TRUST 2026: How B2B companies win enterprise clients in the AI era
AI made content easy to produce. Attracting enterprise B2B clients still takes earned trust - not louder brand broadcasting.
Recently we hosted TRUST, ModumUp's sixth annual online conference, where members of our B2B Marketing Leaders community talked about how B2B companies win enterprise clients in the AI era.
685 people registered from 58 countries, and 103 joined us live. Thank you to everyone who joined us!
Below are the key takeaways from each session.
Olga Bondareva, Founder of ModumUp- The TRUST framework: How to work with your B2B audience as one connected system
Olga opened with a shift many B2B buyers already feel: when content is easy to generate, decision-making moves into dark social. People ask peers, join professional communities, and look for suppliers they already trust. Her TRUST framework puts that reality into three layers. Building relationships comes first. Owned authority comes second. Borrowed authority through analysts, media, partners, and guest speakers comes third. With a tight budget she would start with relationships alone. With more room she would add owned content. With enough budget she would run all three.
The operating model she described puts community at the center of that system. Social Selling brings target accounts into an invite-only community. Inside it the brand keeps building relationships and shaping the narrative, then invites members to speak, join podcasts, and amplify content so owned and borrowed authority grow from the same audience. For ModumUp's B2B Marketing Leaders community, that path has meant more than 400 members, ROI above 400%, and five client deals. Similar approaches for clients contributed to more than $3 million in deals in one year-long program, and more than $20 million in closed deals in the NetApp example she referenced.
Dmitry Suvorov, Senior Marketing Manager at Harbinger- From outreach to revenue: 340 B2B leads and $1.25M in deals via Social Selling
Dmitry's story started in a hard market. Harbinger sells medium-duty electric trucks to fleet and procurement leaders who have already been burned by EV startups that overpromised. Nobody buys a $100,000 truck from a stranger, cold email now blends into AI noise, and trade shows open doors for a few days before going quiet for a year. The team needed a channel they could run every week, so they chose LinkedIn as the human layer inside a broader mix of email, ads, physical mail, and private events.
They did not start with outreach. Sales leaders published personal, industry-honest posts on their own profiles so prospects saw real people before the first message arrived. One clean-sheet design post reached 55,000 views, almost 300 likes, and 48 comments, and across profiles 27 posts went past a 100% view rate. Only then did outreach follow: a short specific question, qualification that felt like conversation, and useful help with state electrification incentives before any demo ask. For enterprise accounts they contacted three to five people in the same company at once, because one contact was a single point of failure.
Year to date that work produced 340 leads, 82 qualified conversations, $1.25 million in closed deals, and $7.4 million in pipeline based on real configurations and prices. Dmitry's line for the room was simple: volume got cheap, but trust did not.
Priyanka Dasgupta, Director, Field Marketing - US Alliances at Kyndryl- Building trust through employee advocacy in B2B
Priyanka argued that the messenger now matters more than the message. Typical organic reach of a brand social post sits around 2%, buyers filter corporate language before it finishes loading, and cold outreach converts less every year. Edelman research she cited shows that 78% of employees trust their employer ahead of agencies, media, or news. Buyers are three times more likely to believe company information from an employee than from a CEO, while employee-shared content gets about 24x more reshares and 2x higher LinkedIn click-through than company-page posts.
At Kyndryl, advocacy is built into how marketing works, not run as a one-off campaign. The team trains account leaders for social eminence inside ABM, runs a global Ambassadors program with brand-approved thought leadership, and publishes employee recognition externally so wins travel through people, not only through the company page. Around Google Cloud Next they paired experts for thought leadership, recorded 19 C-suite podcast conversations on the floor, and amplified the moments through partners. Advocacy was central to about $40 million of influenced marketing pipeline and around 400 leads from that event work. Her close stayed practical: trust is not a broadcast, it is earned one human voice at a time.
Elsa Velasco, Senior Marketing Manager at Columbus McKinnon- Mentioned or cited: what thought leadership has to do now
Elsa focused on a distinction that matters more as AI search grows. Being mentioned means a company name appears somewhere. Being cited means a specific resource helped support an answer. Publishing more content is easy, but that alone does not make a brand worth citing. At Crosby, a Columbus McKinnon company, she showed how demo days and training events already create original expertise in the room. Those programs have trained more than 600,000 people, and the real work starts after the event: turning approved learning into public resources that partners can also carry, with congruence across Crosby and partner channels so the same accurate knowledge shows up in more places.
She was honest about what the program can and cannot claim. The work is making a dent in SEO and AEO signals, but no single asset proves AI citations, and citation impact has to be measured continuously as platforms keep changing. Visibility can earn a mention. Useful, original, accessible expertise earns consideration. Citation is never guaranteed, but being worth citing is the point.
Doug Kimball, Head of Marketing at Red Sky Health - Building a bigger trusted market voice with analysts and B2B influencers
Doug closed the program on borrowed authority. Almost 40% of buyers treat analyst rankings as a trust signal, and 72% consult analysts in the decision process, yet meaningful analyst relations do not always require a six-figure retainer. Free briefings put Red Sky Health on a Gartner mainstage as an example of outcome-as-a-service pricing. The same analyst later named the company in a report, a prospect saw it, put Red Sky on a shortlist, and the mention turned into a sale.
He also showed two earlier plays. At a previous company he drove almost 40 Gartner Peer Insights reviews, lifted ratings above 4.4, and won a Gartner Customers' Choice Award, then used those third-party quotes in sales enablement and outbound. On the influencer side, a Data Avengers group of 10 creators with more than 1 million combined followers delivered about 50 million LinkedIn impressions in a year of work. One event campaign produced 56,000+ social impressions, 89 leads at the event, and 454 MQLs in four weeks. The through line was the same as Olga's opening: borrow a bigger microphone without pretending the brand can earn that reach alone.