transparent.

I want to share three more, but very briefly, openly discuss trade offs.

You should have somewhere on your website a very clear way for your customer to distinguish are you the right fit for my situation?

This could be a we're a good fit for you if bullet points were not a good fit for you if bullet points.

Or it could be a comparison article, whatever it is, but it needs to be out there and it needs to be very honest and transparent.

Then you cannot rely on vague claims.

Vague claims like industry leading or category defining or whatever it is.

Don't use those words.

You need to be able to verify every single claim you make.

There's another endless customers principle or concept that I love to teach my clients.

And it's the selling seven videos.

And there's one specific video in there that is called Claims we make.

And it's literally a video doing exactly that.

It explains why we're making this claim, and it helps you back up.

You can show the process that you're using.

You can show what you're doing differently, but you got to be willing to show what others aren't willing to show.

And last but not least, I want you to really be explicit about the process, boundaries, and expectations, because I really want you to reduce that anxiety of making the how does it work Visible, and I want you to clarify how decisions are made, what's required, and what your buyer can expect.

Okay, so just to finish us off today, complete transparency isn't a philosophy, and it's a practice.

And I want you to put that into practice.

You listen to this episode.

I want you to actually put what you just learned into practice.

So if someone tried to trust you without speaking to you, they come to your website, they read your content, they interact with what you're putting out there, but they're not calling you up.

What are the top three things they still would need to know to independently make a good decision for themselves?

Pick one and answer it this week.

I'll see you next time.

Until then.