Charles Green: Decoding Trust in Sales, Why Intimacy Beats Credibility
Why Trust Breaks Down and What To Do About It
In this episode, Marcus talks with Charles Green, one of the genuine heavyweights in the world of trust and commercial relationships. If you lead a mid market scaling tech firm and you suspect your sales or GTM function is underperforming for reasons no dashboard can explain, this conversation will feel uncomfortably accurate.
Together they explore how fear, uncertainty, and internal pressure quietly poison performance. Forget the usual talk about activity ratios and pipeline hygiene. This is a candid look at the human drivers behind buyer reluctance, stalling, and ghosting, and why most attempts to “solve” these problems only make them worse.
Charlie argues that instead of trying to measure trust, leaders should focus on spotting and removing the behaviours that actively destroy it. If you are grappling with the tension between short term targets and long term customer value, this episode will challenge how you think about leadership, incentives, and your culture.
Key Takeaways for Scaling Founders, GTM Leaders and Sales People
Trust is lived, not conceptual. It is emotional as much as rational. Charlie draws a clear distinction between thin, institutional trust and thick, personal trust.
Trust is often built in moments. Reliability takes repetition, but intimacy is created quickly. How you pause, how you listen, and how you look at someone all matter more than your slide deck.
Over promising is lying twice. One promise on the way in, one on the way out. It corrodes trust faster than anything.
Fear drives most distrust. Buyers who feel uncertain catastrophise. That is what creates anticipatory buyer remorse and pipeline ghosting. The antidote is to name the fear out loud. Once spoken, it loses power.
Repair beats perfection. A relationship that has been broken and then repaired well is often stronger than one that never faced a test. Repair requires vulnerability and accountability, not ego.
The Trust Equation and Why Most Firms Focus on the Wrong Bits
The Trust Equation helped popularise the components of trustworthiness. Most leaders obsess over credibility and reliability because they are convenient to measure. Charlie explains why they are nowhere near the strongest drivers.
Intimacy. By far the biggest factor. It is about making the other person feel safe, understood, and genuinely heard. Nurses top trust rankings for a reason.
Low Self Orientation. The second strongest factor. Hard to measure and impossible to bribe into existence. Fear drives self orientation. Freedom from fear frees you to focus on others.
Scaling, Money, and the Uncomfortable Truth About Culture
Charlie and Marcus tackle why trust based, customer centric selling so often collapses once a company grows beyond 100 or 200 people.
Money permeates culture. Investors and boards often prioritise valuation over outcomes. This shifts intent and corrodes trust without anyone noticing.
Ideology shapes behaviour. Modern management is built on economic beliefs that favour short term gains and things that are easy to measure.
Mixed messages destroy conviction. Telling teams to “do the right thing” while driving absurd stretch targets creates confusion and cynicism.
The Bill Green example. When the former Accenture CEO was challenged about incentives conflicting with doing the right thing, he told the room to do the right thing first, then fix the incentives later. That clarity changed the behaviour of forty senior leaders immediately.
Practical Trust Based GTM Moves
These are the actions Charles Green recommends leaders adopt straight away.
Be transparent on price early. Withholding price to “build value” creates anxiety. Give a ballpark early to remove fear.
Stop using discounts as currency. It destroys trust. Offer only standard, published discounts such as volume or non profit rates.
Protect existing customers first. Expansion and net new wins come after that. Repeat
