How do you embed trust into your go-to-market motion?

Forget AI and flashy tools, Christopher Ryan says trust is still your sharpest go-to-market weapon.

In this episode of Straight to Voicemail, Rachel Elsts Downey connects with Christopher Ryan, founder and president of SIX Marketing. For over a decade, he's helped B2B companies unify their go-to-market functions through trust-building workshops, messaging alignment, and strategic collaboration.

You’ll learn:

• Why trust is the real glue between sales, marketing, product, and CX
• How Christopher uses communication styles (like DISC) to build alignment
• Tactics for building credibility as an external or fractional GTM leader

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Rachel Downey (00:00):
Rachel Downey, you've heard it before. Trust is earned. It's not assumed it's not given, but what does that actually look like inside your go-to-market team? Christopher Ryan has built a career answering that question. He's the founder of Six Marketing, where he spent over a decade helping B2B companies unify sales, marketing, product and customer experience using trust as that connective tissue, and he's not just talking about those feel good team dynamics. He's talking about building real unity, alignment, the kind that shows up in clear messaging, better handoffs and customers who stay because the brand delivers on what is promised from internal workshops to external partnerships. Christopher's approach is about putting ego aside, getting the right people in the room and doing the work that builds trust consistently. So I had to call him when I was wondering, how do you embed trust into your go-to-market motion? Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. At the tone, please record your message.

Christopher Ryan (01:19):
How do I build trust in my go-to market motion? Great question. Tough question. First and foremost, with anything, trust is fundamental and it's key and crucial for success. With go-to market, it's all about alignment. In the line of trust, one thing that we always do is we work on communication. So we're big on disc styles, we're big on communication styles and understanding the other person at the other table. I frequently as a leader will say something and think the person on the other side of the screen or the room understands what I'm saying, and it's Greek to them and vice versa. They're saying something that I don't understand. So we fundamentally will go around the room. We'll talk about simple things like this, styles or attributes or values. We try to bring in some personal stories and just say, just something about us to get a little bit deeper when we're sitting down together.

(02:08):
Once we get through that, those are really, really good tactics to set up trust. Again, we're working with these people internally. It's easy, right? We work with these people on a day-to-day basis, but when we work externally, I've done workshop after workshop after workshop for GTM and we come in and they're like, who is this marketing guy? What is he going to do? What is he going to tell us? So it's huge for us to come in and just disarm and say, guys, we're all on the same team, and that's a fundamental component for GTM. We're coming in as fractional. We're coming in as an outside source, but we need to be an incremental part of their team so we can all work iteratively together. It's putting teams together. It's putting teams that likely communicate differently or potentially have been adversarial at some part of their job function between sales and marketing.

(02:52):
We've all heard the old school tales on that, but really, if you put everybody in a room and everybody has a fair voice, there's no leader and you're in this together. Once you build trust just to back up, you really can get into this entire GTM world and really have success, but trust is fundamental. If you don't have that, don't step forward. Rachel, great questions today. Thank you so much. Thank you for challenging me, and I think that was my biggest takeaway here is that a lot of people want to talk about AI and a lot of people want to talk about GTM and the process. I really appreciate you bringing in the authenticity and the trust, so thank you so much. If you have any other questions, you have my number.

Rachel Downey (03:37):
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