Marketing Only Wins When It Shortens the Trust Curve
Walk into any budget meeting at any organization and I guarantee you’ll see the same story play out: the marcomm team is fighting for investment, but the executives are weighing risk.
And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but risk almost always wins. Not because the work is weak or because leadership “doesn’t get marketing.” But because your plan is asking them to trust something you haven’t made easy to trust.
Executives don’t fund activities. Executives fund certainty.
Anyone who sells products or services into education knows how unforgiving the timelines are. Sales cycles stretch six, twelve, even eighteen months. (The longest RFP process I was part of at mStoner was nearly two years!)
In markets like this, certainty has a single source: how early your team shapes trust.
That’s the part most marcomm teams never articulate. It’s also why they lose the room (and often the budget battle.)
Executives Aren’t Rejecting Your Strategy
When marketing leaders present campaigns, content plans, awareness plays, or community ideas, it all makes sense to them. But to the people holding the budget? It looks like a list of bets.
Your CEO, CRO, or CFO is doing one quiet calculation: Does this reduce uncertainty or add to it?
The work might be smart. But if it’s framed as effort instead of outcomes, you’ve already lost.
I see this pattern everywhere:
A team pitches thought leadership. Leadership hears: “We’ll spend money publishing ideas into the void.”
A team pitches content strategy. Leadership hears: “We’ll produce a lot of stuff and hope something hits.”
A team pitches brand work. Leadership hears: “We’ll make things prettier while revenue stays flat.”
Your Buyers Make Most Decisions Before You Even Know They Exist
By the time a buyer raises their hand, the decision is already forming.
Research across B2B, enterprise, and public-sector buying is consistent:
CEB and Google estimate 57% of the purchase decision is complete before a buyer talks to sales.
Other studies put the number closer to 70–80% as buyers self-educate.
Gartner predicts 80% of all B2B interactions between suppliers and buyers will happen in digital channels.
If you’re selling into higher ed, the stakes multiply. Long procurement cycles. Multiple gatekeepers. Committees layered on committees. Buyers looking for the “safest” choice, not the newest one.
By the time your “university partnerships” team meets a buyer, their emotional shortlist is already in place. Early-stage marketing is what earns you a spot on that shortlist. And I have research that shows if you don’t make the initial shortlist, the climb back into consideration is steep and expensive. Most buyers never reopen the field once they’ve formed their first few “safe” options.
Because leadership rarely sees this part of the journey, it’s also the part you have to translate.
(Side note: Y’all! Can we just call the sales team a sales team? You’re not fooling anyone with a “university partnerships” moniker.)
The Trust Curve: The Only Thing That Speeds a Long Buying Cycle
In higher ed and education-adjacent markets, trust is the core variable shaping your win rate, your cycle length, and your pricing power.
If trust forms late, everything slows down. If trust forms early, everything gets easier.
Late trust = scrutiny, friction, RFP purgatory, stalled deals.
Early trust = faster movement, cleaner evaluation, less need to “prove” your legitimacy.
This is the part executives intuitively understand. They’ve lived it. They’ve felt the pain of late trust.
But when marketing teams frame upstream work as “awareness,” it sounds optional. When they frame it as “shortening the trust curve,” leadership hears something very different:
“We reduce risk early so your teams stop scrambling late.”
That’s the language that wins investment.
Executives Fund Certainty, So Show Them the Work That Creates It
Your plan may be strong. Your creative may be sharp. Your strategy may be sound.
But if the story stops at tactics, you’re asking your executives to connect dots they don’t have time to connect.
Most teams walk into a budget conversation and say something like,“We need to invest in thought leadership to build trust.”
The leader that actually gets funded says, “Our buyers don’t trust us early because we’re not speaking to the problems they’re actually trying to solve. This work closes those gaps so buyers feel confident choosing us long before they ever talk to sales. It removes friction by aligning to their real decision criteria.”
The Translation Layer: From Activities to Outcomes
Most marcomm teams don’t struggle because the work is wrong. They struggle because the way they explain the work never lands with the people who control the money.
When you describe what you do in marketing terms, you force executives to decode it.
High-performing marketing leaders talk about it in decision language.
Awareness becomes: “Buyers can’t trust a company they never encounter. We show up early enough to matter.”
Content becomes: “We answer questions and remove confusion before sales ever steps in.”
Thought leadership becomes: “We give buyers a reason to believe we’re the safe choice.”
Community becomes: “We create visible proof that people like them choose us — the kind of evidence no sales deck can fake.”
Research becomes: “We know the exact moments where buyers hesitate and we fix them.”
What This Means for Agencies, Edtech Leaders, and Consulting Teams
You’re not selling to a building. You’re selling to people and they are under pressure.
Your clients and customers must:
hit revenue and enrollment targets
manage long, political cycles
justify spend to a board and cabinet that fears risk
show progress before buying committees even meet
Every one of those constraints is softened by early trust. Every one of them is worsened by late trust.
When you frame marketing as a trust-curve problem, not a content problem, executives finally see what they’re buying.
The Shift That Changes Everything
You don’t need a new strategy deck.
You need a new operating model for how marketing earns certainty inside your organization.
In the best teams I work with, I see the same pattern:
Marketing, sales, and product share a definition of what “certainty” looks like at each stage of the buyer journey.
They identify the exact moments where trust drops and build around those.
They measure progress in trust gained, not activities completed.
Executives stop second-guessing because they finally understand what the work is for.
When trust is your organizing principle, everything sharpens from your messaging and content to your internal alignment and company growth.
A Final Question for Leaders Who Want to Grow
Where in your market is trust forming too late, and what is it costing your revenue team?
If your exec team isn’t “getting it,” what part of the story hasn’t been translated into their language of certainty?
Once you make that shift, you’ll change how your organization sees marketing and how quickly your market sees you.