In B2B, everyone talks about the “buying committee”, but forgets about another committee-like group that has a much bigger influence on your champion.

⭕️ Your champion’s “circle of trust”

These are people your champion looks to for guidance, entertainment, and support outside of their company.

(some might call them “external advisors”, “dark social communities”, “the right hand men”, the “consigliere”)

They have an extremely high level influence because your champion…

• Admires the companies they work for.
• Follows their content.
• Has friends that also follow them.
• Attends their events.
• Tries to implement their playbooks.

They are the influencers and gatekeepers of your champions…

…acting as a trust filter for who should be listened to, and who should be ignored.

And in some markets you must gain their trust, BEFORE you can effectively reach your ideal customer.

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Anthony and I experienced this in our business, FletchPMM.

Our ideal customer segment is B2B software startups refining their positioning.

Our champions are founders and marketing leaders (who own this key initiative)

For us, these gatekeepers have included the following:

Companies:

Marketing Agencies (Olivine Marketing, MKT1, Spiralize)

B2B Marketing Tools (Wynter, Klue, RB2B)

Website Agencies (Oratory.co, Alrdy)

Communities:

Marketing & PMM (Product Marketing Alliance, Exit Five, Pavillion, SaaS Academy)

Founder (TinySeed, Practical Founders)

VCs & Accelerators (YCombinator, Techstars, Point72, Gradient, Character Capital))

PMM Practitioners:

Solopreneurs in B2B (Tas Bober, Devin Reed, Morgan J Ingram, Kyle Poyar, Brendan Hufford, Yi Lin Pei)

In-House Marketing Leaders (Roxana Irimia, Kyle Coleman, Mark Huber, Jess Cook)

If you are in our ICP, there is a good chance you follow this group too.

And while we’ve done everything we can think of to give value to our champions in our marketing, we ALSO had to earn the trust of this group.

Many of have them have been gracious enough to give us their blessing — by sharing our content, mentioning us by name, letting us speak at their events, having us do guest posts on their newsletter, intro-ing us to prospects, even becoming customers of our service themselves.

Their blessings translate into higher trust from our ideal champion — giving us a stronger starting point to develop customer relationships.

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I encourage anyone building out marketing programs to map out your champion’s circle of trust, and allocate resources to market to this group.

It will take time, but this longterm investment in the ecosystem can also be a powerful moat.

At least for us, the juice was worth the squeeze.