Building Trust Before the Sale Part 10 | Beverly Cornell

Why do some people feel ready to work with you long before they ever book a call?

In Episode 10 of this special season of Marketing Magic & The Messy Middle, Beverly Cornell walks through Chapter 10 of the revised edition of Marketing for Entrepreneurs and explores how trust is actually built in marketing.

This conversation is not about persuasion tactics or quick conversions.

It is about staying power.

Beverly shares why trust forms slowly through repetition, familiarity, consistency, and the steady experience of your presence over time.

She also explores the three layers of trust: recognition, resonance, and reinforcement and why audiences often feel connected to your work long before they publicly engage with it.

Because trust is rarely built in one piece of content.

It is built through accumulated experience.

Read Marketing for Entrepreneurs!

Revised Edition
Shop on Amazon: https://a.co/d/02BEL4H7

Questions about the revised edition? https://a.co/d/06dtKQ2e

Original Edition
Shop on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0eBn7jHu

Questions about the original edition? https://a.co/d/06c6PDiA

Dare to be Wickedly Branded

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome to the Wickedly Branded Podcast. I'm Beverly, the founder of Wickedly Branded, and we're talking all about chapter 10 of the Marketing for Entrepreneurs. This is the revised edition. It's the quick guide to sparking that your marketing. Chapter 10 is all about building trust before the sale. And we've talked a lot about trust up until this episode. So every single chapter builds on the trust. Consistency builds trust. Visibility instills trust. All of these things are building the trust with the client, the potential client. So there's one moment that I watched probably hundreds. Yeah, easily hundreds of times. A woman books a discovery call. And then we begin speaking, and she says something almost identical, almost exactly to what someone else said the week before. I've been following you for a while. Sometimes it's been months, and sometimes it's been actually years. And then she'll say something that always makes me take a deep breath, I think. Cause for sure. I already feel you know how I think. That's pretty powerful. Trust is formed long before that phase, long before the invoice goes. And if you care deeply about the people you serve, which I think most of you do, that is the kind of marketing you want to build. So today we're talking all about trust, how to form trust, why trust is so important before this, how it forms, why it forms so slowly, why it takes a while, and how your work, your presence either strengthens it or interrupts it. So this is chapter 10 of the marketing for entrepreneurs, and it sits in the blade section for a reason. Trust belongs to the long game. It's it belongs to the staying power of your marketing. It's the marathon part. Trust rarely announces itself. It's not, oh, I trust them. Like even if if you're working with somebody yourself, you're like, oh yeah, I trust them. It's not something that just appears, it grows through repeated familiarity, through repetition, through consistency of your tone and your thoughts, and through seeing the same values that you have show up again and again for them. So when someone reads your words enough times, their nervous system begins to recognize you. The recognition creates like a really guarded connectedness or steadiness that you might have. And that steadiness creates an openness to you, your work, and next step they want us to have with you. So there is neuroscience to this, although we do not need to diagram it to feel it. The brain prefers what it has seen before, always. So familiarity lowers the internal resistance that we have in our brain to new concepts and ideas. The more often someone encounters your voice in a consistent way, the more their body experiences it as safe. So that safety allows them to be curious about you and what you do and what and what you offer. And that curiosity allows them to take some kind of engagement, to ask questions, to come back to your work, to read your newsletter again, a new one. This is why the people who work with us often feel as though the decision has already happened before they scheduled the call. They've spent time with the voice, they've seen the patterns, they've watched how we show up when things are steady and when things are evolving. Trust is rarely ever built in one single piece of content. And people seem to think that's how it happens in social media or an email, like one email is going to solve all the problems. That is not the case. It built over time. A few years ago, a consultant reached out to me after following with Killy Brandon for almost, I think it was like two years, two years or so. And she had downloaded several resources we offered. She listened to the podcast. She read so many emails and she watched the way we spoke about burnout and about voice and about repetition. And she had invested in other programs during that time and she had tried all kinds of different strategies. She'd tried everything. And she had hired a coach and she had redesigned her website already one time. And when we finally spoke, she said something that I think makes this work all worth it. It like sits in your soul a different way. She said, I needed to see that you stayed, that I wasn't like a flash in the pan, that I was going to be here in two years. She told me that every time she felt pulled towards a new tactic, she would check in on our content and notice the message had not shifted. The tone had not gotten sharper or more urgent. And the philosophy had not pivoted to chase whatever trend was happening that month or next. She saw me just being me in a steady way. And that steadiness, that consistency, that showing up authentically and incoherence felt trustworthy. That moment crystallized for her, something for her that said she could trust us. People are not only listening to what you say in social media and in your email marketing and everywhere, they're also watching how you stay. There are three layers of trust that I think are really important. So over time, I began noticing these three distinct layers. The first one is recognition. Someone encounters your work and it feels like a little subtle like click of, oh, that sentence reflects an experience that I might have had or have not yet named, or a phrase that you said mirrors maybe something that they're carrying privately. Recognition creates the attention, like that, oh, I'm connected to that. The second layer is resonance. So resonance deepens when they encounter you again, and the tone then feels familiar. The values have remained consistent, the message does Matt swing wildly from week to week, and their internal world finds alignment with yours. The third layer is this idea of reassurance, although I prefer to think of it more as like reinforcement. Reinforcement happens when your actions match your words, when your offers reflect your philosophy, when your follow-through echoes your promises. And over time, people witness the coherence of all of that in your ecosystem. And that coherence is what creates the trust. None of these layers happen instantly, and none of them can happen by themselves. They unfold through you consistently showing up as you. So trust can feel really slow, absolutely 100%. Many entrepreneurs experience a period where they are showing up all the time and wondering if why, like it's quiet. There's a lot of lurkers on social media, so it happens quite often. This stage carries a particular attention that that's hard. You're doing all this work, you're writing and you're posting and you're sending emails and you're having conversations, and yet the visible response feels way lighter than you would expect or that you want. You want people to get it, engage with it, and say yes, but quiet a leader, they are. They're just not saying it as much, like loudly. But trust beneath your visibility is what's building. So someone may read your work for six months before ever engaging once or a comment ever. And they may share your content privately with a colleague before actually liking any post. They may bookmark your website and return to it repeatedly before sending you a message. The outside world rarely shows you the depth of internal processing that is happening on the other side of the screens. When you understand that trust forms through repetition and familiarity, your job becomes way simpler from a marketing standpoint. You focus on coherence, you focus on consistency, and you focus on staying aligned long enough for the accumulation to work in your field. One of our real estate clients, Alex, came to her brand Ignite Intensive with a solid business and steady stream of transactions. Her marketing spoke clearly about listings and process and negotiation, but it did not yet reflect was her deeper value system. She cared about relationships and she cared about families finding homes that felt good and safe for them. And she cared about guiding people through emotionally charged decisions with patience and care. And as we refined her message, something I think really changed for her and her confidence. Her content began speaking to the emotional experience of buying and selling home. She shared stories about late-night texts from anxious clients and quiet celebrations after keys were handed over. And she spoke about legacy and community in ways she hadn't until then. So within months, she noticed something different about her inquiries. Conversations began. I've been reading your posts, and I feel like you understand how important this is to us. The sales process softened for her. Decisions felt easier for her clients. Her marketing stopped functioning as an announcement and started functioning as a relationship. That is where trust is at work. So what builds trust in your content? Trust grows through congruence when your tone remains steady and when your offers align with your philosophy all the time. When your language sounds like the same person across every single platform, no matter where you're at, and when your presence feels deeply grounded in lived experiences rather than borrowed urgency or some other comparison trap you created for yourself, there is a particular quality that comes from writing and speaking from your own pattern recognition. It feels earned, it carries expertise and like weight without the noise or the volume. People can tell, people can sense that's what's happening when you do that. You do not need to prove expertise when your language reflects time spent inside real conversations. Authority becomes completely embodied rather than declared in the work. You just are. It just is. There's no proving. Wait, I've been doing this for 30 years. It's a long time. I have a master's degree. I've worked with hundreds of consultants, coaches, and creatives, but my stories and my experiences all relate to that time. Trust deepens when you follow up with people. When someone reaches out and you respond thoughtfully, when you reference a previous conversation, when you remember details. It's so hard for me to remember details. I talk to so many people all the time. I am not the best person for this, but I do often remember conversations. And I think if you take good notes, that will help you as well. But your follow-through communicate that you care. And care communicates a level of safety that people are looking for. And safety strengthens the ability to have a commitment with you. Many founders experience an internal hesitation around following up. They worry about being intrusive or they worry about feeling like they're pressuring or swarmy. But when when follow-up comes from presence and attentiveness, it feels more relational. A simple message that says, I've been thinking about our conversation and wanted to check in, often opens doors that would otherwise have remained closed. One of my favorite things to do is to I think about like potential clients all the time. Like I've had a conversation or something, and then I see something, I read something, and I just send them a video message when I do, hey, I'm thinking about you. I came across this thing and made me think about this thing that you're playing with, whatever. Just want to check in and see how things are going. And just I'd love to work with you. Just a simple, I would love to work with you. You're the kind of people that it makes this work so much fun. Just being honest about that. And you're then that follow-up that you do continues a relationship and that momentum lives in continuity that you're creating by continuing to check in with. So if you're in a season of building, this chapter invites you to look at your marketing through the lens of trust rather than this lens of transaction. I want you to ask yourself does my presence feel coherent across all platforms? Are you showing up the same way? Is it consistent? Does my messaging reflect what I believe at a foundational level? And am I allowing repetition to strengthen familiarity? Am I staying long enough for accumulation to work? Trust requires time, and time requires you to be consistent and steady. And steadiness requires alignment between who you are and how you show up every single day for the work that you're doing and in the marketing that you're doing. This is where brand magic begins to hum quietly in the background. When identity and language and visibility can move together and your presence feels so much more natural, and you, people experience that alignment before they can actually even talk about it or articulate it. Brand magic is recognized. It's not like you convince somebody of that. I don't think you can convince anybody of anything, but if the writing tries to prove it, you probably have missed the point. If this episode resonates, is connecting with what you're feeling about how you show up and how hard it is to be patient for trust to be established. Maybe you've been news with me for two years and it just hasn't clicked yet. Chapter 10 of the Marketing for Entrepreneurs book goes deeper into this process. And the companion workbook offers reflection prompts to help you map your own trust-building rhythm that feels good for you. Not everything is going to be the same for everyone. The book is available on Amazon, and the workbook can be downloaded through the link in the show notes. And when you download the workbook, you join our weekly marketing magic newsletter where we share tons of insights like this and tips and new podcast episodes so you can continue building the momentum in a way that fits your life. So if you're ready to for a deeper reflection on how your brand builds trust, the brand spark experience is designed to help you see your business from the outside and connect the threads you may be too close to notice. So remember, trust formed quietly. It forms when you stay on your message, stay with your message, don't give up on your message. When you return to your voice, who you are, inherently, not in the performance, remember in the living room, and your presence feels familiar over time. The work carries the weight for you. And the voice carries the history you have, your lived experiences, and your consistency can carry the momentum for your business. But just be sure you stay. Don't give up. I'll see you in the next episode as we The Magic of Repetition and How Familiarity Turns into memorability. But until then, I want you to choose what fits your life and stay with it long enough to see what grows.