Understand why potential buyers hesitate, ask for more proof, and default to safer options - even when you are the better choice. Join our free live webinar to learn more: https://founder-trust-webinar.scoreapp.com

Many B2B leaders invest heavily in marketing and messaging while overlooking the foundation that buyers actually need to trust them. This episode breaks down competence as the first cornerstone of trust and explains how buyers cognitively assess risk before buying.

📘 Recommended Resources

Lead With Trust by Hannah Eisenberg: https://www.trustleader.co/lead-with-trust-book

Dentsu – Superpowers Index 2024: https://www.dentsu.com/us/en/solutions/dentsu-b2b/superpowers-index

Take the assessment: https://trustleader.scoreapp.com/

⏰ Episode Timestamps

00:00 Understanding Competence in Business

03:43 The Importance of Buyer Perception

07:41 Bridging the Gap: Internal Competence vs. Buyer Belief

13:44 Why Competence Comes First

15:39 Teaching as a Tool for Demonstrating Competence

20:18 The Impact of Believable Competence on Sales

24:14 Summary and Next Steps

🧠 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

•Why competence is a buyer-held belief, not an internal reality

•How unclear competence increases perceived risk and price pressure

•Why brand, authenticity, and relationships cannot replace cognitive trust

•How teaching reduces buyer anxiety and demonstrates expertise

•What must come first to shorten sales cycles and scale trust

👤 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/

Competence is not what you know or how good you really are as a business, but it is what your buyers can believably verify.

Now most founder led businesses I speak to are amazing at what they do.

They are highly competent, they have experience and they have expertise and they really solve a unique problem in a fantastic way that no one else can does quite the same way.

But the problem is unless you actually work with them and you experience and you can benefit from the expertise and from from their competence, you wouldn't know.

I have worked with so many B2B founder led businesses in the 2 to 5 million that are struggling to communicate how good they are especially compared to their competition in the rest of the market.

So they lose sales to bigger companies that appear to be the safer choice.

If your buyers don't believe you are competent, nothing else matters in sales because if they don't believe that you are competent and more competent than alternatives, they're not going to buy.

In this episode I want to unpack one what competency actually means and why it's the first and most fundamental building block of building trust.

Welcome to another episode of Lead with Trust.

This is episode 37 and we are going to dive today into the first cornerstone of the trust leader framework and that is how to build trust.

Foundational or cognitive fact based trust using competence.

More specifically, communicating your competence believably and effectively.

Now in the last episode we talked all about transparency, but transparency in itself is like the price of admission, right?

The price of admission to building fundamental trust.

The principle that you have to commit to.

But by itself it doesn't build cognitive trust that results in sales.

You can be radically transparent and still not be trusted.

Because if buyers aren't convinced that you actually deliver, they're still not going to buy.

So this episode is not about giving you random tactics or talking about competence as like a fuzzy value.

What this episode is about is the mechanics of building trust, using or communicating your competence effectively and believably.

Because if you misunderstand what competence is and how it helps you build trust, everything else that you built on top of it will be fragile and could come crumbling down like a deck of cards because that foundation wasn't laid.

Today, we're going to lay the foundation for building that cognitive fundamental trust that is required to make the first purchase, actually experience firsthand what it is like to work with you, how competent you actually are, how reliable you are, how you treat people with integrity before they can then go start trusting you on an emotional level and become that lifelong loyal customer that you're looking for.

But today we're going back to the basics and to the very foundation.

Okay, so what does competence actually mean in trust building?

When I talk about competence, I refer to the knowledge, the skills, the experience, the expertise, the capabilities required to perform a specific task or role effectively.

In other words, if you are a company that is manufacturing a certain piece of equipment, you have all those skills, expertise, capabilities in house.

And your unique set of competence or skills, expertise, etc.

Is different from your competitor.

And that's why you end up having maybe slightly different processes.

Your secret sauce is a bit different, but, but because you have these, these skills, knowledge, expertise, you have that competence.

You are positioned in a way that you can actually perform the thing in terms of sell the product and the product actually works in the expected manner, or you provide the service, right?

You have the expertise, you have the experience in a way that it benefits your customer.

But it's not enough to have that in house.

In trust building, it matters less that a company actually is competent and far more that the buyer believes that you're competent based on their logical and cognitive assessment of your company's abilities.

Now, don't get me, don't misunderstand me.

I'm not saying that you should sell yourself as more competent than you actually are, but what I am saying is because you're so competent, just assume that somehow magically transfers and the buyer just will find out because you are so competent.

And that's, that's a misconception I see all the time.

And it's not a conscious decision that someone makes, right?

It is.

Someone focuses so much on explaining their technical competence.

They bring in engineers, they bring in a lot of times the founder and sales conversations, and they're talking at a level that is so high up there and goes way above the head of the buyer.

Or they are speaking in such broad industry language jargon that the buyer has no clue what you're talking about, or they have a different mental picture of what you're talking about because it's so generic, buzzworthy.

So if that is what happens, the buyer is not clear on your competence in their head.

They can't assess as a cognitive assessment whether or not you are uniquely positioned to do the thing that they would hire you to do or they would pay the price of the product for you to deliver.

Okay, so in the context of trust, it exists only when the buyer believes that the company has the ability to deliver on the promise and meet the expectation.

It's really important to Understand?

Okay.

So just to wrap it up, it matters less that you are competent, but it matters more that your buyers believe that you're competent because your buyers are making a risk assessment.

And this is especially true in complex high stake B2B decisions, because they're asking unconsciously, is this going to work for me?

Can these people handle my situation?

Is this safer than any alternatives?

So if your buyer doesn't believe you're competent and more competent than the alternatives, they're not going to buy.

Now, again, I'm not saying your internal competency doesn't matter.

Of course you have to be competent.

But what I'm saying is that most companies confuse that internal competence with the external clarity.

But what they sort of assume magically happens is that that tacit knowledge that lives inside the founder's head, that lives inside the sales conversation, or that lives in the delivery teams, transfers somehow to the buyer's head or to the buyer's belief.

And it doesn't.

My point is you have to bridge that G. Right?

That's what I'm talking about.

What is happening internally in your company, the task of knowledge.

You have phenomenal secret sauce.

You have to bridge that by communicating your competence believably and effectively into the buyer's head so they can assess what is happening.

Are you competent?

Are you more competent than others?

In what ways are you more competent?

Common patterns that I see companies do instead.

And I want you to understand what that would look like so you can recognize the signs if you're doing this as well, and then stop and say, okay, we have to do slightly something different here in order to bridge that gap.

A lot of times what happens is companies don't actively demonstrate their competence.

They indirectly infer it.

They post logos of customers they've worked with to infer their experience, having worked with X, Y and Z.

Now, posting logos of your customers is a great trust signal, but it shouldn't go just in itself as the explanation of your competency.

Then they're posting credentials.

We are a, I don't know, certified X, Y and Z, we're credited with this organization, etc.

That needs context.

Most people don't know what it means to be a B Corp or be accredited with this foundation or whatever.

They need the context to understand what these things mean.

And how is that reflecting on your competence?

Another really good one is Analyst Reports.

It's amazing if Gardner quotes you.

It's amazing if they include you in the magic quadrant.

You have to explain what that means and how does that reflect your Competence, what exactly did they evaluate?

What exactly did they take into consideration and how is that comparing to the rest?

Now you got to be very careful with analysts that you comply with their rules and regulations around how you talk about their research.

But there are ways that you can definitely showcase your competence using their research and the fact that you might have been featured in that research in a powerful way.

But just putting it out there without any context is a powerful trust signal, but it's not helping you communicate your competence effectively.

Then there's I see a lot of generic or buzzwordy messaging and let's say I tell I you and I have a conversation and I say to you, the trust leader framework is going to transform your business.

If I say transform your business, what I mean is you're going to be a category of one, people are going to follow you, you don't have to chase your buyers anymore, they will come to you, you will have premium pricing, etc.

Etc.

What you might have in your head is I can make payroll next month.

Very different things.

So you need to be clear as to what is it that you're competent in.

And to make it believable you have to be very clear and not use buzzwordy or generic language.

Other language that I see a lot of times is like trust us language.

Obviously we all want and we all feel that same feeling of you just have to work with us for a bit and you will see.

Just trust us.

We've done this before, we know, but that's not going to work with the buyers anymore because buyers are so afraid to make a mistake, they are terrified to make the wrong decision, end up in in a locked in contract and they have no confidence in salespeople anymore that they're not being persuaded.

So that's a problem.

Trust as language is going to be doing the opposite.

Now the key thing I want you to take away from this is that buyers don't distrust you because they think you're bad at what you do.

They hesitate because they can't verify that you're better.

And I want you to remember that when competence is unclear, using all the common patterns that I've mentioned above, buyers don't just stop buying, they slow down, they compare more, they ask for proof, they default to safer looking options.

So if you're seeing those signs internally and some alarm bells are going off right now.

Good, because you just identified that maybe you need to communicate your competence in a more effective and believable manner.

All right, now I want to take one minute to Talk about why competence must come first.

Competence is the first cornerstone of the trust leader framework.

We're building trust with the trust leader framework in nine consecutive and compounding steps.

And competence is the first.

And that matters because competence, if someone believes that we're competent, it lowers the perceived risk.

And when we have a lower risk and enables the trust, and when we're starting to enable trust, we're enabling the movement, we're enabling decisions.

So a lot of times we get told we have to invest more in brand building or relationship building.

We have to be storytelling, we have to be authentic.

And I want to make a quick point here that all of these are great and they're all necessary and you really should invest those.

But competence comes first.

If you buyers aren't convinced that you reliably can solve their problems, none of these things compensate.

They simply amplify doubt rather than create trust.

So none of those work if competence isn't clear first.

They amplify trust, they don't create it in itself.

So we have to tie this back to cognitive trust, right?

Cognitive trust happens when a buyer is making a logical assessment, a logical assessment of can you help me?

Will you deliver on time and within budget?

Are you going to treat me fair?

Those are the three components, competence, reliability and integrity, that someone needs to feel in order to have enough cognitive fact based trust to make the first purchase and then really experience your brand and all the other stuff.

So this is a logical thing.

It ties back to cognitive trust.

All of these other things that I just mentioned happen after you build that cognitive trust.

So competence has to happen before emotional trust, before loyalty, before advocacy.

Now we have talked a lot about why it is important to effectively and believably communicate your competence.

Now let's switch to how do you do that?

And one of the best ways that I have found that companies can achieve this is really by teaching, by trying to become the absolute best teacher out there.

It's the fastest way to demonstrate competence, is not talking about yourself, it's just to teach.

And the reason why this works so well is because teaching allows you to really showcase the depth and the scope of your competence without claiming it publicly and sounding like you're bragging.

Teaching reduces buyer anxiety and lowers the risk.

If you think about something that you recently bought and you see which articles you read and who you ultimately went with.

And I'm not saying just articles, I'm saying teaching in a way that comes across as they're truly trying to help me understand the thing and enable me to make the best decision for myself.

And they're not holding back anything.

Hello, transparency.

And they are obviously because they can explain things so well, they're obviously competent.

It helps buyers make sense of all this complexity if you help them sort it out.

And it proves that you understand the problem better than they do.

Okay, it is that simple.

And we just have to put ourselves in our, in our buyers shoes and think, what questions do I need to answer?

What things do I need to understand?

Where does it not make sense?

And truly explain the whole thing and teach them.

If we become the best teachers out there, we can without a doubt communicate our competence better and more effectively than any of our competitors.

So I just want to make one clear distinction here.

Teaching is not about content volume.

I'm not talking about, you have to generate with AI 30 articles a week and just pump them out.

That is not what I'm talking about.

Becoming the best teacher out there in your niche is giving a clear explanation of the problems, the trade offs, the risks.

How do things actually work?

How do things compare?

All these questions that we would have if we were to buy this product.

But you have to remember that you are an expert and they are not.

So the curse of knowledge is real.

And you really have to take a step back and say, if I was to hire an intern and I have to explain all these things to them, what would I have to explain?

Because the curse of knowledge refers to you as the expert knowing all these things and taking them for granted.

Whereas your buyer has no idea what you're talking about.

And you then talk way over their head and there's a discrepancy that they can't bridge.

Okay, so keep that in mind.

Teaching is also not about thought leadership, hot takes.

So we're really not trying to get attention.

It's truly about what does the buyer need.

And the last thing it's not is the goal of teaching is not to look smart.

The second you try to look smart, it sort of goes out the window.

Everyone will sniff you out.

It's, it's a very not smart thing to do.

So the goal here is to make the buyer feel safer by educating them the best way we can.

And just to remind you, what we're trying to, to achieve here with this is your buyer needs to believe that you're competent and more competent than alternatives, so they will buy.

Right?

Because if your buyer doesn't believe that you're competent, they will not buy.

Okay, so now that we've seen that teaching is a really good mechanism to show and actively demonstrate your competence in sort of the beginning stages.

They're really additional ways, for example, developing your own ip creating frameworks.

But that's a more advanced sort of way of doing that.

I really would love for you to tackle the teaching thing first and we'll address the IP and the frameworks in another episode.

But if you do that and focus on that in the next six months, you will see a drastic difference.

And that's what I want to get next to.

What happens if you are able to communicate your competence in a believable manner?

What happens if your buyer does believe that you're more competent than anyone else in the market to solve their specific problem?

Well, externally the signs are going to be you're going to have shorter sales cycles.

Not only are your buyers now way more educated, they don't have to weigh the risks as much.

They don't have to request more proof, they don't have to talk to more references because they truly believe that you're competent to solve their problem.

Meaning they're going to take less time making their decision, shrinking the sales cycles drastically.

If you see this happening in action, when a company does this and all of a sudden their sales cycle shrink from 18 to 20 months to about three to four.

Because now we have where have the content that teaches in place, we have the, we really demonstrating on the website and other content channels expertise and we have the sales enablement content in place where we can just.

It is drastic how?

I mean I've seen this happen so much where the it just shrinks and you're just like wow, this is like magic.

It can work.

So this is fantastic.

Yeah, as I said, people need less proof points and that is really helpful because they feel more at ease because they don't feel the risk is so high.

Because they don't feel the risk is so high, they request less proof.

There is less pricing pressure.

If you are the most trusted option in the market because you come across as the most competent, you can demand a premium price and you will not be asked to discount because discounting only happens.

Requests for discounts only happen when your buyers don't perceive you as competent as they feel comfortable and they want to lower the risk by lowering the financial risk they're taking, hence discounting.

So if they perceive you as a non risk and they trust you as being competent, there's less pricing pressure, they're willing to pay a premium price and of course you have to chase people less.

You will get to a point where you actually don't have to chase any buyers, they will come to you internally.

That also has consequences, right?

Sales doesn't need to rely on the founder.

Imagine you not having to be in every room, having to run every single important demo, having to show up in every single conversation, important sales conversation.

Because sales can sell, because they can clearly communicate competence.

It would make a huge difference because that would give you not only time back in your week, now this machine starts to scale, right?

Because you only have that many spots in your calendar.

If you now can hire more salespeople and they can just scale this whole thing, you get more revenue because you're not the bottleneck in this equation.

Marketing and sales can also align around that shared messaging.

And as a company now you start to scale.

And this is how trust is really helping the founder to scale the company.

Because they are not no longer the bottleneck and they can push through and truly start scaling their company.

All right, so to finish this off, I just want to quickly summarize what we talked about today.

The first is that competence is fundamental and it needs to come first before everything else.

Everything else in trust building comes after.

And it's the foundation to truly build trust, cognitive trust that is needed for making the initial purchase.

It lives in the buyer's perception, not in your internal reality.

So it matters less how competent you are.

In reality, hopefully you are highly competent, but you need to communicate that effectively and believably to your buyers.

If the two dismatch and they don't believe your competency is as high as it actually is, they're not going to buy.

And teaching is how you are going to actively demonstrate at this stage how competent you are and how to make this the most believable.

So in the framework, it is the first cornerstone.

For that reason, it is a foundational cornerstone.

Without it, other trust efforts are becoming unstable.

In the next episodes, we will build on this.

We will look at how you can communicate reliability and integrity effectively.

And when you combine competence with reliability and integrity, the first three cornerstones of the trust leader framework that are required to build cognitive fact based trust, you have all the components to building that rock solid foundation, resulting in shorter sales cycles, higher win rates and more revenue.

Now remember, if buyers don't believe you're competent and more competent than alternatives, they don't buy.

I'll see you next time.