Adjusting Your Funnel and Nurture Strategies to the Current Trust Recession - Jillian Bright

Website: www.jillianbright.com

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/jillian-bright

Instagram: www.instagram.com/wildbrightandfree

00:00 Hi everyone, I am so excited to share this presentation with you on the current trust recession and the landscape that we are all working in as business owners and to show you how to adapt your funnels and nurture strategies. So you guys are all going to walk away with a much stronger concept of where general buyer behavior is at right now, what they need and what you need to do to meet them where they're at so they can say yes easier and quicker. So I am Jillian Bright, I'm a conversion copywriter and a fractional CMO. 

00:28 I've been running this business for about 6 years now, serving solopreneurs and small businesses with digital products and services that center brand voice, messaging and ethical marketing. So I am also an author in my free time, so I really love working with other authors and founders who want to write books to grow their brand. And fun fact about me, I'm originally from Northern California, but I moved to Costa Rica when I was 23 and that's where I started my first business making custom swimsuits. That's one of them in the middle. And for the last seven years now, I've been living in Italy with my partner who makes wine and our son and that picture is US harvesting grapes for the very first advantage that I made myself and you'll see a picture of that very end. 

01:08 So the bigger question though, why does this matter right now? And this is because long term successful businesses depend on trust this is not a new concept i am fairly certain all of you guys have heard this, but why does it matter so much? Right now? We are in the middle of a trust recession. Maybe you have heard this phrase and maybe you have not, so we're going to go in and define it for you. A trust recession is very similar to a financial recession. 

01:41 If a financial recession is where people's spending capacity is low, in a trust recession, people's trust capacity is low. So we are currently at the lowest levels of trust that most of us have seen in our lifetimes, maybe all of us. This graph right here, it represents the USI have some global statistics I'm going to share in a minute but there is a reason why I show US statistics, and that is because the US dominates the market for most of us most of us might live there, but even if we don't live there, we probably have a lot of customers and clients there. 

02:14 So this graph represents people who said yes to the question do you believe most people can be trusted? So you can see it starts in early mid sixties at just about fifty percent and it this this graph ends at like 2001 I think, and it's just above 30 %. The most recent numbers in 2025 are just under 3 %. Next, the most prominent indicator of trust is done by the Endleman Trust Group. They create a barometer every year for the last 25 years where they pull 33 countries over 35,000 thousand people and these were their top three findings for 2025 You can go look at this whole report if you want to with the animal Trust barometer. 

03:01 It's really interesting. Number one thing that they have found is the fear of discrimination has surged we're going to talk in a second about the relationship between trust and fear, but the context of this is very interesting because it's not just fear of discrimination that's up surged in their this is their terminology. Globalization, recession and technology fears are all significantly higher and the fear of discriminations have surged in all countries, All categories of people polled, the next 1A majority lack optimism for the next generation. 

03:34 Only 36 % of respondents believe that things will get better for the next generation. In developed countries, that number drops to just 20 %. That's a sobering statistic. And the third one, and this is what really comes back to us as business owners, high sense of grievance puts pressure on business what the heck does that mean? Well, 61 % of the people polled globally have a moderate to high sense of agreements. So we're looking at close to 2/3 of people and what grievance is, is when they believe that government and businesses make their lives harder and that their trust is low for all four institutions, business, government, media, NGOs, and that includes CE OS and AII. 

04:23 Think 1 clarification I want to make right here is that most of us, even though we identify as CE OS, even though identify businesses, small businesses probably don't have the higher level of mistrust. However, one of the things that they found that's not on this slide is that people think that businesses of all kinds and all sizes, if they see a place that they can make it better, they should, whether or not they cause the problem. 

04:56 So this is important because when trust is high, countries and collective states are associated with higher economic prosperity, more collaboration, more innovation and so 2/3 of people think that it is partially business owners responsibility to restore trust and get us back to this place of higher economic prosperity, innovation and collaboration. So let's take a look at this quote by Rachel Botsman, who has made an entire career out of trust she says it is helpful to think of the loss of trust as a disconnection problem. 

05:36 Before you can solve it, you have to 1st understand the underlying 'cause we're not going to get into all the different trust issues we're going to focus on marketing and so we're going to go into neuroscience. So basically trust and fear are too complex and opposite neurological processes when fear is up, trust must be down when trust is up, fear must be down. They can't both be high, they can't both be low so basically when trust is low like it is now, fear is high and therefore stress is also high because when fear levels are high, it releases stress hormones. 

06:10 So that means what's happening is we are living more and more and more in our reptilian brains, the amygdala, which is right back here, which is that fight flight or freeze survival mode. And the interesting piece when it comes to marketing is high pressure manipulative marketing tactics they rely on stress and fear to get the yes. So they definitely work in the moment, probably not long term. But of course, since they rely on fear and stress, they erode trust. So it doesn't matter if you've never used tactics like these because the prevalence of them, the sheer number of them there, I cannot like, I can't imagine that there is a single person watching this presentation or even attending this summit that has not been exposed to this kind of marketing. 

06:55 Everyone knows what this kind of marketing looks like everyone knows what this kind of marketing feels like. So we are not just operating from a lower place of societal collective trust. Now we're layering collective mistrust in marketing too. So this does not mean that we're always in a state of mistrust, but it does mean that it has decreased our tendency to trust as a default. Meaning when people come into your audience when they're at the very beginning of their relationship with you, their trust has shifted. Used to be here, now it's here. 

07:28 So even if you've never used these sketchy marketing strategies, if you are marketing in a way that assumes a baseline of a trust positive environment rather than the low trust environment that you're you're actually in right now, you are slowing down momentum and potentially losing customers and clients. I'm going to show you in a minute exactly what I'm talking about. So. 

07:51 Basically when we are marketing, our job is to meet our potential clients and customers where they're at, not where we think they are, not where we want them to be, where they're at right now. So when where they're at changes, this means that we need to take a look at our messaging, our strategies and we need to be actively bridging this new gap. So step one is assessing this trust gap so this comes down to three things, voice of customer research, speed and cost. So I mentioned voice of customer research because every audience, every industry is going to look a little bit different you are going to need, 

08:37 You're paying customer research i'm not talking about getting general research from chat GBT spark toro i'm talking about your customer research. And if you don't have a current voice of customer research in place, I'm begging you, please prioritize that. So once you have your voice of customer research, that is going to be the filter through which you put all these other concepts through to know exactly how to apply it in your business. So. 

09:07 This right here, the speed and cost comes from the book The Speed of Trust by Stephen Kobe it's a really quick read it's like an hour audio book, I think. And what he says is that we can make trust quantifiable in business, meaning we can measure it when we look at two things, speed and cost. When trust is high, speed goes up and costs go down. 

09:25 When trust is low, speed goes down and cost goes up. So what you're going to do to assess the trust gap is you're going to look at two things you're going to see how long it takes for someone to like from the moment they come into your funnel, come into your world to the time when they make their first purchase and you're going to see how much you pay to acquire that customer. So for some of this us, that's going to be easier for some of us, that's going to be kind of hard to like put like solid numbers on that one but we can all track patterns. So again, how long and if you can, this should be a great intake question for clients, 

10:08 Customers, again, that depends on your business. And then to get to that client, customer acquisition cost to the best of your ability, you're going to take the time and money that you spent on marketing in any given period, ideally that length of time, right, that it takes for someone to become a customer and client take that chunk of period for simplicity, let's just say one year. So you would want to take the amount of money that you spent on your marketing or time, you know, whatever in 2023 and divide that by the number of customers and clients you got in 2024 period of time, amount of money and time, customers and clients. 

10:45 And that's going to give you a really solid number. And it gives you a baseline to start up. And you can look online, you can see what your industry averages are. You can talk to some business friends, compare around, but that's going to give you your starting point. So when we look at customers and clients or your audience who you would like to turn into your customers and clients, they have a new starting point. So their starting point that we're aware of has always been that they have needed to be seen, heard and understood in order to know, like and trust you. 

11:21 And that is still true, but it has also shifted. So first in the sense that what they want. So in one sense, what they want and what they want is what they have always wanted, which is their problems alleviated, their desires met, and they want you to give them something valuable. But what's valuable now is not what was valuable five years ago, two years ago, even one year ago of course, people want information still, which is what used to be very valuable, but now they can get it anywhere. They don't need that from you. What they need from you is connection. So here's where that neuroscience piece comes back in. 

12:03 Paul Zack, who is the leading researcher in the neuroscience of trust, found out that by increasing oxytocin, you increase trust. So trust is up. Fear and stress automatically decline. So the other really cool thing that happens when trust goes up is the decision making moves from the amygdala into the prefrontal cortex so now not only do we have those feelings of rapport, connection, camaraderie, we can now access empathy, connection, cooperation, creativity, planning and executive decision making. We are no longer making snap decisions from the trust division, stressed out fight or flight amygdala, but from the trust positive prefrontal cortex. 

12:48 So great oxytocin. How do we get that to be released in the body? We know that positive physical touch is one thing that triggers oxytocin release. Obviously, we're not going to be going around doing that as business owners, but what Zach found out and what is really interesting, so do social connections online. So when you do the things that build a real connection in a genuine, honest way, it triggers that oxytocin release, which establishes the rapport and relationship that they need. So you're not just giving them what they want, you are giving them, like I said, what they need on a neurological level to shift out of that fear and stress because that's a status no one like no one wants to be there into connection, trust, creativity and collaboration, which isn't that where we all want our potential clients to be. 

13:47 So what is this genuine, honest way to build real connection? This is their new starting point. They now need to feel seen, heard, understood and valued in order to feel that connection that they used to feel just from being seen, heard and understood. I'm not saying that being valued is a new thing it's not we've always known that showing you know your customers and clients that you value them creates a stronger relationship. What I'm saying is now it's crucial not just to show them after they've become a customer and client. Now it's crucial to show them that before they become a customer and client. So how are we going to apply this to our funnel and nurture strategy so another awesome quote from Stephen M Markoby is the quickest way to destroy trust is to violate one of the behaviours of character. 

14:45 And the quickest way to build trust are to demonstrate behaviours of competence. So he gives 13 different behaviours i'm obviously not going to go into all those we are going to mention some of the most important ones. But another like caveat that I want to give right here this is another place where your voice of customer is going to be crucial because there are some general across the board truce but the application of these is definitely going to vary across industries like a really obvious one for me is when it comes to generative AI use. If you use Gen Gen AI super well in the tech industry, it is a trust maker. 

15:28 If you use generative AI really well in the publishing industry, it is a trust, a breaker no one wants to see AI like in the industry at this point, like writing books and making art. That's what I'm specifically talking about. So we're going to go through the trust Breakers real quick first so these are misleading marketing, either by omission or false claims, performative, anything, especially empathy that you can see right through it. Security concerns, we're talking about data getting hacked, portal payments, that kind of a thing, inconsistent product or service or a lack of clarity. 

16:13
These are trust Breakers. So these are really simple to check for in your funnel. You just want to go through, make sure that there's nothing misleading that you're stating how you secure the data. If AI is a like a transparency around AI is a big deal for your audience you want to make that statement. You want to make sure that you're offering social proof around the quality of your product and services. 

16:35 All of this is pretty standard, but I'm really, really emphasizing right now that these are the things that right now in a low trust environment, trust Breakers will make you like really, really, really lose what little trust you already had you probably won't get a second chance. The next section is trust makers. So again, these are divided from character and competence. Character is basically the way you show up your values and competence is how well you get the job done, How do you meet the expectations that you set. And so you want to be including as many of these in your nurture content as possible again, these are general guidelines. 

17:18 You are going to want to look at your customer research to see exactly how these should be applied, like be vulnerable. That's going to look very different from business to business. Ok. So let's take this one layer deeper. And that is for a long time we have thought about the like the hard work in marketing is getting people's attention is the visibility and getting them to make that first commitment, whether it's like hitting that follow button, joining your email list whatever. 

17:51 And I think that's still valid i think getting people's attention is still very, very difficult and obviously very, very important because you don't have anything if you don't have that. But now with this lower trust status, once they're in your funnel, there is more work to do than there used to be because the burden of proof is on us to bridge that trust gap. So this literally might mean more touch points you might need to add more emails, especially if you have high ticket offers. 

18:18 I work with a artist who's in fine art his art cost between five and five hundred K per piece. We have noticed that on average people need five to seven more touch points before they buy. The buyer journey is now about a year longer. So that might be your case. Or, you know, if you are not doing high ticket sales, if you have low cost digital products, then you really might just be meaning needing, excuse me, to make more meaningful touch points not more, but more meaningful again, this is going to depend on your audience, but you, they are demanding more meaning. 

18:55 This is a place in your nurture where you need to focus even more on setting expectations. Not just what they'll get when they work with you, but how you're going to get them to that, that goal point, how you're going to solve their problem exactly your framework, your processes, what it feels like to work with you. And I think a lot of us know this like on a theoretical level, but we aren't stepping up in the way this new way that people need us to. 

19:28 So you need to show up, show your proof of character. You need to show social proof, which is your proof of confidence. And you're going to build trust a whole lot quicker. So building the trust gap with connection, character and confidence now, I chose this quote by brene brown a lover. She says just as there are small moments to build trust, when we don't take the opportunity to build trust, when we actually see an opportunity, it can contribute to betrayal, omission, right? So remember what I said at the beginning about not acknowledging that this trust gap exists is actually slowing your momentum i'm going to tell you exactly how. 

20:08 That genuine connection increases the oxytocin, which lowers fear and stress and increases trust. If you see that opportunity like Renee is talking about, and you don't take advantage of it, either someone else will, or you're leaving your people feel slightly alone when they already feel alone they're already in a place of fear and stress more often than they used to, right? So when we assume that trust already exists, or we're assuming that it exists at higher levels than it actually does, when we don't acknowledge that gap, what's happening is that we are forcing our potential clients to cross that bridge by themselves. 

20:53 And when we make them cross that bridge alone, we risk that sense of betrayal by omission because we are leaving them to get out of that high stress, low trust and back into executive decision making brain function when they are probably already stressed out about the problem they need you to help solve. We're not making them feel valued. Like they might feel seen, they might feel heard, they might feel understood but if you are not taking the opportunity to give connection when they need that, they're not going to feel valued. And so it's going to take them longer to cross that bridge, longer to say yes. But when we show that proof of character to show our integrity and intent, when we show that proof of confidence that like shows the capability of himself, when we really make that effort to create genuine connection, what we're doing is we're acknowledging the gap. 

21:42 We're deciding to step up as leaders and say, I'm going to meet you where you're at because I value you enough to put an extra effort where you need it. I'm going to give you whatever you need to help you cross that bridge instead of leaving it to figure out on your own. So this when you do that, you're going to build trust faster. You're going to build a more loyal client customer base. 

22:01 You're going to spend less time and money on marketing. You're going to build a stronger, more reputable brand and a more resilient, more profitable business. So I'm going to leave you guys with three questions. 

22:15 Is there anywhere that you're actively breaking trust or still using manipulative or fear stress based tactics? Again, it's going to depend on your audience, their threshold for this. If you are though, definitely review whether it's serving your long term goals. Are you acknowledging the need for a bridge and really making your potential customers and clients feel valued at every touch point? And are you offering to walk them across that bridge, that connection and putting in the extra meeting, the clarity and the consistency that they need every time that you set and meet their expectations? 

22:56 So that's it. That's my piece on trust so I have two invitations for you guys. If this was well, I hope that I gave you some thought provoking things to consider. And if you want to dive a little bit deeper, I have two things. First of all is the trust optimization workshop and that comes with the free Summit ticket. Everybody has access to this. What we're going to do in this workshop, what we did do in the workshop is bridge the gap in your opt in Page and welcome sequences very specific it's going to go into the actual like practical things that we couldn't get into today because you know, time limits and all. 

23:33 It comes with a self audit checklist and a special offer from my strategy sessions. And if you are AVIP ticket holder, you will get access to the trust shift rethinking how we market sell in lead and this is a private audio series, five fifteen minute episodes where I take all of the research that I did in like 20 different sources and I put it into these, like I said, five fifteen minute episodes where we look at each different area of your marketing much like today we looked at nurturing. 

24:02 We're going to take it and look at all the things. And that comes with a checklist to spot trust gaps across your whole business ecosystem so if you want that, make sure you sign up for the VIP because this is not available anywhere else. So this is me and my very first wine that I told you guys about. The reason why I feel trust is so important to me and why I have learned so much about it is because winemaking is especially natural winemaking, which is what my family does. 

24:29 You really have to trust the process and this has been a big, big thing for me i have been learning about this in a very interesting way and how you can do things to like help it, but really that trust has to be there. I know that doesn't fully apply to what we're doing, but this explain why I got really into it. 

24:52 This is it if you want to get in touch with me for any reason collabs, if you want me to send you these slides, shoot me an email it's my website. Linkedin is where I talk a whole lot more about business stuff instagram is where I talk a whole lot more about life stuff so thank you so much for joining me i hope it was informative and insightful for you and I hope you guys get amazing things out of the whole summit thanks bye.