How Do We Rebuild Trust in Business? Stop Going for the One-Night Stand

In Part 1 of this series, I asked why sales and marketing increasingly feel like lies. In Part 2, I looked at what seems to be cutting through all that distrust: comedy, controversy, and, most importantly, experience. But diagnosing the trust recession isn't enough. At some point, we have to ask the harder question: How the hell do we get out of it?

Unfortunately, I have some bad news. Trust repair is slow. I know because I've spent 20 years doing it.

I'm a sex therapist, and a significant part of my career has involved helping couples rebuild after some of the biggest breaches of trust a relationship can experience. I've sat with couples after affairs, betrayals, years of sexual disconnection, lies, resentment, and conversations that should have happened 10 years earlier but somehow never did. One thing I've learned with absolute certainty is that you cannot talk somebody into trusting you. You can apologize, explain, promise, cry, or create a PowerPoint presentation entitled 17 Reasons I Am Definitely Trustworthy Now. Eventually, none of that matters if the person sitting across from you doesn't start having different experiences with you.

That's true in a marriage, and I think it's increasingly true in business.

Sales Is a First Date. Stop Trying to Fuck Everybody.

I've been testing this idea with audiences recently, and people seem to immediately understand it when I put it this way: sales is a first date.

Imagine going on a first date with someone whose only objective is to get you into bed by the end of the night. They aren't really listening to you. They're listening for openings. They're saying the right things because those things increase their odds of getting what they want. Every question is strategically moving toward the close. Maybe they're charming. Maybe they've studied all the right techniques. Maybe they're really fucking good at first dates. And maybe it works.

Congratulations. You got the one-night stand.

But here's the question businesses forgot to ask: Did they actually enjoy the experience you sold them, or did you get your orgasm and leave your customer to clean up the mess?

Those are two very different business models.

For years, sales training has obsessed over conversion. Get the lead. Overcome the objection. Create urgency. Close the sale. Upsell. Retarget. Get them back into the funnel. I'm not saying conversion doesn't matter. Businesses have to make money. I own a business. I enjoy paying my mortgage. I would like everyone who works with me to continue receiving paychecks. Ethical business does not require financial martyrdom.

But there is a significant difference between asking, How do I help this person make a good buying decision? and asking, How do I get this person's money? One is the beginning of a relationship. The other is the completion of a transaction. And customers have had a whole lot of transactions.

Trust Is Built Through Experience, Not Promises

This is where the research gets interesting. PwC's 2024 Trust Survey found that business leaders continue to substantially overestimate how much consumers trust them. When PwC asked consumers what businesses could actually do to earn trust, their priorities weren't particularly sexy. Consumers emphasized things like protecting their data, responding quickly when something goes wrong, and delivering consistent and reliable experiences.

In other words, people weren't asking companies to come up with better slogans about trust. They wanted companies to behave trustworthily.

That's exactly what I see in relationship repair. After an affair, the person who broke trust can say, I promise I'll never do this again. That statement may matter, but the sentence itself doesn't repair the relationship. What matters is what happens tomorrow, next Tuesday, and three months from now. What happens when their partner asks an uncomfortable question? What happens when they're frustrated? What happens when nobody is watching? Eventually, enough consistent experiences begin creating new evidence.

Business trust works similarly. You say your cancellation policy is easy, and then I try to cancel. You say customer service matters, and then something goes wrong. You say you respect my privacy, and then I discover what you're doing with my data. You say you care more about the relationship than the sale, and then I tell you I'm not ready to buy. That's when I find out who you actually are. Your marketing tells me what you want me to believe. My experience tells me whether I should.

The Person Who Made the Mess Has More Responsibility—but Trust Repair Still Takes Two

My thinking about infidelity changed considerably over the years. Early in my career, it was easy to think that trust repair was primarily the responsibility of the person who cheated. And to be very clear, if you had the affair, responsibility for having the affair belongs to you. We don't blame somebody for their partner's decision to betray an agreement.

But rebuilding the relationship turned out to be more complicated.

The couples I watched create genuinely healthy relationships after infidelity eventually became capable of looking at more than the affair itself. They could look at the marriage that existed before it and say, There were conversations we weren't having. There were ways we stopped connecting. There were things I didn't tell you. There were patterns we both participated in. There were places where we needed each other and didn't know how to say it. One person may have created the largest explosion, but eventually both people had to decide whether they wanted to rebuild the house.

The couples who did that work together are the ones who still reach out to me years later. They're the ones who tell me they're doing well. They didn't erase what happened or pretend responsibility was equal. Instead, they built something different from what happened.

I think the trust recession is going to require something similar.

Businesses have enormous responsibility here. Businesses designed many of the systems customers are reacting against. Companies built manipulative funnels. Platforms learned how to monetize attention. Businesses made subscriptions easier to enter than exit. Marketers manufactured urgency. Organizations collected enormous amounts of consumer data. Industries learned increasingly sophisticated ways to influence human behavior. So no, I'm not going to look at the customer and say, Well, you need to trust businesses better. That's not how trust repair works.

But customers aren't powerless either. If we're going to build a healthier marketplace, eventually both sides have to participate.

Customers Have Power Too

As customers, we constantly teach businesses what works. Every click is information. Every purchase is information. Every subscription and cancellation is information. Every time we complain about manipulative marketing and then buy because of manipulative marketing, that's information too. That doesn't mean companies get a free pass for exploiting human psychology. They don't. But it does mean we have more agency than we sometimes realize.

We can put our dollars behind businesses behaving in ways we actually want businesses to behave. We can give feedback, ask questions, say no, and stop buying things simply because somebody manufactured a countdown clock and told us the opportunity disappears in seven minutes. We can tell businesses what we want instead of expecting them to psychically determine it from our browsing history.

Perhaps most importantly, we can stop expecting ethical businesses to somehow serve us without making money. A mutually beneficial relationship requires mutual benefit. If I want a local business to treat its employees well, create a good product, protect my information, answer my questions, provide good customer service, and still exist next year, somewhere in this arrangement the business has to make money. The goal isn't for customers to win and businesses to lose, just as the goal isn't for businesses to extract every possible dollar from customers. The goal is a fair exchange where both sides can win.

That's what healthy relationships look like.

Stop Guessing What Your Customers Want

This is where I think the businesses of the future are going to look fundamentally different. We're going to stop sitting in conference rooms guessing what customers want and start asking them. We're going to co-create.

There is actual research behind this idea. Research published in the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research examined customer involvement in value co-creation and found something fascinating: trust wasn't simply something required before people participated. Trust could also grow through the process of participating. The researchers described trust and co-creation as reciprocal. Other research has found relationships among customer participation, trust, loyalty, satisfaction, and brand outcomes.

That makes intuitive sense to me. If you ask me what I need, listen to my answer, let that information influence what you create, and then come back and say, Is this closer?, we're having a completely different interaction than if you study my data in secret, decide what psychological button is most likely to make me buy, and then target me with it until I surrender.

One is collaboration. The other feels like extraction.

This is also where I think we're going to have to reconsider what we mean when we talk about personalization. Personalization doesn't have to mean, We know so much about you that we can manipulate you more efficiently. It can mean, We know more about you because you told us, we listened, and we're building something together.

That's a radically different future for business.

Ask Before You Pitch: The Pitch Brainstorm

This is also why I keep coming back to consent. I teach consent in sex therapy all the time, but consent is fundamentally a human communication skill. It requires noticing yourself, communicating what you want, listening to another person, respecting their response, and understanding that a "no" isn't necessarily an injury. Those skills transfer beautifully into business.

One way I've started applying this in my own business is something I call a Pitch Brainstorm. I've realized that some of my best networking and marketing conversations happen when I don't walk into the room with a perfectly polished pitch that I'm determined to deliver exactly as rehearsed. Instead, I throw an idea onto the table and invite the other person into it. Here's something I'm thinking about. What do you think? Where could you see this fitting? What would make this useful to you or your organization? What am I missing?

Suddenly, we're not sitting on opposite sides of a sales interaction. We're brainstorming together.

I've been doing a lot of Pitch Brainstorms lately, and they've become a hallmark of how I network. Sometimes the idea changes dramatically during the conversation. Sometimes the person I'm talking with sees an application I hadn't considered. Sometimes we realize there isn't a fit at all. And sometimes we accidentally build something much better than the thing I walked into the room planning to sell.

That's the point. I'm not trying to convince you to want the thing I've already decided you need. I'm letting you participate in figuring out whether there is something valuable we could create together.

That's co-creation in real time, and it changes the energy of a sales conversation. Instead of throwing your pitch at somebody and hoping they catch it, you warm the relationship first. Ask whether they want to brainstorm. Ask if they'd like to hear an idea. Ask what they're currently struggling with before deciding you have the solution. Ask whether it would be helpful to explore what working together could look like. Those questions don't destroy sales. They create participation, and participation gives both people information.

And here's the funny thing about a healthy first date: you aren't only trying to get the other person to like you. You're figuring out whether you like them too.

That's another place sales has gotten weird. We've acted as though every potential customer must be converted. Why? Sometimes they're not a good fit. Sometimes your service isn't what they need. Sometimes they shouldn't spend the money. Sometimes somebody else is better suited to help them. And sometimes the conversation reveals an opportunity neither of you could have seen before you started talking.

Being willing to have that kind of conversation may cost you today's sale, but it may also create tomorrow's partnership, referral, product, speaking opportunity, or completely unexpected idea. More importantly, it gives the other person an experience of what it feels like to work with you before you've asked them to buy anything.

Maybe that's another way we rebuild trust in business: stop perfecting the pitch in isolation and start inviting people into the brainstorm.

Your Customer Isn't Only Responding to You

This may be one of the most important mindset changes for business owners right now. When somebody takes longer to buy, asks a million questions, wants another meeting, checks your reviews, disappears for three weeks, comes back, disappears again, and finally says, Okay, I think I'm ready, it is very tempting to get frustrated.

But they're not only responding to you. They're bringing their history into the room. They're bringing the coach who charged them thousands of dollars and didn't deliver, the subscription they couldn't cancel, the product that didn't work, the company that sold their information, the influencer recommendation that turned out to be sponsored, the course they bought and never finished, and the business that promised transformation and delivered 47 prerecorded videos and a Facebook group nobody uses.

You inherited some of that distrust. It isn't necessarily fair, but trust repair rarely begins with arguing about fairness. It begins with understanding what happened and then deciding what kind of experience you're going to create next.

The Businesses of the Future Will Build With Us

I don't think we're going back to the old marketplace. There is too much information now, too much technology, too much AI, and too much access to reviews, competitors, pricing, communities, and other people's experiences. Consumers also understand considerably more about how they're being marketed to. Frankly, I don't think that's entirely bad. Maybe the trust recession is forcing us to build something better.

Businesses can become more transparent. We can listen before we pitch. We can create experiences before demanding commitment. We can tell customers what something can and cannot do. We can stop treating every "no" as an objection requiring a counterattack. We can invite customers into product development, education, communities, events, testing, feedback, and ongoing conversations.

Customers can participate too. We can communicate what we value. We can reward businesses that behave accordingly. We can set boundaries around our money, attention, and data. We can stop demanding perfection while simultaneously demanding honesty. And we can recognize that the healthiest business relationship isn't one where one side extracts as much as possible from the other. It's a relationship where both sides leave better.

That's the part I learned from couples. Trust isn't rebuilt because somebody finally says the perfect thing. It's rebuilt when two people start having different experiences with each other, slowly, repeatedly, and honestly, until eventually the relationship doesn't feel quite as dangerous anymore.

Maybe that's what business needs now. Not another funnel designed to trick somebody into saying yes. Not another countdown clock or perfectly polished promise about how your product is going to change my fucking life. Maybe we need businesses willing to sit across the metaphorical table from their customers and say, What do you actually need? Here's what I can actually do. Does that work for both of us?

That's not particularly complicated. It's just a healthy relationship.

After 20 years of helping people rebuild some of the most broken trust imaginable, that's the part I'm increasingly convinced businesses have forgotten: You don't repair trust by getting better at the pitch. You repair trust by getting better at the relationship.

So stop trying to turn every first date into a one-night stand. Get to know each other. See if there's a fit. Brainstorm together. Build something worthwhile together. And if you both want a second date? Great.

Now we're doing business.

Back to Part 1: Why Do Sales and Marketing Feel Like Lies?

Back to Part 2: What Actually Sells When Nobody Trusts Anything?

Sources

• PwC, 2024 Trust Survey. PwC surveyed U.S. consumers, employees, and business executives and found that consumers emphasize concrete behaviors when determining whether a company deserves their trust, including protecting customer data, responding quickly to concerns, and delivering consistent and reliable experiences.

• Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research. Research examining customer participation in value co-creation found that trust can operate as both an antecedent and an outcome of co-creation, suggesting that collaboration and trust can reinforce one another.

• Journal of Business Research. A meta-analysis synthesized 135 studies examining customer participation and its relationship with outcomes including customer trust, satisfaction, loyalty, and brand performance.

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