For many years, salespeople have aspired to become “trusted advisors”.
It sounds good. It feels like a step up from “just another rep”. You’ve probably heard this idea in training, on LinkedIn, in books and podcasts.
The problem is what it does to our behaviour in our conversations with customers.
“Trusted advisor” often permits us to give more advice. We talk more. We explain more. We try to sound smart and helpful. We feel pressure to say something clever whenever there is silence.
Customers may like us. They may respect our effort. While we’re busy sharing our advice, their challenges and opportunities might stay ill-defined. We may still lose opportunities to “no decision” or to another supplier who helped them think more clearly.
This article is about stepping away from the “trusted advisor” story and stepping into a more useful role: outcome architect in coaching-led conversations.
Where “trusted advisor” really came from
“Trusted Advisor” didn’t start in B2B selling.
It was popularised by the book The Trusted Advisor, first published way back in 2000. It was written for professions such as law, accountancy, medicine and engineering. These are careers for people who study hard for certifications and hold a license.
To retain their hard-won licence and continue in their career, they owe “a professional duty of care”. They can lose the right to practise if they give bad advice.
Trust, in that world, is backed by:
Formal qualifications
Professional standards and regulations
Legal accountability for outcomes for customers
Most B2B sellers are not in that position.
You carry a quota. You may care deeply about your customers, but you are not formally responsible for their decisions or their business results.
If one of your customers’ purchases fails to deliver as expected, you do not lose your licence to sell!
This doesn’t make your work less important. It just means the “trusted advisor” label, as defined originally, does not fit in the same way. In selling, it often turns into a flattering story we tell ourselves so we can stay in the comfortable role of expert talker.
How the label changes what you do in calls
Imagine a buyer says:
“We’re under pressure to tighten our controls around data access.”
If you’re chasing the trusted advisor label, you might think:
“This is my moment to show I understand their world. I should share an example. I should explain how our platform handles this.”
So you talk.
You describe similar customers and what they’ve achieved
You explain features
You offer opinions on “best practice”
You give advice on what they should consider
None of this is evil. But notice what has not happened:
They haven’t defined clear outcomes for customers in their own words
They haven’t explored who else will feel the impact
They haven’t thought through how improvement would be measured or reported
You’ve taken the mental load onto yourself. You’re doing the thinking. They’re reacting to you.
The more you try to sound like a trusted advisor, the more you stay in advice mode. And the more you stay in advice mode, the less space there is for the coaching skills you can use that actually change the way you deal with customers fundamentally.
What builds real trust in B2B selling
In Sales Reset, trust does not come from a title or a label.
Trust comes from what customers experience when they talk to us:
We help them think more clearly about their challenges and opportunities
We use questions, not speeches, to help them define the outcomes they need
We are honest about risk, capacity and trade-offs
We qualify out when we cannot see a realistic path to deliver
A customer is far more likely to say “we trust you” after a call where:
We stayed with one important issue through the second, third and fourth questions, digging deeper until we unearthed the root issues and their implications.
We helped them see implications for colleagues they had not named
We checked everybody’s understanding in simple language
We were willing to say, “I do not think this is sufficiently well developed yet to justify a project”
That behaviour builds more trust than any “trusted advisor” badge on our LinkedIn profile.
What to do instead in your next few calls
On your next two or three serious conversations, test a different mindset.
Before the call, write this at the top of your notes:
“My job is not to impress them with advice. My job is to help them define clear, valuable outcomes and see what that would really mean for them”.
Then, when a familiar topic appears, try this sequence:
When they describe a challenge, resist the urge to jump in with advice
Pick one important phrase and ask three or four linked questions on that theme
Use your experience to shape questions, not to deliver long answers
For example, if they say:
“We’re losing too much time every month chasing missing data.”
You might ask:
“Where does that show up most clearly in your world?”
“Who feels it most when that happens?”
“If this were fixed, what would change for them?”
“How would this improvement be reported, and to whom?”
You can add a very short example if it sets up a better question:
“I worked with a customer where this only really affected one team. In your case, who else might be affected if you achieved this?”
Then pause. Let them think. Let them do the work.
How to spot when the old story is back
After each call, look at your notes or the transcript and ask yourself three simple questions:
“Did I talk like a trusted advisor, or did I help them think?”
“How many times did I give advice where I could have asked a question?”
“Did we identify clear, customer-specific outcomes and at least one other stakeholder who matters?”
If you see a lot of advice and not much exploring of implications, that’s valuable data.
It doesn’t mean you’re bad at your job. It just means the old “trusted advisor” story is still doing what it always does: pulling you back into persuading and explaining.
The shift you’re making is not from “untrusted seller” to “trusted advisor”.
It’s from expert talker to outcome architect.
You still use everything you know. You just use it differently. You use all that you know to ask better questions, digging deeper to the third and fourth questions on what really matters, and deciding honestly whether this is an opportunity worth more of your time.
This is what will build real trust over time. And fill your pipeline with fewer vague conversations and more deals where customer outcomes are clear, shared, and deliverable.
