Who Do B2B Buyers Actually Trust? The New Rules of Influence

Trust, according to Joel Harrison, is now “the biggest challenge facing B2B marketers today.” That’s a bold claim. Joel has spent over two decades at the centre of the industry – as founding editor of B2B Marketing magazine, co-founder of the B2B Marketing Awards, and now host of the Trust and Influence in B2B podcast. So when Joel joined Lead Forensics CMO Kirsty Dawe for a webinar on exactly this topic, we wanted more people to see it. A single recording felt like too small a home for this many good ideas.

Below is a distillation of that conversation, in Joel’s own words. It covers why trust has become so hard to earn. Five types of people now hold the keys to it, and you’ll hear about all of them below. The piece closes with what to do about it, starting next week!

Why trust got so much harder to earn

B2B buyers no longer follow the path marketers built for them. As Kirsty Dawe put it during the conversation: “We don’t send an email, and then they go click through to a landing page… The buyer has way, way more control over how they make that decision.” Because marketers no longer control that journey, trust carries more weight than ever. A buyer has to trust you the first time you speak – and every time after that.

Joel points to multiple forces converging at once.

AI, and a culture that’s turned inward

• AI is squeezing trust from both directions. “It’s coming from both ends,” he explains. AI shapes how buyers find information, through search and AI answer engines. It also shapes how brands produce that information in the first place. The result, in Joel’s words, is “machine gun slop”: a flood of average, AI-generated content that all starts to look the same. That’s happening at exactly the moment buyers are leaping to a shortlist faster than ever.
• We’re in a “culture of insularity.” Joel cites the Edelman Trust Barometer, a 25-year-running annual study from global communications firm Edelman. It has tracked a growing skepticism toward any voice outside a buyer’s own trusted niche. Andy Mildren, Managing Director at Edelman Business Marketing EMEA, explored this same theme with Lead Forensics CMO Kirsty Dawe in a previous webinar. Edelman’s own research found that 81% of buying committee members had already heard of the brand they ultimately chose, before ever engaging directly. Edelman’s B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report adds more detail. 75% of B2B buyers research a vendor further after encountering credible thought leadership. And 60% say strong thought leadership justifies paying a premium. Broader economic anxiety and polarised public discourse have only deepened the instinct to retreat to sources we already trust.

Fewer gatekeepers, too many channels

• The old trusted intermediaries have thinned out. As a “recovering magazine journalist” himself, Joel points out that trade publications used to be an automatic trust signal. Many of those titles don’t carry the same authority today, and there’s nothing that has fully replaced them.
• Channel overload is drowning out the signal. McKinsey now counts roughly ten channels in a typical integrated B2B marketing mix. Buyers feel overwhelmed, so – as Joel puts it – “we’re narrowing our focus down to the things that we do really trust.”

The result is what Kirsty describes as the dark funnel. Buyers do the bulk of their research anonymously, long before they’re willing to speak to sales. They’ll often trust an anonymous voice on a forum more than they trust the brand talking about its own product.

The five “Trust Champions”

The central idea in Joel’s current thinking is a simple but useful one: individuals increasingly own trust, not brands. He’s mapped that shift across three eras of B2B buying. The first was brand-and-media-controlled, before 2010. The second was buyer-enabled and content-driven, from 2010 to 2020. In the third, today’s era, the credibility that moves a deal forward sits with named people. He calls them Trust Champions, and identifies five distinct types:

1. Thought leaders – an individual inside the company with a defined point of view. They’re briefed and supported to publish and speak publicly as a recognised spokesperson.
2. Employee advocates – “more rank and file” employees who choose to speak passionately about the company, entirely of their own accord. Not everyone will want to do this, Joel says, but the ones who do are “wonderfully powerful and resonant.”
3. Unpaid influencers – journalists and analysts (Joel includes his former self here) whose independent perspective carries weight precisely because it isn’t bought.
4. Paid influencers – people who’ve built genuine resonance and now operate commercially. Joel is candid that true B2B influencer deals of this kind are still rare. He points to Katie Martell in the US as one of the few doing it well. Companies like LinkedIn and Adobe supply the budgets for that kind of work. “It’s not about numbers of followers,” he stresses. “It’s about depth of resonance.”
5. Customer advocates – real customers whose testimony Joel calls “incredibly powerful.” Yet, by his own reading of B2B Marketing’s data, they’re still strikingly underused in most campaigns.

Don’t try to do all five at once

Asked whether every company needs a strategy across all five Trust Champion types, Joel is refreshingly blunt. For most marketing teams, that’s “impossible” as a starting point. His actual advice:

“Look at where your bottlenecks are in your buyer journey. Look at where your deals are breaking down… Is it about awareness? Is it about decision or consideration? Or is it about renewal, retention, upsell? And that’s when you need to look at which of those protagonists are best placed to help you with that.”

In other words: diagnose the friction point in your funnel first. Then pick the one or two Trust Champion types best suited to unblock it. Prove the model works there before expanding it.

Customer advocacy: go beyond the case study

Customer advocacy gets the most airtime in the conversation. Joel doesn’t pull his punches on how most B2B teams handle it: “most people don’t get beyond a case study.” Worse, the same handful of willing customers often get repeatedly “bombarded with requests for testimonial calls,” until they burn out and stop participating.

His suggested alternatives:

• Bring advocates into events, which he calls “such a powerful way of demonstrating customer loyalty.”
• Build a customer board – direct, ongoing engagement where loyal customers help shape the product and business, not just supply quotes. “It’s not just good marketing,” Joel says. “It’s good business.”
• Recognise that review platforms like G2 and TrustRadius have effectively monetised social proof – useful, but a double-edged sword. Joel also flags that fake B2B reviews are a real and growing problem worth watching for.
• Look at purpose-built customer advocacy platforms, such as Trusted, co-founded by Paul Button and Emma Roffey. It uses AI to identify likely advocates, manage reference calls, and turn ordinary customer conversations into verified testimonials. That’s a different approach from relying on a handful of the same willing customers every time.

Employee advocacy: “borrowed trust,” not borrowed content

On employee advocacy, Joel draws a sharp distinction worth building content strategy around: it’s borrowed trust, not borrowed content. The credibility doesn’t come from an employee reposting a company message. It comes from the fact that they chose, unprompted, to say something positive at all. “If an employee isn’t prepared to advocate… you’re never going to buy from them,” he says. And while only a small proportion of any workforce will engage this way, “they’re worth their weight in gold.”

His challenge to marketers: don’t stop at sales and customer success, where people already expect advocacy. The bigger opportunity is in the voices we don’t typically hear from: engineers, technical teams, delivery staff. Look especially outside LinkedIn, in the niche forums, communities and even offline events where a given industry’s buyers actually spend their time.

Brand vs. reputation – a “false dichotomy”

Joel also pushes back on the well-worn “brand vs. demand” debate in B2B marketing, reframing it as brand vs. reputation. Investing in brand builds visibility; it doesn’t automatically build the depth of trust that comes from individuals vouching for you. Sponsorship and advertising, he argues, can’t create that personal affinity on their own. The trust-building work has to happen through real testimony, not just paid exposure.

He also notes this is a genuine leveller for smaller or challenger B2B brands. A startup that can’t outspend an established competitor can still out-trust them within a tightly defined niche. All it takes is demonstrating credible results with a handful of true peers.

Two trust frameworks, one conclusion

Joel’s Trust Champions model isn’t the only framework we’ve covered on this topic. In our earlier piece on earning trust to drive B2B demand, Edelman’s Andy Mildren set out the firm’s five pillars of trustworthiness: Ability, Dependability, Integrity, Purpose and Self. These are the traits buyers actually evaluate a vendor against. The two frameworks answer different questions. Andy’s is about what makes a company trustworthy. Joel’s is about who actually communicates that trustworthiness convincingly. But they point to the same shift. Consistent, credible proof points and real human testimony earn trust long before a prospect ever fills in a form – not a single campaign or claim.

Can you actually measure trust?

Asked how to prove any of this is working, Joel is candid that the field is still catching up. Net Promoter Score remains the closest thing to an industry standard – but it’s 25 years old and, crucially, backward-looking. He points to newer, forward-looking approaches emerging from research firms exploring “shortlist likelihood” scoring. He expects more accessible, AI-assisted versions of this kind of trust measurement to appear over the next year. His practical recommendation for now: pick a general trust benchmark if you can get one cheaply. Then focus most of your measurement effort on the specific stage of the funnel where you’ve identified a trust problem. The right metric will differ depending on whether the gap is at awareness, consideration, decision, or renewal.

What this means for AI search (AEO/GEO)

Asked directly about AI Engine Optimisation, Joel connects the dots back to his broader thesis. If you know where your buyers’ trust objections are, “the chances are so will AI.” Those are the exact questions buyers are typing into AI tools. Creating clear, well-sourced content that answers those specific objections is, in his view, one of the more durable ways to earn visibility. AI-driven research is becoming the default starting point for B2B buying journeys. It’s the very same dark-funnel research happening long before a lead ever reaches a sales conversation.

The one thing to do next week

Asked what a marketer should do differently starting next week, Joel doesn’t recommend a grand strategic overhaul. His advice mirrors the diagnostic he gave earlier: identify where in your buyer journey trust is breaking down. Then find the right Trust Champions to close that specific gap – thought leaders, employees, journalists/analysts, paid partners, or customers. Build outward from that one proof point, rather than trying to solve trust everywhere at once.

Why this matters for visibility, not just belief

Everything Joel describes – buyers researching anonymously, trusting individuals over brands, forming a shortlist before ever raising their hand – is the dark funnel in action. The uncomfortable truth for most marketing and sales teams is that this research is happening on your website right now, from real target accounts. And it’s invisible in standard analytics. Website visitor identification won’t replace the trust-building work Joel describes, but it does something complementary. It tells you which accounts are already engaging anonymously, so you know where to point your Trust Champions – and your sales team – first.

Want the full conversation? Watch the on-demand recording of The Importance of Trust and Influence in B2B webinar with Joel Harrison.