In this episode
John Rockhold, VP of Market Engagement at Spotlight, walks through Spotlight’s Influence Orchestration report and its central finding: what analysts, customers, partners and experts say about a B2B vendor now carries more weight than what the vendor says about itself. He and Greg Kihlström cover why influence has to be treated as ongoing work rather than a score, why buyers have usually formed a shortlist before they ever contact a vendor, how to decide which AI platforms and prompts actually matter, why LLMs reference analyst research but quote peer reviews, and who inside a company should own influence.
Key takeaways
- Earned authority now outweighs owned content. Spotlight’s report set out to test a suspicion Rockhold says more and more data supports: third-party voices (analysts, customers, partners, experts, influencers) shape perception more than a vendor’s own content.
- Owned content still matters, but the balance should shift. It isn’t either/or. Owned content needs to amplify third-party validation. A team running 60% owned and 40% earned should seriously consider flipping that ratio, or at least increasing budget, staffing and strategy time for earned.
- Influence is never finished. Rockhold’s working definition: influence requires trust, is constantly in motion, and resists fabrication. Leaders should stop treating it as something achieved, scored or found once.
- The buying group is bigger than the contact. Citing 6sense’s Kerry Cunningham, buying groups run 5 to 11 people while the vendor usually sees one or two. The job is to be discoverable to the whole group, not to get one person to open an email.
- Start AI visibility with prompts, not platforms. Identify the handful of prompts you want to appear in, learn which LLMs your audience actually uses, then study what those LLMs cite. Profound-type tools or Bing Webmaster Tools (which surfaces Copilot data) can supply the research.
- Analysts define the category; peer reviews get quoted. LLMs reference reports like the Gartner Magic Quadrant but rarely quote them because the content is gated. They pair the analyst’s category definition with real user reviews from Gartner Peer Insights, G2, PeerSpot and TrustRadius.
- AI visibility gives analyst relations a measurable signal. Analyst firms have no reason to disclose how often they mention a vendor. Whether a vendor shows up for a category prompt, and whether the answer cites the Magic Quadrant, Wave or MarketScape, is something AR teams can actually track.
- Listicles worked because of the format, not the gimmick. They ranked well because they forced writers to answer questions in scannable, digestible form.
- Influence needs one leader with real authority and budget. Multiple teams will always do the work, but someone has to lead, and the teams rally best around a shared focus on the buyer.
Chapters
- 00:35 — Where B2B influence lives when AI assembles the first answer
- 02:50 — John Rockhold and Spotlight’s influence orchestration work
- 04:11 — Why Spotlight wrote the Influence Orchestration report
- 06:52 — Trust in motion: a new definition of influence
- 10:08 — The influencing is done before the buyer makes contact
- 12:33 — Buying groups: 5 to 11 people, one or two visible
- 14:51 — AI search isn’t one engine: which differences matter
- 17:00 — Find the prompts you want to be in the answer for
- 18:56 — Why Reddit matters long term
- 20:44 — What listicles actually got right
- 21:16 — Analysts set the vocabulary, peer reviews get cited
- 24:04 — Measuring influence through AI visibility
- 26:42 — Who owns influence when it’s “everybody and therefore nobody”
- 29:36 — How John stays agile
Why trust and motion define influence now
Rockhold interviewed more than 20 experts for the report, and trust came up again and again as a prerequisite for influence. He traced the word back to the 14th century, when it was an astrological term for an unseen force from the heavens acting on people. The unseen quality stuck even as influence came to be understood as something people create. His conclusion is that influence today requires trust, is constantly in motion, and resists fabrication, so clients asking him to rank one analyst’s influence against another’s are asking the wrong question.
Why the influencing happens before the buyer calls
Buyers usually already know the vendors in their space, and the vendor they choose was often on their mind from day one. Rockhold does not tell marketing teams to abandon owned content or MQL programs, which he describes as decades of ingrained habit. He asks them to re-examine the balance between owned and earned and to think about presence across the whole buying group, most of whom the vendor never sees.
Why AI search rewards the same fundamentals SEO did
Rockhold compares the moment to the years SEO teams spent dissecting every Google update, chasing tactics with short-term impact before settling on clear, useful content. He expects the same for AEO and GEO: make content that answers your audience’s questions, find the prompts that matter, then learn which LLMs your audience uses and what those engines cite, whether that is Reddit, Wikipedia, Gartner, G2, PeerSpot, TrustRadius or trade press. He also warns that source preferences are volatile, pointing to Reddit’s swings in AI visibility over the past 18 months, while arguing that Reddit’s voting and debate make it durable over the long term.
Why analysts still matter when LLMs don’t quote them
Rockhold rejects the idea that industry analysts are on the way out, though he expects the ones who fail to evolve to fade. LLMs need analyst work to define and structure a category. Because that work is gated, the engines reference it rather than quote it, then turn to peer review platforms for what customers say a product does well and badly. He believes that even with ungated analyst content, LLMs would still want quotes from ordinary users.
Who should own influence
Greg cites an executive in the report who said ownership of influence is “everybody and therefore nobody.” Rockhold’s answer comes in two parts. First, someone has to lead, whether that is the CMO, a VP of Influence or a Chief Influence Officer, and that leader needs real authority and real budget. Second, the teams involved (analyst relations, reviews, customer engagement and others) align best when they focus on the shared goal of winning over the buyer.
FAQ
What is influence orchestration? Spotlight defines influence orchestration as the deliberate, intentional shaping and coordination of everything that influences how a company is perceived in the digital ecosystem, including customers, partners, employees, analysts, influencers and experts.
Why do AI engines cite peer reviews more readily than analyst reports? Analyst reports such as the Gartner Magic Quadrant are gated, so LLMs can reference their category definitions but rarely quote them. Peer review platforms like Gartner Peer Insights, G2, PeerSpot and TrustRadius offer ungated reviews from real users that engines can quote directly.
Should B2B marketers stop investing in owned content? No. Rockhold says owned content still has its place, but it should amplify third-party validation, and teams should consider shifting their owned-to-earned balance substantially toward earned.
How can a B2B company tell which AI platforms matter for its buyers? Rockhold recommends finding the handful of prompts you want to appear in, using a tool like Profound or Bing Webmaster Tools to see what is being asked, and identifying which LLMs your audience uses. Then study which sources those engines cite.
How does AI visibility change measurement for analyst relations? Analyst firms don’t disclose how often they mention vendors. Tracking whether a vendor appears in AI answers for its category, and whether those answers reference analyst research, gives AR teams a measurable signal they have rarely had.
Who should own influence inside a B2B company? A single leader with real authority and budget, such as the CMO, a VP of Influence or a Chief Influence Officer, supported by the teams that do the work and aligned around winning over the buyer.
About John Rockhold
B2B buying has become AI-mediated and trust-driven, long before buyers engage a vendor. I spend my time observing how influence is formed, synthesizing signals from analysts, buyer research, and market behavior, and helping organizations make sense of what actually shapes modern buying decisions.
As VP of Market Engagement at Spotlight, I draw on a background that includes journalism, analyst relations, and years of close collaboration with industry analysts. I’m trusted by analysts because I respect their role, understand how their work evolves, and prioritize accuracy, context, and long-term relationships over short-term outcomes.
Much of my work focuses on how influence, visibility, and trust are earned in the modern B2B buyer journey. I help B2B brands understand how experts, customers, vendors, partners, and employees all shape visibility and credibility. At Spotlight, we refer to this coordinated approach to earning and sustaining trust across analysts, customers, and AI systems as Influence Orchestration.
———- Resources ———-
This episode is brought to you by Spotlight. Spotlight is pioneering the future of influence orchestration in the B2B buyer journey. Trusted by over 165 teams globally, Spotlight is the world’s leading analyst relations consultancy and industry platform.
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Transcript
[00:00:35] Greg Kihlström: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of The Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you: what if the most consequential description of your company isn’t the one on your website, it’s the one an AI assistant assembled out of sources you never touched? Agility requires earning credibility in the channels you don’t control, because those are increasingly the ones shaping what buyers and the systems they ask believe about you. Today we’re gonna review some of the findings in Spotlight’s Influencer Orchestration Report, and talk about where B2B influence actually lives now, and what it takes to build earned authority when the first evaluation happens before anyone contacts you. A few things we’re gonna get into are: why AI answer engines lean on third-party validation over a company’s own content,
[00:01:20] Greg Kihlström: and what that selling costs you; how analyst firms shape the vocabulary of a category while peer review platforms get cited directly, and what that means for where the budget goes; and who should own influence when it spans marketing, communications, and product, and how to make it measurable enough to survive a budget cycle. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome John Rockhold, VP Market Engagement at Spotlight. John, welcome back to the show.
[00:02:38] John Rockhold: Greg, thanks for having me.
[00:02:39] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, always good to talk with you. Wel- welcome back to the show, I should say. So [laughs]
[00:02:44] Greg Kihlström: and for those that, didn’t catch your, your last episode, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Spotlight?
[00:02:50] John Rockhold: Cool. Thank you. Yeah. Hello, Agile Brand Nation. so Spotlight, where I work, VP Market Engagement, we are what we call an influence orchestration agency. So we help tech companies, all B2B, influence their perception, the knowledge, the awareness of their brands out there in the market. These days, of course, that’s primarily driven by robots, LLMs. So we help our clients, big, small household names and little startups, they all care about influence. They all care about putting their best foot forward. We help them understand what’s known about them and correct things that are incorrect and elevate the things that are correct and very,
[00:03:35] John Rockhold: worthwhile to be known. So that includes analyst relations, customer engagement, influencer relations, LLM monitoring, all those things coagulate. We help them orchestrate those things into influence orchestration.
[00:03:51] Greg Kihlström: Great. Great. And speaking of, of influence orchestration, today we’re gonna talk about a report you recently, put together. Before we dive in, got, got a bunch of questions to, to dig through in that. Why don’t you give us just a high level of, what, what was the focus of the report? What, w- w- how, how did it come to be?
[00:04:11] John Rockhold: Yeah. So about this time last year, we introduced the concept of influence orchestration, which we define as the very deliberate and intentional shaping and coordination of all the things that influence the perception of you in the digital ecosystem. Ranges from your customers, to your partners, to your employees, to your analysts, influencers, experts, so on and so forth. So we introduced that concept a year ago, and we’ve been seeing it come- become more and more real. And so the idea was to do a report that is essentially a manifesto of that concept, but it was also triggered by a couple things. One, the question of what is influence
[00:04:57] John Rockhold: in this AI-driven era? and I’ve been asked over the years at Spotlight probably hundreds of times by clients, “What is influence? Who is the most influential analyst? How do you quantify influence? How do you score influence or rank influence?” And that’s a really hard question to answer for a host of reasons, right? But we wanted to try to revisit that question and provide a new answer in for the new era. So that was motivation number one. Motivation number two was we see the need for a new kind of leader in influence, or at least new leadership efforts from existing leaders,
[00:05:43] John Rockhold: and we see this manifesting in our clients. And, whether it ends up becoming chief influence officer or VP of influence or, who knows what the actual title is, or it becomes characteristics that the CMO takes on or modifies that they’re already doing, we just see the need for a new kind, new effort, new clarity, new focus on leadership because of how influence is changing So we wanted to put forward that vision in the report, and then last but not least, we wanted to investigate. We have this suspicion, slowly proven by more and more data, that your earned authority has more power now and moving forward than your owned content. So what they say versus what you say. By they, I mean your analysts, your customers, your experts, your influencers, your partners, versus what you say about yourself as a vendor. So we see that happening, and we wanted to treat it with some rigor and put it into a report. So all those three things coagulated into, “Let’s do a report on this,” and voila.
[00:06:52] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Love it. Love it. So yeah, let’s, let’s dive in here, and I know you talked a little bit about defining influence. One of those definitions in the report is also this concept of, of trust in motion. And, and I love that, here on the, the Agile brand here we- we’re all about, adaptability, right? So can you unpack what, what does trust in motion mean, and- and why is that distinction critical for leaders to understand right now?
[00:07:21] John Rockhold: So I had the pleasure of interviewing more than 20 experts, yourself included, from a variety of, of walks of life, variety of fields. And over and over again, when I would ask, “What does influence mean to you today?” the word trust came up right away, and often it was a condition for influence or a prerequisite for influence. And just the more I interviewed people who have way, [chuckles] way more smarts than I do, the more I realized that trust is integral, required for influence in a way that I think we underestimate. even if we know it instinctively, I think we underestimate its impact on influence.
[00:08:07] John Rockhold: And so right away I wanted to, in the new definition of influence, attach trust to it at the hip. We– I actually had, I had a lot of fun digging into the origin of the word influence, going back to the 14th century. It was a astrological term, so not astronomy, but astrology, so horoscopes and stuff. And it meant, it meant an unseen force coming in from the heavens to influence the actions of people. And so it was always thought of as this unknown, unthi- unseen thing, right? And o- and fast-forward hundreds of years, influence still had that sort of unknown factor to it but it dropped the concept of coming from, the heavens. and it got more attached to people creating influence, right? So all these interviews I did to dig into what does influence mean to you, couple things came to light. One, I already talked about trust, and two, influence being something that is constantly in motion. And that goes back to that question I’ve been asked hundreds of times by clients and whatnot: quantify influence. Tell me the exact influence of analyst X versus analyst Y. We have to stop thinking about influence as something that you ach- achieve and you’re done.
[00:09:36] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:09:36] John Rockhold: Or you score and you’re done, you find and you’re done. It’s gotta be a constantly in motion with agility pursuit. And so I talked about influence in this era being something that’s requires trust, constantly in motion, is resistant to fabrication. And anyway, it was a really interesting exercise to examine what does influence mean to people today, and what did it mean when the, the word first arrived in our language.
[00:10:08] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. So, so then in addition to what influence is, there’s, the report also talks about, how it happens as well as when it happens. And so-
[00:10:20] Greg Kihlström: …certainly all those, those marketers out there listening that are talking about funnels and MQLs, SQLs, all of those kinds of things, I mean, one, one of the things the report brought to light, which I, I know a lot of people are feeling right now, is that by the time a buyer contacts a vendor, the influencing has already happened. they’re already down selected or, or not, as the case may be. But, what does that do to a marketing organization that’s still structured around lead gen, MQLs, all, all of that?
[00:10:53] John Rockhold: Well, the first thing to understand and for them to breathe some degree of, a sigh of relief is this is not an either/or scenario. It’s not-
[00:11:02] Greg Kihlström: Yeah
[00:11:02] John Rockhold: … turn all of your investment, all of your activities from owned to earned. It’s not black or white. Owned still matters. Owned still has its place, but you need to be able to amplify the owned. Owned, and owned needs to amplify something else from someone else, third parties. Third parties are integral to the new definition of influence. so what it means is leaders need to reconsider the current level of priority, the current balance. So let’s just say that your current balance, to make it easy, is 60% owned and 40% earned, or 80/20, whatever. Give serious consideration to straight flipping that or
[00:11:48] John Rockhold: just at least amping up your budgets, your pursuits, your staffing, your strategy, your thinking time for earned. And yeah, it means that a lot of what you do for MQLs and whatnot probably isn’t as effective as you think it is. I understand why we still do it. It’s muscle memory. It’s decades of ingrained habits. But- As you mentioned, we- the data shows that people already know the vendors in their space. You know? And more often than not, buyers already have their, their proclivities set to a certain vendor, and often they already– The people that– The vendor they end up choosing was on their mind from day one. Kerry Cunningham with 6sense, one of the
[00:12:33] John Rockhold: many experts I interviewed for the report, he’s a bona fide expert in all these things, but especially buying groups. This concept of buying groups, th- there are somewhere between 5 and 11 people in a buying group, and the vendor only really sees one, maybe two of those people, but that buying group has huge influence over the final decision. And so vendors need to be thinking about, “How do I make my presence known and discoverable to the whole buying group?” As opposed to, “How do I [chuckles] get that buyer to open an email?”
[00:14:51] Greg Kihlström: So let’s, let’s talk a little bit about, AI search, and so certainly… I, I feel like maybe the last few years prior to, ChatGPT, we, we got a little spoiled because really we were focusing a lot on Google and Google results and, and things like that. I mean, not… back in the day it was Lycos and Excite and AltaVista and all that. we had to optimize for, six different search engines but, things have consolidated. Sorry, sorry, Bing. But, now all of a sudden, we’re, we’re saying AI search like it’s one monolithic thing but, we’ve got ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot, n- so on and so forth.
[00:15:36] Greg Kihlström: They’re all doing things a little bit differently. They all behave a little bit differently. So, for a company that is trying to get ahead of that and, and do, what we’re talking about as far as, while there’s still possibility to influence, where do some of those differences between platforms actually matter, and where does some of that just it’s a kind of a distraction and we should focus on the, the fundamentals?
[00:16:03] John Rockhold: Yeah, won’t it be interesting to see three years from now, five years from now, if the LLM landscape consolidates the way that the search engine landscape did, for, for us old-timers who were around in those [chuckles] times. I tend to think it won’t, but we’ll see, obviously. to your question, the first thing to do is much like the conclusion that we SEO experts arrived at eventually. Remember the days when we would wait with bated breath for every little update from Google? Every little word we would dissect and we would try to understand what it means for our SEO tactics, right? And we would try things, and sometimes they’d feel very artificial, and they’d have short-term impact but not long-term impact. And eventually, at least in my world, we just took a deep breath and said, “Let’s just make great content-“
[00:17:00] Greg Kihlström: Right. Yeah, totally
[00:17:00] John Rockhold: “…that, that makes sense to people, that answers questions, that has clear headlines.” And I think that that’s… We can already get there with AEO, GEO, whichever one you, of those acronyms you like best. There are differences but anyway, make great content that answers questions for your audience. Find the handful of prompts that you wanna be in the answer for, and then you can do research ranging from working with a partner, like a Profound, to simply using the Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing Webmaster Tools, thank you Chris Penn, pro tip that I learned recently. You c- can get all kinds of data on what’s happening within Copilot because Bing is Microsoft and Copilot’s Microsoft, right? So whether it’s Profound or a company like them or something as simple as the Webmaster Tools, find the prompts that are being asked where you want to be the answer or in the answer, and focus on those. And you will see that not every LLM gets those kind of questions. So eventually you’re gonna figure out, okay, well, as of now, our audience tends to use, I’m gonna make this up, Copilot and Claude way more than ChatGPT and Perplexity, right? And then when you figure that out, you can dig into, okay, what do those LLMs that at the moment matter the most for us, what do they source? What do they cite? What do they prefer? Is it Reddit? Is it Wikipedia? Is it Gartner?
[00:18:32] John Rockhold: Is it G2? Is it PeerSpot? Or TrustRadius, and I can read real reviews written by real people about those platforms. Is it trade press? What is it? And you can create a degree of focus through that exercise. Now, understand, we’re still in the very early Wild West days of all this, and things are gonna change. I mean, if you’ve followed the story about Reddit the past 18 months, it’s the hottest thing ever. Oh, wait, it totally crashed. Oh, wait, it’s back.
[00:18:56] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:18:56] John Rockhold: I mean, it’s up and down. But here’s the thing, long-term, Reddit matters. Why? Because it has real people who are bantering, up voting, down voting, disagreeing. It has an, a built-in machinery for creating good answers for people to questions they have. So take a deep breath, focus on creating good content that answers questions people have, find the questions that you want to be within the answers for, and create good content for it. But then also buckle up and keep watching because things are gonna keep changing quite a bit. We’re on a rollercoaster, we’re gonna have ups and downs. It’s gonna keep changing.
[00:19:39] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Well, and I, and I think what you’re, what you’re touching on as well is just the, the evolution of search. I, I agree with you. I don’t know that it’s necessarily that there’s gonna be fewer LLMs, but I think the maturity of the search– I mean, it just so happens that it kind of shook out that, that really was Google and Microsoft the, at, at the end [laughs] of the, of, of the, the search kind of debacle or whatever. But, I think as L- as AI search, GEO, AO, whatever, as that matures, I do think the nice part about the search kind of evolution was that, to your point, good content and good content practices won out, right? And so, I’m an optimist and, and a lot of these things,
[00:20:24] Greg Kihlström: it’s my hope is that LLMs will continue to reward good practices and, reputable third parties and, and all those kinds of things. And then, then it really just becomes, okay yeah, there’s a subtle difference between Perplexity and Claude, but really if we’re doing the right thing, we’re doing the right thing, right?
[00:20:44] John Rockhold: I mean, what? A year ago w- or more, everybody was head over heels for listicles.
[00:20:50] John Rockhold: listicle content. I mean, here’s the thing: it wasn’t– listicle content was ranking well, still is ranking well because it forced people to answer questions in very scannable, digestible formats.
[00:21:06] John Rockhold: So it wasn’t the listicle by itself necessarily that lifted, visibility. It was the format that the listicle forced people to write into.
[00:21:16] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. And so, there’s another component here of just talking about how… I think the report does a really good job of, of looking into how different types of content are influencing things. And so, one, one of the things was analyst firms are influencing the vocabulary of a market, but it’s the peer reviews, those, those real customer reviews that are often being cited by AI engines directly. What does that change about, an analyst budget or efforts or, or things like that versus, gett- getting those peer reviews?
[00:21:57] John Rockhold: Yeah, great question. first of all, rumors of the demise of the industry analyst are greatly exaggerated. Do, do they need to evolve? Absolutely. Of course. And if they don’t, will they go the way of the dinosaur? Yeah. But I’m confident that many will. I know that all, all of them are trying to evolve to meet the moment and, and meet the evolved, needs and interests of their customers. So I just wanna say very clearly, I don’t think that industry analysts and all kinds of experts are gonna go away because of LLMs. We’re gonna need them more than ever. And guess what? The LLMs need them, too, to provide content. But one of the reasons that LLMs, as you mentioned, will reference, as an example, Gartner Magic Quadrant, but not quote from it, is because that stuff’s gated.So, and but then when Gartner has Gartner Peer Insights right next to it in the Gartner website architecture, the robot’s like, “Well, I can find the definition of the category. I can even probably find maybe a copy of that for free out there in the wild, ungated because it got, promoted. Or at the least I can find the summary that describes the definition of the category and, and the players therein.” So okay, great. Now I have an expert who has outlined, architected, described, taxonomized, defined the space, right? But then I can turn to Gartner Peer Insights or G2 or PeerSpot or TrustRadius, and I can read real reviews written by real people about those platforms. And so that’s, I mean, winner, winner, chicken dinner for the robot.
[00:23:40] Greg Kihlström: Right. [laughs]
[00:23:41] John Rockhold: I’m leveraging the expert opinion on what it is. I’m leveraging real human opinion on what it does and what it doesn’t do well, what it does do well. Now, if all analyst content was ungated, might the robot quote from the experts? Yeah, I think so, but I, I think they’re still gonna want quotes from, us ordinary Joes and Janes reviewing those platforms.
[00:24:04] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about measuring here, and so those in the industry know influence programs sometimes have a hard time measuring impact, right? But a lot of what we’re talking about here, I mean, from my perspective, I, I, I work with a lot of marketers that are looking at these same nu- maybe for- …slightly different reasons, but, they’re looking at these, these same numbers of, of citations and, how, how people are reaching sites, and, and content, and, and things like that. So with the ability to track this AI engine visibility, how does this, how does this change, the conversation of, of influence
[00:24:49] Greg Kihlström: and when it comes to, more, more investments?
[00:24:54] John Rockhold: Yeah. Well, for, for the world of analyst relations, at least, this is a boon because it’s historically hard to track how often do, do analysts mention us, especially verbally because there’s no, [laughs] there’s no reason for the analyst firms to disclose that kind of data, right? As much as the vendors might wanna have it, there’s just no reason for them to disclose it. So but do we show up when, when a prompt asks about our category, or do we not? And does it reference the Magic Quadrant, the Marketscape, the Wave? That gives the AR pro something far more measurable than what it’s ever had in a long time, i- if ever. more broadly speaking, beyond analyst relations, BB marketing as a whole, yeah, measurement’s a challenge. [laughs]
[00:25:47] Greg Kihlström: It is.
[00:25:47] John Rockhold: Spoiler alert, I, we don’t have a silver bullet for it yet, but the more that you can show that the experts, your customers, your partners, even your employees, are having an outsized, influence, [laughs] pun intended on what the robots say about you to humans asking questions about your space, your competitors, I think the easier time you’re gonna have demonstrating that this is a effort we have to have, this is a effort worth doing because it has a direct tie between the expert ranked us, the influencer talked about us, the customers rated us, reviewed us, and that information synthesized formed the answer about us in the engine that people are using in droves.
[00:26:42] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, first of all, I definitely recommend that, we’ll, we’re gonna have the link to the, the report in the show notes. Definitely recommend people check it out. There’s a lot more, we’re only scratching the surface here, but there’s, there’s a lot here. O- one other piece that I definitely wanna get to is, before we wrap up here, is just the, from an org chart perspective even, who, who owns influence within an organization and, as we all know, every organization’s a little bit different, but one exec quoted in the report says, “Ownership of influence is everybody and therefore nobody.” I’m sure we can relate to that in our respective areas, e- even if you don’t work in this specific field. So org charts aside-
[00:27:30] John Rockhold: Couple things at least. One, somebody needs to lead it. There’s never gonna stop being multiple teams that do the work and make the magic happen but somebody needs to be the leader. And whether that’s the CMO, or VP of Influence, or a Chief Influence Officer, it’ll manifest differently at different companies, but somebody needs to be the leader. It’s a team sport, but every team needs a captain, so that’s number one. And number two, or 1B, 1A, that leader needs to have real authority and real budget. it’s hollow to say, “Greg, you’re leading influence,” but then give you nothing to do as far as budget or authority to make it actually happen. So there’s one and 1A. [laughs] second, to really rally these different teams that occasionally collaborate, but not often, not consistently certainly, to really rally the teams to come together, I think it requires a focus on, guess what? The customer, the buyer.
[00:28:48] Greg Kihlström: Right. [laughs] Yeah.
[00:28:49] John Rockhold: What do they, what, what do they all have in common? They’re trying to win over a buyer. Now, some look at it through review lenses, some look at it through analyst relations lenses. There’s all kinds of lenses on it, right? But at the end of the day, it always gets down to the customer. So when we see success in our clients with this, it tends to be triggered by getting the whole group, or groups, or teams to rally around, “Guess what, guys? We’re all on the same team here. There’s different tactics, of course-
[00:29:22] John Rockhold: …but we’re all trying to win over, help customer.” So get a leader, leader with real authority, real budget, and then rally the teams around the customer.
[00:29:36] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Love it. Love it. Well, John, thanks again for, for joining. Got one last question for you as we wrap up here. What do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:29:49] John Rockhold: Well, as, as much as I can, I g- I’m fortunate to talk to experts. whether it’s writing this report, or doing LinkedIn posts, or just keeping up with things, I just try to have a lot of conversations with a lot of people. And I’m fortunate that I get to do that for a living. I get to pick people’s brains, and that’s a really awesome job to have and, so I think the nature of that alone keeps me agile. I think also I just embrace, as hard as this is sometimes, [laughs] I just embrace the changes, the nature of the beast, and sort of to enjoy that ride as opposed to being petrified by that ride.
