To launch or grow your B2B company, you need to convince people to buy what you’re selling. Whether you’re designing a website, sending out email blasts, or having conversations on social media, you’re trying to influence potential customers to do business with you. If you play it smart, you can build authentic relationships where everyone gets what they want. If you cut corners, your reputation may take a hit.
“Influence is what moves people without pushing them,” said Courtney Beasley-Widmer (VP, Growth Marketing). She recently moderated “How CMOs & CCOs Build Influence That Buyers Trust in 2026,” a webinar that gave some of Highwire’s most trusted leaders the opportunity to share their thoughts on how companies can create, sustain, and grow their influence in a crowded market.
The panelists were:
Danny Maiello, MD, Corporate Reputation
Rebekah Crispin, EVP, Integrated Solutions
James Holland, EVP, Integrated Strategy
Reed Handley, EVP, Innovation
Things are changing in the world of B2B influence. Compared to a few years ago, decision cycles are longer, stakeholders are more skeptical, and AI has completely flooded the zone with both good and bad content. For B2B companies, credibility is harder to earn and easier to lose.
Building influence is more important than ever, and our panelists got specific on exactly how to do it. If you can’t watch the whole webinar right now, we’ve captured some of the highlights for you here.
To start, Highwire identified five problems that leaders face while building and maintaining influence in the B2B sphere:
“The thing we see most often is that attention, and therefore influence, is increasingly diffuse. It’s spread across a whole bunch of different ecosystems,” said Holland. “It’s not clean anymore. There are no simple buckets and categories.”
In other words, a unified story in a fragmented market can be the key to breaking through.
“If I zoom out and look at this at the organization level, influence weakens when there’s no shared operating system for the story. Most companies don’t have a messaging problem; they have a coordination problem,” said Crispin. “Brand owns positioning, product owns roadmap messaging, comms owns visibility, sales owns the revenue conversation, but no one truly owns the narrative across the full buyer journey … That’s something we have to do right from the start and establish that ownership of the narrative.”
The next set of B2B influence problem examples involved content and messaging:
Handley explained that while AI makes it easy to generate content at scale, that content can do more harm than good. Buyers prefer a consistent message with real people behind it.
“There’s a wide need to have consistency, but that does not mean the same thing as volume,” she said. “More and more buyers are building that filter for AI slop and understanding, ‘This doesn’t really feel like it’s written by a human. This doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s got the strategic wherewithal, that would make me think I’m buying from an organization that really understands my problems and my issues.”
Maiello also pointed out that when too many parts of the business tell too many different stories, your message can get muddled.
“The consistent and authentic and trust-driven overall narrative is the holy grail,” he said. “Too much diversity with regard to who is telling your story, whether it be employees, stakeholders, spokespersons, key audience targets. [If] they are overstimulated with too much content that is not cohesive, they’re going to be telling different stories across the board.”
Finally, our experts offered suggestions for how companies can make influence a priority while growing their brands:
Once again, “consistency” was the keyword. Getting everyone on the same page at the beginning of a project can mean better results at the end.
“We can all think of situations where that messaging has just been handed down from on high. You will get much better results when you’re bringing all of the experts together to work on that messaging,” said Crispin.
“Somewhere, a salesperson is going to smile at this, but you can’t forget about sales and ensuring that they have all the assets they need to be able to carry the message,” she continued. “You can have the most beautiful marketing and communications program. But if you haven’t translated that into the business of your business, which is converting things into pipeline and revenue, then ultimately, you’re not going to get the result that your business literally exists for.”
“Influence isn’t about just one moment,” said Beasley-Widmer. “It’s about that pattern of signals that people are seeing over time, and ultimately, where they’re deciding to build that trust.”
If you’re in the process of building trust in the B2B space, Highwire can be your partner in storytelling. Our experts can help you craft a clear, consistent message and spread the word to your target audience. Contact us today to learn how you can build influence in your industry and use that influence to achieve your business goals.