ArtVersion Executive Director of Design Erin Lentz recently joined members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank to examine why buyers hesitate even when they are interested in a product or service.
In this discussion, Senior Executives explores the role confidence plays in complex purchasing decisions. The research looks at a challenge many marketing leaders face: generating interest does not necessarily make a decision feel safe.
For Lentz, that confidence begins forming well before a buyer reaches a sales conversation.
Trust Is Built Across the Experience
Buyers encounter a series of signals as they evaluate an organization. The website is one of them, but so are the clarity of the company’s positioning, the visibility of its people, the quality of its case studies and the way its process is explained.
Lentz notes that inconsistencies across those touchpoints can create uncertainty. When one part of the experience feels unclear or outdated, buyers may begin questioning areas they cannot see as easily.
That makes trust broader than a messaging exercise.
“CMOs should think about reducing perceived risk across the entire experience, not just through messaging,” Lentz explains in the article.
For considered purchases, confidence often develops through repeated interactions rather than one persuasive moment. Buyers look for evidence that the organization understands what it is doing and can deliver consistently after the decision has been made.
Make Credibility Visible
For CMOs, this creates a practical design and brand challenge.
A company may have deep expertise and a strong delivery process, but buyers can only evaluate the signals available to them. The digital experience therefore has to make credibility easier to recognize.
That can mean clearly explaining what the company does. It can mean showing the people behind the work or presenting case studies that demonstrate how problems were actually solved.
The goal is not to remove every concern. It is to give buyers enough evidence to understand how the organization operates and what they can expect from the relationship.
Senior Executive’s broader discussion reinforces that idea across several dimensions of the buying process. Contributors address switching risk, proof, reversibility and the need to help internal decision-makers defend a purchase to other stakeholders.
Confidence Becomes Part of the Brand Experience
For marketing leaders, perceived risk has implications beyond conversion.
Every interaction contributes to the buyer’s understanding of the organization. Brand expression, digital experience and customer proof can either reinforce one another or introduce small inconsistencies that create hesitation.
That is especially important in B2B environments where the decision may involve multiple stakeholders and significant organizational risk. Senior Executive cites 2026 Forrester research indicating that an average of 13 internal stakeholders and nine external participants influence business buying decisions.
In that environment, a strong brand experience gives buyers something they can understand and explain to others.
For CMOs, the opportunity is to look beyond the strength of an individual campaign and examine whether the full experience gives people confidence in the organization behind it.
Erin Lentz’s perspective appears in Why Buyers Hesitate—and How CMOs Can Reduce Perceived Risk, published by Senior Executive on October 27, 2026.