NPS has survived more obituaries than almost any other metric in B2B marketing — and it's still standing. Bain & Co.'s newest research doesn't try to kill it off again; it argues the real predictor of B2B growth is something else entirely: whether a vendor makes a buyer's 'day one' shortlist, the mental list formed before anyone picks up the phone. Tony Larks, a B2B marketing leader with over 20 years of experience spanning sales, enterprise technology and zero-to-one startup builds, read that research and asked the obvious next question — could you estimate your shortlist position without ever surveying a buyer?

➡️ Tony walks Joel through the AI prompt he built to do exactly that — scoring companies against Bain’s five-part framework using nothing but public signals: analyst coverage from the likes of Gartner and Forrester, peer review sites such as G2, forums including Reddit, and even employee sentiment on Glassdoor. He shares the story of an NPS score skewed by SMB customers who’d rather pay a compliance fine than do the hard work of getting compliant, unpacks why ‘shortlist share’ risks becoming exactly the kind of vanity metric NPS became if marketers try to game it with PR spend, and explains why fixing the fundamentals — service, roadmap transparency, honest pricing — beats gaming any signal. He’s open-sourced the tool and is giving the prompt away free to anyone who wants it. If you’ve ever wondered whether your brand is even in the room before the RFP lands, this conversation will change how you think about being ‘in the market’ versus being in contention.

What You'll Learn

• What's actually wrong with NPS, the B2B trust metric — and why nobody's replaced it, until now

• What the ‘day one list’ is, and why Bain says most lost deals were never winnable to begin with

• How Tony built an AI model that estimates buyer confidence from public signals alone, and where the approach is strongest and weakest

• What brands should actually do once they know where they sit on the shortlist

Chapters

00:00 - Introduction: Why We're Finally Talking About NPS

01:35 - Meet Tony Larks: From Sales Floor to Startup Marketing Leadership

04:45 - From Sentiment Tracking to Bain's ‘Day One List’

09:28 - What's Actually Wrong With NPS (And What Isn't)

12:14 - NPS's Cultural Blind Spot: Sevens, Nines and Detractors

15:07 - Inside Bain's Day One List: Why ‘Lost’ Deals Were Never Winnable

17:56 - Do You Need Bain's Budget? Mining Your Own CRM Data

21:02 - The Hidden Buyers Bain's Framework Surfaces

23:55 - Building an AI Proxy for Buyer Trust: How the Shortlist Matrix Works

26:26 - Estimation vs. Measurement: How Rigorous Is Good Enough?

28:07 - The Gaming Risk: Can Shortlist Share Be Bought?

31:26 - Could ‘Shortlist Share’ Become the Next Vanity Metric?

33:27 - What Marketers Should Actually Do With Their Score

35:02 - Explaining the Two-by-Two Grid

36:13 - NPS Isn't Dead, It's Just Incomplete

37:42 - Wrap-Up and How to Get the Tool

About the guest

Tony Larks is a B2B marketing leader with over 20 years of experience, starting his career in sales before moving into marketing roles spanning distribution, systems integrators and enterprise technology businesses. He has spent his most recent years leading zero-to-one marketing builds inside startups, and over the past year has been building a suite of AI agents to track brand and market sentiment — work that led him to develop the open-source ‘shortlist matrix’ featured in this episode.

Tony on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonylarks/

Blog featuring shortlist matrix prompt: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-measuring-market-share-start-shortlist-tony-larks-hazje/?trackingId=BHbT3G1Q76e9aaY0PZoOcg%3D%3D

About the podcast

This is a full episode of Trust & Influence in B2B, hosted by Joel Harrison, founder of Joel Harrison B2B.

Joel on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joelharrison/

If this was useful, subscribe for more on trust, influence and the metrics that actually predict B2B growth — and tell me in the comments where you think you’d land on the day one shortlist.

Most B2B marketing leaders aren't short on expertise — they're short on the confidence and the practised skill to be visible with it, whether that's in the room with their own board or out in public. Archana Dhankar, VP Marketing EMEA at Proofpoint, TEDx speaker and LinkedIn Top Voice, joins Joel Harrison to unpack what it actually takes to build that visibility, internally and externally, and turn it into real influence.

➡️ She breaks down the practical mechanics of building influence: a 2:1 ratio for balancing self-promotion against value-added content, a three-stage framework for knowing when visibility has become influence (likes, saves, and inbound interest), and why trust compounds differently on a public platform than it does inside your own organisation. She's also candid about the cost — the professional accountability, the late nights, the posts that flop despite your best instincts — and closes with practical advice for reluctant leaders and junior marketers on where to start.

• Why visibility and influence are not the same thing, and how to tell them apart
• The 2:1 ratio Archana uses to keep self-promotion from tipping into ego
• A three-stage framework for measuring whether your content is building real influence
• Why trust compounds differently on social platforms than it does in daily work
• The personal cost of building a public profile – and why consistency, not confidence, is the hard part
• How to start building influence if you're a reluctant leader, or a junior marketer just starting out

• 00:01 – Introduction and episode setup
• 02:08 – Archana's journey: two decades in B2B marketing, content roots back to 2008
• 04:20 – Visibility vs. influence: the core distinction
• 06:17 – What prompted Archana to go public, and the “side hustle” advantage
• 09:33 – Three phases of measuring when visibility becomes influence
• 12:51 – Self-promotion vs. ego, and the 2:1 content ratio
• 14:18 – Balancing personal brand with company brand
• 16:47 – Why trust is the foundation of influence
• 18:41 – Winning over skeptical stakeholders: SEMrush and Adobe as B2B influencer examples
• 20:28 – How being an influential leader has shaped Archana's career
• 23:29 – The personal cost: accountability and consistency
• 26:08 – Where to start if you want influence, not just visibility
• 30:19 – Advice for junior marketers
• 31:14 – The one mindset shift that matters most

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/archanadhankar/

🌐 Visit Joel Harrison's website to explore exclusive reports, upcoming events, and join the B2B marketing community: https://www.joelharrisonb2b.com/

📲 Follow Joel Harrison and Trust & Influence in B2B across the web:

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joelharrison/

Most leadership advice pushes you toward a familiar template: decisive, diplomatic, endlessly composed. It's meant to build trust. Often it does the opposite – because trust depends on people actually knowing who you are, not the version of you assembled to fit expectations.

In this episode of Trust & Influence in B2B, Joel Harrison is joined by Karl Van den Bergh, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Illumio, the breach containment company. Karl has spent more than 25 years leading go-to-market teams at global technology companies, including CMO roles at Gigamon and DataStax, and now writes regularly on authenticity and what it means to be human at work.

Together they unpack why being yourself is a trust strategy rather than a soft skill, how to tell real authenticity apart from the performative kind, and why Karl believes AI raises the value of human, relational marketing rather than eroding it.

In this episode:

• Why most leadership advice pushes conformity rather than authenticity, and what gets lost in the process
• The test that actually separates real authenticity from the performative kind
• Why brands that try to please everyone end up forgettable – and the campaign that proves the opposite
• How fear of conflict quietly kills team performance, and what fixed it on Karl's own team
• Why Karl believes AI raises the value of human, relational marketing rather than replacing it

Chapters

00:00 Cold open

01:26 Karl's background – from physics to CMO

03:13 Why he started writing about being yourself at work

06:10 Why a distinctive point of view is a differentiator

08:37 Personal brand vs. company brand

10:55 What authenticity actually means

11:50 Spotting performative authenticity

13:47 How authenticity cascades through a team

17:27 Where leaders fall short on consistency

19:46 Does this get harder as the stakes rise?

21:56 The counterargument: "Don't Be Yourself"

24:30 AI and the flattening of content

27:52 One thing to start doing differently next week

Karl on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karlvandenbergh/

Joel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelharrison/

Why is employee advocacy so often mistaken for a content strategy? Rida Oyebade, Senior Social Media Manager at Workday, explains why handing employees “ready-made content” isn’t enough — advocacy only works when it still sounds like the person sharing it, not the brand behind them.

In this episode of Trust & Influence in B2B, host Joel Harrison talks to Rida Oyebade about employee advocacy — the discipline of turning colleagues into credible, willing voices for the brand. Rida traces her own path into advocacy, breaks down the different tiers of an advocacy programme, and is candid about what she’s learned building one from scratch at Workday: why participation has to stay genuinely optional, why no programme survives without real buy-in from leadership, and why the whole discipline is really about borrowed trust rather than borrowed content.

In this episode

• Why brand-originated content is losing ground to individual voices in B2B
• Why handing employees ready-made content isn’t the same as earning their voice
• The three tiers of employee advocacy, and why each needs different handling
• Why employee advocacy means borrowing someone’s “personal real estate” — and why participation has to stay optional
• What actually makes advocacy programmes work, and why persuasion alone isn’t enough
• Whether employee advocacy is a specialism worth building a career around

Guest

Rida Oyebade is Senior Social Media Manager at Workday, where she leads employee advocacy — working with colleagues, or “influencers” as she prefers to call them, to carry the brand into places a corporate account can’t reach.

In this special edition of Trust & Influence in B2B, Joel Harrison is joined by Fiona McKenzie of Marketbridge to make sense of Cannes Lions 2026. Fresh from five days of multi-stream content, installations and fringe events, they let the dust settle and distil what actually matters for B2B marketers – viewed through a growth lens, not creativity for its own sake.

They unpack why B2B is visibly on the rise at Cannes, the tension between creativity and commercial measurement, and the CFO buy-in conversation (brand as future cashflow). They dig into three important releases from the week: the FT's work on trust (including the finding that 82% trust a source more when it challenges than when it agrees), Bloomberg on reputation pulling weight across the full funnel, and Bain & Co.'s new model positioned as a rival to NPS, scoring a buyer's likelihood to choose you before any deal is on the table.

The conversation moves through the B2B Lions winner – an obscure Swedish ball-bearing company using tidal energy in the Faroe Islands, and why a big idea told as a wider go-to-market story is a step in the right direction – the rise of creators and influence in B2B, Joel's framework of five "trust champions," and a notably optimistic read on AI: a technology that surfaces existing misalignment and removes grunt work rather than replacing human judgment. They close on what Cannes could do better for the B2B community.

In this episode:

What Cannes actually is, and why it's so hard to navigate. B2B moving up the agenda. The growth-versus-creativity lens. CFO buy-in and brand as future cashflow. Why CMOs are exhausted by the measurement debate. Three key releases: FT on trust, Bloomberg on reputation, Bain's NPS rival. The B2B Lions winner and what it signals. Creators, influence and Joel's five trust champions. A grounded, optimistic take on AI. What's missing, and what would take Cannes to the next level in 2027.

Reports and resources mentioned (links below):

• FT – research on trust in B2B https://dimensionsofinfluence.ft.com/
• Bloomberg – reputation across the funnel, B2B Summit presentation https://www.bloombergmedia.com/blog/corporate-rep-study-2025/
• Bain & Co. – new buyer-choice model positioned against NPS https://www.bain.com/insights/raising-the-odds-on-a-deal-how-likelihood-to-buy-rewires-b2b-growth/

Chapters:

• (00:00) Welcome and why we waited for the dust to settle
• (01:13) What Cannes actually is, and how to navigate it
• (03:04) B2B on the rise at the festival
• (04:28) The growth lens: creativity anchored in commercial value
• (05:21) CFO buy-in and brand as future cashflow
• (07:54) Why CMOs are exhausted by measurement
• (10:23) Is B2B creativity judged by the wrong (B2C) playbook?
• (11:26) Three key releases: FT, Bloomberg and Bain
• (16:45) Talking the language of the boardroom
• (19:36) The B2B Lions winner: a Swedish ball-bearing story
• (24:29) Creators, influence and the five trust champions
• (30:11) AI: surfacing misalignment, not taking our jobs
• (35:17) What Cannes could do better
• (37:46) Wrap-up and how to share your own take

Connect with Joel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelharrison/

Connect with Fiona on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fiona-mckenzie-8a16921a/

Most of the conversations that decide a B2B deal happen in a room you'll never be in. Buyers swap recommendations, compare notes and build their shortlists in spaces marketers can neither see nor measure – and by the time you're in contention, the decision is often half made.

In this episode of Trust & Influence in B2B, Joel Harrison is joined by Lottie O'Donoghue, strategy director at Velo, a specialist B2B agency built on recommendation. Lottie has led marketing client-side in scale-up SaaS and run ABM at Accenture, and now shapes recommendation strategies for Velo's clients across technology, industrial and professional services.

Together they unpack why becoming the recommended choice has shifted from a nice-to-have to a commercial imperative, the real difference between being known and being recommended, and the trust signals that quietly compound into advocacy.

In this episode:

• Why the recommended choice now matters more than the visible one
• The trust signals that accumulate into recommendation, and the ones marketers most underestimate
• How to make the case for investing in influence that conventional attribution can't capture
• Where to start if you suspect you're not being talked about in the right rooms
• Velo's six Rs of Recommendation Marketing framework

Download Velo's report here: https://www.velo-b2b.com/ebooks/?utm_source=Joel+Harrison&utm_campaign=Recommendation+Marketing

This is a sponsored episode, produced in partnership with Velo.

Lead generation is the discipline B2B marketing relies on most and trusts least. In this episode of Trust & Influence in B2B, Robin Caller, founder and CEO of Leadscale, explains why, and what it would take to fix it.

Most people in B2B know that a good share of the leads changing hands every day are of questionable quality. Few will say so on the record. Robin is an exception. He calls it "a tolerable level of mischief", a grey zone the whole industry has quietly learned to live with, and in conversation with host Joel Harrison he explains why it persists, why he refuses to call it fraud, and how transparency could begin to put it right.

A note before you listen: Robin speaks freely, and not everyone in the industry will agree with all of it. That's rather the point.

In this episode:

– Why lead generation has been B2B's least-trusted discipline for 20 years

– What "a tolerable level of mischief" really means, and why it isn't fraud

– The "blind faith" model and the hierarchy of transparency

– Why marketers tolerate poor-quality leads: the quota trap

– How advertisers are part of the problem, not just the victims

– The provenance questions every buyer should be asking their suppliers

– Why "more leads will not be the answer" in the AI era

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Lead Generation Challenges

05:42 Transparency and Its Role in Trust

08:20 The Ambivalence of Stakeholders

11:26 Blind Faith in Lead Generation Practices

14:23 The Importance of Transparency in Data Collection

17:19 Navigating the Gray Areas of Lead Generation

18:22 Finding Fair Solutions for All Parties

21:37 Advertisers: Victims and Perpetrators

21:54 The Importance of Data Sharing

24:30 Data Decay and Its Impact on Performance

25:16 Trust and Transparency in Data Transactions

25:25 Generational Perspectives in Marketing

27:03 The MQL Mindset and Its Limitations

29:20 Dynamic Qualification of Leads

31:12 Managing Tolerances in Imperfect Systems

32:48 The Future of Lead Generation

36:23 Questions for Better Data Practices

39:56 The Ethical Implications of Data Sourcing

42:42 A Positive Outlook on Future Trends

About the guest

Robin Caller is the founder and CEO of Leadscale, a London-based lead generation and data quality business. He has spent more than two decades in lead and demand generation and is one of the industry's more outspoken voices on data quality, transparency and trust.

Robin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robincaller/

About the podcast

Trust & Influence in B2B is hosted by Joel Harrison, founder of Joel Harrison B2B. Each episode explores marketing strategy and practice with senior B2B practitioners, researchers and academics.

Joel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelharrison/

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