Getting buy-in: how I earned front office trust
Ten locations, three hours of content each session, a team and a deck walking into rooms full of people who hadn't asked for either.
That was the marketing roadshow I ran early in my career: going office to office, presenting plans and ideas to front office staff, tailoring every session to the room in front of me. Some sessions ran long because people had questions. Others ran short because it was obvious within ten minutes that nothing I'd brought was going to work for that room.
Pitching marketing to hundreds of financial advisers is not a one-size job.
Some of them were made for it: media-trained, camera-ready, happy to speak on a panel, do a LinkedIn video, or put their name to an award case study. Others weren't interested at all. "I don't need a marketing team. I don't even need the brand. Above the door, everything I get comes from referral."
Both groups were right, and both sets of feedback mattered. My mistake would have been treating the second group as a problem to convert. Their business model didn't need what I was selling. Once I stopped trying to convert them and started listening instead, the roadshow taught me more about earning trust than any deck could.
That was the first lesson in earning front office trust. It wasn't the last.
Coming to marketing through finance
I came to marketing the long way round. I qualified as an accountant, built my career in commercial analytics, and spent two decades inside financial services across a range of firms before I ever ran a marketing team.
Those years taught me the same lesson from both sides of the table: most marketing teams lacked commercial fluency, and most commercial teams had no instinct for how brand and positioning build advantage. Neither side trusted the other's version of "done."
Commercial teams built things marketing didn't use. Marketing asked for things that weren't commercially grounded. Each side read the other's pushback as someone being difficult, rather than someone being honest.
My job, across firm after firm, was to sit in that gap: take a commercial question and translate it into something a marketing team could build a story around, then take the output back and connect it to what would actually move the business, not just what looked good in a deck.
I built that, firm by firm, over two decades, starting in a very literal sense in those ten roadshow rooms.
Trust builds in small details
People didn't trust me because I said I understood both sides. They trusted me because, the first few times, I got it right. I asked the follow-up question that showed I understood what the business actually needed, not just what had been requested. I pushed back when something technically correct wasn't commercially useful. I showed up with something that worked.
Do that consistently enough, and people stop double-checking your work. They bring you the problem earlier, often before they've decided what the solution should look like.
It's the same shift I saw, in miniature, with the roadshow's media-trained group. The more specific and useful the sessions became, the faster that group moved from polite attendance to active participation: case studies offered up, questions about the next session, colleagues brought along.
Trust compounds, but slowly, and only in response to something real.
Why this matters more in the front office than anywhere else
Front office teams are protective of client relationships, and rightly so. That trust took years to build, one client at a time. You don't hand a stranger that on the strength of a good pitch, and you shouldn't.
Earning front office trust meant proving, in small repeated moments, that I'd protect what advisers had built rather than disrupt it in the name of a campaign. The "above the door, everything comes from referral" adviser wasn't being difficult. He was telling me, plainly, what he needed me not to break.
Once I understood that, the brief changed. It was no longer how do I get this person to say yes. It was what does this person need to see from me before saying yes is even reasonable to ask of them.
What this means if you're trying to get buy-in
If you're trying to get front office buy-in for a new campaign, a new proposition, or a new way of working, the instinct is usually to explain and persuade. That rarely works on its own.
What works is smaller and slower: understand what the front office is actually protecting, show up with something that connects to the commercial picture before you ask for anything, and let trust build the way it always does, one accurate answer at a time, across enough rooms, for long enough.
Segment the room before you walk into it. Some people will meet you halfway on the first visit; others need to watch you get it right for them, specifically, before they'll consider it. Both are earning you the same thing, just on different timelines.