Promissory organizations like IS analysis companies or academic institutions have started to play an increasingly important role in the way organizations make sense of IS innovations. Research has so far neglected how the trust that potential adopters place in these promissory organizations affects institutional pressures that promissory organizations exert on them. In this research-in-progress paper, we develop a research model to analyze the effects of different trusting beliefs – integrity, competence, and benevolence beliefs – in IS analysis companies and IS scholars, and how they affect potential adopters’ performance expectations in the early diffusion stages of an IS innovation. We expect this model to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the role of promissory organizations as a mechanism of producing institutional trust and the importance of institutional trust for potential adopter firms in IS innovation adoption