The Spheres of Influence

B2B growth is being rewritten.

AI is killing the click, discovery is shifting upstream, and in a noisy market, trust is now your biggest competitive advantage.

We’re living through one of the most fundamental shifts in B2B buyer behaviour in decades. A few years ago, you might have gotten away with ranking on Google, cranking out lead magnets, or automating cold outreach. Not anymore.

Today, decision-makers aren't filling in forms or responding to sales cadences. They’re in Slack groups, WhatsApp chats and Reddit threads asking their peers what’s working and which product to buy. And when they make a purchase, 73% of them cite word-of-mouth or community-driven insights as their deciding factor. That’s not a hunch, that’s according to data from Wynter.

This referral behaviour has always been powerful in B2B, but what’s changed is how it's scaled. Now, with LLMs becoming a more prominent part of how people search and make sense of the web, brand mentions (what we used to call online PR) are becoming even more vital. What others say about you, especially those who are credible, trusted, and hold authority in your space, determines which brands are found, trusted and chosen.

We’ve always known that word-of-mouth is the most powerful and sustainable growth engine for any business. I saw this first-hand in building ContentCal. However, we’ve never had a framework to apply word-of-mouth growth systematically to any brand.

With this new book. I’m changing that.

Spheres of Influence will be released in September, but before it hits the shelves, I’m sharing the core idea behind it with you first, so you can get ahead of this shift and start building a brand that people talk about, search for, and trust.

Think of influence not as a switch you flip, but as a ripple you start. The Spheres of Influence model helps us visualise how this ripple works. At the centre are your most passionate users; your Core Advocates. These are the people who’ve experienced your product firsthand and tell others about it without being asked. From there, the circle expands into Community Leaders and Specialist Creators, those with niche followings or trusted voices in specific communities. Further out, you find Category Leaders and Domain Experts, whose larger audiences help translate credibility into reach.

Here’s a breakdown of the six primary Spheres of Influence.

1. Core Advocates – Users who love what you do and say so unprompted. For example, at ContentCal, we identified a small group of early beta users who consistently shared feedback, tweeted about us, and referred others. They were foundational in shaping our roadmap and brand trust.

2. Evangelists – Believers who share your mission and actively advocate for you. For example, Adobe’s partnership with long-time creative professionals who had organically been creating tutorials became full-time evangelists and spokespeople on stage at Adobe events.

3. Community Leaders – Trusted curators inside forums, groups, or member communities. At ContentCal, we have built strong relationships with the Marketing Meetup and Social Media Managers Hub communities, where moderators and group leaders regularly recommend us as a valuable tool.

4. Specialist Creators – Niche content creators with deep audience trust. A good example is eFinancialCareers, which partnered with Amber Shand, a career content creator who speaks directly to underrepresented voices in finance, helping to reframe how early-career professionals engage with recruitment platforms.

5. Category Leaders – Prominent voices shaping the industry narrative. Lenny Rachisky’s newsletter is the perfect example. Lenny has carved out a valuable audience of SaaS executives, and now inclusion in Lenny’s newsletter or podcast is seen as a mark of status for brands.

6. Domain Experts – Analysts, institutions, and researchers validating market choices. Take LinkedIn’s ongoing collaboration with Edelman to produce their B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study, which helped LinkedIn establish data-backed credibility across enterprise marketing teams.

Each sphere is connected, and each builds upon the last. You can’t just jump to a big-name endorsement without the groundwork. Influence scales when trust flows through all six layers.

You don’t need a big budget to build trust; you need the right mindset. Here are three simple ways to get started:

1. Surface your hidden advocates
Dig into your product usage and support tickets. Who’s giving detailed feedback? Who’s shouting about you online? Reach out and thank them. Turn delight into advocacy.

2. Ask better questions
In every customer call, ask:
→ “How did you hear about us?”
→ “What communities are you part of?”
This simple shift will reveal unseen influences and map the actual decision-making journey.

3. Show up in the spaces that AI reads
Reddit. LinkedIn. YouTube. Community forums. These are the training grounds for tomorrow’s search results. If you’re not present and cited in public by trusted individuals, you’re invisible.

There’s no playbook for how to get found in AI-first environments. No ad units. No guaranteed organic reach. No reliable funnel. So, what’s left?

Influence. Trust. And what people say when you’re not in the room.

And it’s not just me who thinks this. According to LinkedIn’s 2025 B2B Marketing Benchmark report, 94% of B2B marketers say trust drives success across the funnel

We’re shifting from lead capture to mind capture. From clicks to credibility.

Whatever shakes out in the coming years, in times of uncertainty, I find it most helpful to defer to first-principles thinking and base our marketing strategies on the facts that remain true. Those truths are these;

• The brand that gets remembered gets bought.

• Frequency and relevancy determine who gets remembered.

• If more people are talking about you than your competitors, you will grow.

You could distil all this down into one statement: The brand that is most trusted wins.

Spheres of Influence is your blueprint for building brand momentum that lasts, by turning influence into your most significant competitive advantage.

Whatever this platform shift has in store, understanding your Spheres of Influence will mean laying the fundamental foundations that any fast-growing business needs to create for repeatable, sustainable growth.

If this shift resonates with you, if you're building a brand you want people to talk about, search for, and trust, then Spheres of Influence was written for you.

The book launches this September. But the early thinking, tools, and behind-the-scenes insight? That’s going out exclusively via my Substack.

👉 Subscribe to the Spheres of Influence Substack to get:

• Early chapter previews

• Real-world case studies from brands building with trust

• And first access to the waitlist, launch bonuses, and more

This isn’t a playbook for playing it safe. It’s a blueprint for the brave.

→ Join here:

Because in a world of AI-filtered decisions, the brand that's most trusted wins.