Trust & Influence in B2B
I’m Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing.net (formerly B2B Marketing magazine) Propolis and the B2B Marketing Awards. It’s been my mission for the past 21 years to recognise, celebrate and evangelise for the amazing profession that is B2B marketing, which has evolved beyond that recognition in that time. In this podcast, I’ll be exploring what I believe is the biggest challenge facing B2B marketers today: Trust. Buyers have always been cynical, hard to reach and even harder to convince, and increasingly expect to be self-directed in their research. In other words, they only w...
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Why Replacing Junior Marketers With AI Is a False Economy | Professor Laura Chamberlain on Next-Gen Talent
<p>In this episode of Trust and Influence in B2B Marketing, Joel Harrison sits down with Professor Laura Chamberlain, Professor of Marketing at the University of Warwick and Founder of Think Talk Thrive. They tackle one of the most pressing questions in the profession right now: Do we still need junior marketers—and if so, what do we owe them? As AI absorbs entry-level tasks and graduate vacancies continue to shrink, is marketing quietly destroying its own talent pipeline?</p><p>➡️ Laura draws on years of teaching across every level of the profession—from undergraduates to C-suite executives—to challenge...
What Access Group Learned from a Year on the AI Bus | Kate Hassler's Inside Track on How a $9 Billion B2B Software Powerhouse Has Made AI Business as Usual
<p>In this episode of Trust and Influence in B2B Marketing, Joel Harrison sits down with Kate Hassler, Group Director of Brand and Comms at Access Group—a $9 billion global B2B software company serving 160,000 customers across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. While headlines scream of AI-driven redundancies at tech giants, Access Group took the opposite approach: hiring more people, running company-wide hackathons, and building a culture where AI is simply business as usual. So what does a genuinely human-led AI transformation actually look like from the inside?</p><p>➡️ Kate walks through every stage of Access Group's journey—from poc...
B2B Tech Marketing's Human-First Future in The Age of AI | Exclusive Insights from B2B Marketing Awards Data, Focusing on Four Key Trends, with Tejal Patel
<p>In this episode of Trust and Influence in B2B Marketing, Joel Harrison sits down with Tejal Patel, Independent Marketing Consultant and former marketing leader at Cisco, Microsoft, and Nokia. Together, they examine how B2B technology marketing is changing as AI reshapes content creation and digital channels become more saturated than ever. Using exclusive insights from B2B Marketing Awards data, they reveal four emerging trends that are helping leading brands stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace.</p><p>➡️ Tejal explains why marketers are moving beyond traditional buyer personas and investing more heavily in developers, practitioners, employees, and...
Best in show B2B | Why The RHS Chelsea Flower Show is blooming for Addleshaw Goddard's full-funnel campaign, with Brian Macreadie
<p>In this episode of Trust and Influence in B2B Marketing, Joel Harrison sits down with Brian Macreadie, Head of Marketing at Addleshaw Goddard, one of the UK's most creatively ambitious international law firms. Brian reveals how his team did something no legal firm had ever done before—becoming the first-ever official legal partner of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show—and built a full-funnel campaign around it called Flourish in the City. Could flowers, billboards, and a garden at Chelsea really deliver 350% ROI and 40 new clients in under a year?</p><p>➡️ With over 30 years of B2B marketing experien...
Why Data is Still The Achilles Heel of B2B Marketing | Trust in Data Remains at Rock-Bottom for Enterprises — Maureen Blandford Explains What Marketers Can Do About It
<p>In this episode of Trust and Influence in B2B Marketing, Joel Harrison sits down with Maureen Blandford, Founder of Serendipitas and co-author of the Diginomica Enterprise Data Health Study. Together, they expose one of B2B marketing's most uncomfortable truths: that senior leaders across major enterprises don't actually trust their own data—even when they say they do. Could the data powering your most critical business decisions be far less reliable than anyone is willing to admit out loud?</p><p>➡️ Maureen draws on nearly twelve years as a B2B tech CMO and frank conversations with eighteen senior...
The Four Pillars of Success in The Agentic AI Era: Governance, Judgement, Taste and Orchestration | With Angela Tangas of Oliver
<p>In this episode of Trust and Influence in B2B Marketing, Joel Harrison sits down with Angela Tangas, CEO of Oliver, part of the Brandtech Group—the original pioneers of the in-house agency model. Together, they tackle one of the most urgent questions facing B2B marketing leaders right now: how do you move beyond AI experimentation and drive genuine, scalable transformation? And is the operating model you choose as important as the technology itself?</p><p>➡️ Angela draws on her experience working with eight of the world's ten largest advertisers across forty-eight countries to deliver a frank, practical, and ge...
Is PE killing the B2B ROI imperative? | Nick Eades on what PE-backed marketing teaches the rest of B2B
<p>In this episode of Trust and Influence in B2B Marketing, Joel Harrison sits down with Nick Eades, Chief Strategy Officer at Freemarket and one of B2B marketing's most experienced senior leaders, having served as CMO five times across PE-backed, publicly quoted, and VC-funded businesses at companies including IBM, Dell, BT, and Fujitsu. Together, they explore one of the most consequential shifts reshaping the marketing profession: the rise of private equity ownership in B2B — and what it demands of marketers operating inside it. Could the high-pressure, outcome-driven discipline of PE-backed marketing actually be making all of B2B...
Chaos is B2B's problem. Coherence is the answer | Why B2B marketers need to fix their operating model, with Alastair Hussain of TMP
<p>In this episode of Trust and Influence in B2B Marketing, Joel Harrison sits down with Alastair Hussain, Chief Strategy Officer at TMP (The Marketing Practice), a specialist B2B marketing agency. Together, they confront one of the most pressing realities in B2B marketing today: the chaos most marketers are experiencing isn't a streak of bad luck—it's the symptom of operating models that have fundamentally broken down. Is coherence the cure, and what does it actually take to build it from the inside out?</p><p>➡️ Alastair draws on TMP's Cost of Chaos Report—research spanning over a thousa...
Is fractional the future — or a warning sign? | Skip Fidura on what the rise of the fractional CMO really tells us about B2B marketing
<p>In this episode of Trust and Influence in B2B Marketing, Joel Harrison sits down with Skip Fidura, Fractional CMO, Non-Executive Director, and Board Advisor with over 20 years of experience across B2B and B2C marketing on the client, agency, and provider sides. The fractional CMO model is having a moment—but is it a real structural shift in marketing leadership, or just a buzzword that's been marketered up? And what does its rapid rise reveal about how organizations truly value marketing?</p><p></p><p>➡️ Skip has been working fractionally since before it was fashionable, and he doesn...
When AI agents handle your B2B buyers, who owns trust?
<p>Agentic AI is one of the most talked-about developments in B2B right now — but most marketers haven't yet asked the question that matters most: what happens to buyer trust when an AI agent starts acting on their behalf?</p><p>In this episode, Joel Harrison speaks with Andy Johnson, founder and director of client strategy at HUT3, one of the most respected ABM agencies in B2B and one of the earliest adopters of agentic AI in the industry. Andy and his team haven't just been watching this technology evolve — they've been actively building with it for the past...
