In today’s AI-powered marketplace, speed is the norm. Automation writes the emails, books the meetings, even closes the deal. But if everyone’s fast… who actually wins? Join our community of fearless leaders in search of unreasonable outcomes... Want to become a FEARLESS entrepreneur and leader? Go here: https://www.findingpeak.com Watch on YouTube: https://link.ryanhanley.com/youtube In this solo episode, Ryan Hanley makes a bold claim: The real edge in business today isn’t speed to close. It’s speed to trust. You’ll learn: Why optimizing only for sales velocity is a dead-end The neuroscience of first impressions—and how fast people actually decide if they trust you Why trust is the multiplier that makes your data and tech stack actually work Practical tactics to build trust at scale (without becoming a robot in the process) If you're a founder, creator, or high-performer tired of shallow hacks and ready to build something people actually believe in, this episode is your blueprint. 👉 Subscribe to Ryan’s weekly newsletter, Finding Peak: www.findingpeak.com
Chapter 1: What is the real edge in today's business landscape?
You ever get that gut feeling that something's off? Maybe it was a DM that felt a little too slick, or a cold email that opened with your name in bold and the word amazing five times, or a LinkedIn pitch that just simply tried too hard. You can smell it. It's not real. It's AI with a tie-on. Here's the thing no one's talking about.
Chapter 2: Why is trust more important than speed in sales?
The future doesn't belong to the fastest closer or the person with the prettiest tech stack. It belongs to the one who can earn trust fast. Because if they don't trust you, they don't buy from you. If they don't believe you, they won't follow you. And if they don't feel you, they'll never stick around long enough to matter.
Welcome all my unreasonable friends out there looking to achieve unreasonable outcomes. This is the Ryan Hanley Show, and I'm so happy that you've come back and spent some time with us today. If you're not subscribed to the show, whether you're listening or watching on YouTube, please do, and... Do me a favor. If you enjoy this content, if you think it has value, share it with a friend.
Chapter 3: How can we build trust in an AI-driven world?
That's my only ask. I love you guys. Let's get back to the show. We've entered the AI arms race. Everybody's got tools that write emails, make calls, book meetings. Everyone's optimized for conversions, speed to lead, pipeline velocity. But here's a stat most people take the wrong way.
Responding to a lead within five minutes makes you 21 times more likely to turn them into a qualified opportunity. So what do we all do? We try to beat the five minute mark, automate the reply, preload the calendar link, trigger the AI follow up. But guess what? Your competitor is doing the exact same thing.
So the field gets even, the playing field flattens, and the real variable, the real edge becomes trust velocity, speed to trust. How quickly someone believes you're the real solution. We're living in the most skeptical era in modern history. Misinformation, deep fakes, AI generated nonsense, everyone's been burned, ghosted, over-promised, and under-delivered. Trust is no longer given, it's earned.
Chapter 4: What does neuroscience say about first impressions?
And the price is attention. A Harvard business study showed that people decide whether or not they trust you within the first 50 milliseconds of seeing your face. 50 milliseconds. That's less time than it takes to blink. What does that mean? It means your words don't matter. If your energy doesn't hit first, people can tell.
Chapter 5: How does trust affect the effectiveness of sales strategies?
You're either signal or noise, real or someone playing dress up with a chat GPT prompt. There's a reason Stephen Covey said, trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient to effective communication. You know what it really is? Trust is a multiplier. It multiplies the impact of your speed, your data, your systems.
No trust, your perfectly optimized sales machine turns into a glorified spam cannon. Think about this. You can send a thousand emails a day with AI, book 50 meetings a week, run three retargeting sequences with personalized landing pages. But if not one person trusts you, you just spent all that time, all that money to generate nothing. Here's what I've learned after 15 years in this game.
Speed to close is a vanity metric. Speed to trust is the growth lever. And why? Because speed to trust is exponential. Trust leads to referrals. Referrals lead to warm intros. Warm intros skip the line. It's not linear growth. It's compound credibility. Speed to trust. So how do you build trust fast? Well, there's five ways that I recommend. First, lead with honesty, not hype. Drop the act.
Lose the script. Speak like a real human. If you don't know something, say it. If your product's not the right fit, tell them. You'll be shocked how disarming that is. Two, share a story, not a pitch. Data's forgettable, stories are sticky. You want proof? You probably don't remember the stat that I gave you earlier, but you do remember that feeling of being pitched by a robot.
That's the power of a narrative. Number three, show your face. People trust people they can see. Eye contact, voice tone, body language. We love video proposals in all of my businesses. That's why your best salesperson might not be your script, it's your camera. Four, serve before you sell. Show you understand the problem before offering a solution. Use open-ended questions.
Validate before prescription. And number five, my personal favorite, give a shit, like honestly care about solving their problem, not just making a sale. This means sometimes your product or service isn't going to be the answer.
And while you may be giving up a sale today, giving a shit, caring about your prospects, solving their problem, regardless if it's your solution or not, will build trust and pay dividends in ways you can't imagine. I promise you. So here's the rub. In the age of AI, everyone is gonna be fast. Everyone's gonna have data. Everyone's gonna have automation. But trust, that's still handcrafted.
It's still earned. It's still human. It's what makes us different. So if you wanna grow, if you wanna win, don't just build a fast sales system. Build a fast trust system. Speed to trust. Optimize for speed to trust.
My friends, you fellow unreasonable out there working your ass off, if this message hit you, if you're building in public, selling with integrity, and trying to lead with the truth, subscribe to my newsletter, Finding Peak. Every week, I break down concepts like these, how to lead better, sell smarter, build things that people actually believe in. It's not just tactics. It's the truth with teeth.
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