B2B Reads: AI Salespeople, Creator Trust, and the Value Gap

Summary

Some of our favorite B2B sales and marketing posts from around the web this week.

Every Saturday morning we share some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the web from the last week (so it’s fresh!). We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please let us know.

Do Your B2B Customers See the Value You Deliver? by Wendy Wise and Doug May, Harvard Business Review
Most B2B companies assume happy customers understand their own ROI. They usually don’t. Wise and May call this the “value gap,” and it’s why renewals stall even when your product is genuinely working. Their fix isn’t a new dashboard, it’s building value quantification into the sales process from day one.

When AI Becomes Your Buyer’s First Salesperson: What Marketers Can Do by Laurie Ehrbar, Forbes
Before a prospect ever visits your site or takes a call, there’s a good chance an AI tool already gave them an opinion about you. Ehrbar breaks down what that means for marketers who’ve spent years optimizing for humans doing the first round of vetting, not chatbots.

B2B Buyers Are Trusting Creators Before Sales Teams. That Changes the Marketing Playbook by Kamya Marwah, Inc.
Marwah talked to four people building out the B2B creator economy, and they all landed on the same point: buyers trust a face and a feed more than a gated PDF. If your company page is still doing the heavy lifting, you’re probably losing ground to competitors whose employees are posting on LinkedIn.

Demand Gen Report’s 2026 Benchmark Survey Turns AI in B2B Marketing Into an Operations Problem, Not a Tooling Debate by MarketScale Newsroom, MarketScale
Everyone’s past asking whether to use AI in demand gen. The real question, per this year’s benchmark survey, is which parts of the funnel you’re willing to hand over and which ones still need a human checking the work. Content, lead scoring, campaign optimization, and orchestration all get put under the microscope.

The Future Of B2B Marketing Is Experiential—And This Summer Proved It by Taylor Cheek-Mundy, Forbes
B2B is finally borrowing from B2C’s playbook: bigger experiences, deeper trust, less PDF-and-webinar fatigue. Cheek-Mundy points to a summer’s worth of proof that buyers respond to something they can actually feel a lot more than another data sheet.

Have a wonderful weekend and thank you for reading! If you have B2B news sources you rely on we’d love to hear about them. Please share them with us.