Trust in B2B Marketing: Turning customer advocacy into a growth asset

Your customers are your secret weapon

Trust remains one of the most consequential forces in B2B marketing growth, yet it is one of the least rigorously handled. It is frequently invoked but rarely operationalised, and even more rarely owned end-to-end. When organisations talk about trust, it is typically after it has failed, following a lost deal, a spike in churn, or a reputational incident. What is missing is a treatment of trust in B2B marketing as something that can be deliberately designed, measured, and governed.

Marketing leaders increasingly recognise trust as a commercial opportunity. It behaves less like an outcome of performance and more like a precondition for sustainable growth. The challenge, then, is not persuading executives that trust matters, but translating an inherently human phenomenon into something intelligible to boards, finance leaders, and operating models.

For HotTopics’ first Marketing Leaders Meetup in 2026, Rachel Fairley, Co-Author of ReBrand Right, and Emma Roffey, Co-Founder of Trusted, joined in conversation to explore how trust develops, how it behaves in B2B environments, and how organisations can turn trust into a combined brand and business asset.

This article is a condensed write-up of that discussion and the debates shared among attendees. To explore future Meetups for B2B marketing leaders, discover our events calendar.

Reputation transfer and personal risk in B2B trust

At its core, trust in B2B markets is not sentiment. It is reputational leverage. A trusted supplier allows a customer to place their own professional credibility alongside the brand. This is why genuine customer advocacy is rare. Recommending a supplier is not a neutral act.

Advocacy exposes individuals to judgement by peers, leadership teams, and sometimes regulators. In enterprise environments, particularly technology, cyber security, or regulated services, the cost of a poor recommendation can be material to a career.

As a result, trust is revealed less through attitudinal surveys and more through behaviours that entail personal risk. The most reliable signals of trust tend to be visible, attributable, and difficult to reverse, including:

1. Willingness to take reference calls, particularly with senior prospects

2. Public speaking, testimonials, or analyst engagement

3. Unsolicited peer introductions

4. Customers proactively defending the brand when things go wrong

These behaviours often emerge independently of formal advocacy programmes. They are rarely incentive-driven and frequently offered without prompting. Trust, in this sense, manifests as unsolicited commitment.

Measuring trust in B2B beyond NPS

The industry’s reliance on Net Promoter Score (NPS) has not helped to clarify trust.

NPS can function as an early signal of customer trust, but it is neither sufficient nor strategically actionable on its own. More damaging is the way organisations often treat detractors and promoters asymmetrically. Detractors matter. They are diagnostic and highlight where experience or delivery has broken down. However, an excessive focus on detractors can distort growth strategy.

At the other end of the scale, promoters are frequently under-analysed precisely because they are perceived as safe. This is a mistake, as promoters reveal where future growth is most likely to come from.

In practice, trust correlates most strongly with a small number of commercial outcomes, chief among them churn reduction. Reduced churn is not simply a retention metric. It reflects a customer’s willingness to tolerate friction or imperfection without exiting the relationship.

Beyond churn, trust in B2B marketing tends to surface indirectly through:

1. Faster deal velocity as perceived risk declines

2. Higher average contract values and expansion rates

3. Greater openness to cross-sell and adjacent propositions

4. More efficient customer acquisition through peer validation

Taken together, these effects suggest that trust operates as a force multiplier across the revenue system.

Why boards rarely talk about trust explicitly

Despite its impact, trust remains awkward in boardrooms. Most boards do not reject the concept. They simply avoid the language. Instead, trust is discussed through proxy terms such as reputation, resilience, confidence, or renewal.

When trust is framed as a lagging indicator, something that improves once performance improves, it is treated as non-investable. When reframed as a leading indicator of growth, trust becomes something boards can underwrite.

Boards already understand, often implicitly, that trusted organisations benefit from longer customer lifetimes, faster sales cycles, and greater tolerance during periods of change. For CMOs, the task is therefore translation rather than evangelism.

Scaling customer advocacy in B2B without eroding trust

The instinct to scale customer advocacy often leads organisations to over-automate what is, by nature, personal. Volume-driven approaches, more asks, more assets, more programmes, frequently erode the very trust they aim to build.

More effective models focus on orchestration rather than scale.

Advocacy acts are matched to individual motivation, with explicit recognition that not all customers wish to advocate in the same way. Common motivation clusters include professional visibility, influence through advisory boards, peer connection, or thought leadership, rather than product endorsement.

Mature advocacy programmes include guardrails. These might include limits on frequency, customer-controlled pause mechanisms, and internal governance designed to prevent advocate fatigue.

Organisational friction and practical starting points

Practitioners consistently identify the same structural barrier: ownership. Customer advocacy is often no one’s formal responsibility. Data exists across marketing, sales, and customer success, but rarely converges into a coherent operating model. Relationship ownership is frequently contested, particularly in larger organisations.

In ironic timing, at least two global customer advocacy programmes, including AWS’, were publicly paused or cut within hours of this Meetup. Lack of understanding and clear ownership were cited as contributing factors.

A pragmatic starting point is to embed trust and advocacy into existing account-based marketing programmes, where cross-functional alignment already exists.

Early evidence suggests that community-led approaches, such as curated peer groups, informal messaging channels, or selective in-person forums, accelerate trust formation more effectively than content alone. Selective use of video testimonials within late-stage nurture journeys also appears to reduce deal friction.

Trust as infrastructure in B2B marketing

The essential reframing is this: trust is not a veneer applied by brand, nor a sentiment captured by survey. It is infrastructure. A system governing how information flows, how risk is shared, and how quickly decisions are made.

Organisations that treat trust as infrastructure are more likely to invest in it deliberately. They design for it, measure it, and protect it with the same seriousness applied to pipeline or margin. Those that do not will continue to notice trust only when it is missing.

For CMOs operating at board level or beyond, the opportunity is clear. Trust in B2B marketing does not need to be made more emotive for the brand. It needs to be made more intelligible for the business.