Don’t assume senior means influential: what strategic ABM teaches us about trust

AI has made targeting cheap for suppliers and research easy for buyers, leaving trust as the scarce asset in strategic ABM. Claire Ellis, MD of JPC, explains how to find and move the people who really decide

Marketing has always had a weakness for doing things the way they’ve always been done. We always run the dinner. We always take the stand. The format arrives first and the thinking follows, if it arrives at all. In most corners of B2B, that habit is merely wasteful. In ABM’s biggest deals, where a single account can be worth millions and keeping it can matter even more than winning it, it gets expensive. And AI is making it worse, because it has never been easier to generate activity that looks like progress.

On a recent episode of the Trust & Influence in B2B podcast, sponsored by JPC, I spoke to Claire Ellis, Managing Director of JPC, an agency that has spent more than 20 years helping B2B technology companies pursue major enterprise accounts. The agency’s new report, The human advantage in an AI-powered world, sets out an approach it calls experiential ABM. But what struck me most was how often our conversation came back to a more basic, and more uncomfortable, question: do you actually know who you need to win over?

The buyer has AI too

Most of the AI conversation in ABM is about what it does for suppliers: deeper research, sharper targeting, more personalised content. Claire sees it as a double-edged sword. “The same is true for the buyer,” she said. Buyers can now do the kind of detailed market research that once involved a consultancy and a beauty parade of suppliers, and form their views long before anyone from sales gets a meeting.

That changes what personalisation is worth. “Apparent personalisation is actually much less differentiating,” Claire argued, “because that preference formation is happening so much earlier upstream in the whole process, and it’s out of sight.” She pointed to TrustRadius research showing that 71% of buyers go on to purchase their first-choice brand. Her verdict: “Terrifying, isn’t it?”

What rises in value instead are the signals that are much harder to fake: customer testimonials, peer advocacy, evidence, and, in Claire’s words, “the moment that we can look the salesperson in the whites of the eyes and really understand what the experience is going to feel like of working with that supplier.”

Activity isn’t progress

Claire’s list of where suppliers go wrong in big deals is a familiar one, which is partly the point. They start too late, waiting for an opportunity to become visible rather than shaping it. They lead with themselves: the customer value proposition, she said, is very often “a sales proposition thinly disguised as a customer value proposition.” They over-invest in a single champion. And they map stakeholders one by one, rather than as a buying group in which the relationships between people matter as much as the people.

The newer problem is the one AI is accelerating. “Everything is becoming way too activity focused,” Claire said. Teams are “mistaking content, meetings, touch points as relationship progression, when actually very often it’s just noise.” Add the usual silos, with marketing running ABM as a programme over here and sales owning the relationship over there, and the customer ends up with a disjointed experience of a supplier that thinks it is being joined up.

Events have audiences. ABM has accounts.

This is where the format-first habit does its damage. Formats get decided first, Claire said, because they’re tangible: the sponsorship has been bought, the venue booked, the annual trade show is in the diary. Someone owns that budget, so the question becomes how to make the event a success, measured in bums on seats. “The asset or the event very quickly becomes the strategy,” she said. Teams start optimising attendance, or worse, “thinking about the stand design before they’ve actually thought about the content journey.”

Experiential ABM reverses the order. “If you think about events, events ultimately have an audience,” Claire said. “The difference with experiential ABM is that it has an account.” JPC’s method runs in three steps. Intent comes first: what relationship movement are we trying to create, and why? Then experience: what moment, or series of moments, could create that movement, and what needs to happen before and after it? Then momentum: what did we learn, and what changes next? Format, agenda, guest list and environment all serve the account strategy, rather than the other way round.

The cost of getting it wrong isn’t just wasted spend. It’s the missed commercial opportunity. As I put it to Claire, if your guests arrive cynical and leave cynical, you haven’t achieved anything, however good the dinner was.

Don’t assume senior means influential in ABM

The heart of experiential ABM is specificity about people. For each stakeholder, Claire asks what you are trying to move them from and to: a remote CEO to an engaged one, a cost conversation to a value conversation, a sceptic to an advocate. That demands rigour about who actually matters. “Never assume that senior equals the most influence,” she said. “Never assume that good access means we’ve got a really good relationship.”

Org charts rarely describe how a buying group really works. There are dynamics and interactions, and quite often hidden influencers who are hard to unearth. Claire described a recent pursuit for a technology client that had invested heavily in its relationship with the CIO, whom it had always understood to own the decision. What it hadn’t seen was that someone in the customer’s solution team was doing the scoping and feeding it up to the CIO. Only more forensic mapping exposed it, including, as Claire put it, “a bit of social stalking.” JPC then brought both people into a session designed to shape the solution, and aligned them with the client team around a new one.

That is also where the live encounter earns its keep. Bring the right people together and you can see “who challenged in the room, who deferred, who volunteered a next step, who maybe kept really quiet that you didn’t expect.” Generally, Claire said, whoever is carrying the room is carrying the bigger decision too.

But the intelligence is only useful if you act on it, and that takes humility. “None of us like to admit we’re wrong,” she said, particularly after building a beautiful account plan. If nothing changes after the moment, “you’ve sort of created some nice choreography. You haven’t moved the account journey.” Trust, in other words, has to be earned with the people who actually shape the decision, not just the people whose names are on it.

When co-creation is real

The best example Claire gave was JPC’s work with BT and Translink, the Northern Ireland transport operator. The relationship on the ground was strong, but BT was seen as a trusted infrastructure provider rather than a strategic partner. Every experience in the programme had a job to do. Early workshops were designed purely to open conversations, test appetite and listen. A leadership day then brought BT ideas and narratives that Translink’s senior team hadn’t seen from it before. Only then did the programme move into co-creation, through customer advocacy videos that told the story of the relationship and celebrated Translink’s own achievements, filmed in the community it serves. The programme opened up £10 million of pipeline and secured a £4 million contract.

“The power is in the sequence,” Claire said. Each moment creates the conditions for the next, and you can’t leapfrog. She also offered the clearest test of co-creation I’ve heard: it’s real only if the customer has the opportunity to change something. “If you rock up with a proposition, a solution, some lovely thought leadership, and actually the customer only really is being asked to comment on it and feedback, that’s not co-creation.”

Where AI belongs in experiential ABM

None of this makes Claire anti-AI, and she was keen to say so. JPC’s starting question is simple: where can human judgement materially change the outcome? Machines, she said, are “disproportionately brilliant at the heavy lifting”: the research, the profiling, the patterns hidden in more data than any team can absorb. Humans remain disproportionately brilliant where there’s a need for empathy, commitment, risk, difficult conversations, or aligning stakeholders who don’t agree. When JPC put four scenarios to a group of senior practitioners, 71% chose to augment, 24% wanted to keep the activity human, and only 5% chose full automation.

Her own illustration was buying a car. She configured it online, but when it came to a decision of upwards of £40,000, she walked into the dealership to look the salesperson in the eye. “If you’re the person signing off on a ten million pound deal, you want that sort of human assurance at that moment in time.”

On AI-assisted content, Claire puts accountability ahead of accuracy. “If my name’s on something, I’m ultimately accountable for it,” she said, however much AI helped. Accuracy is a hygiene factor. Authenticity is where trust gets damaged, particularly when a customer is encouraged to believe a human gave them attention that they didn’t. She doesn’t advocate performative disclosure every time AI is used; customers expect it in the heavy lifting. But where AI stands in for a person, say so. JPC’s own avatars introduce themselves: “Hello, I’m your JPC avatar,” because “we don’t want there to be a moment of feeling like you’ve been missold.”

Who owns what happens next

The final discipline is evidence. “You’ve got to start with the movement, not the metric,” Claire said. Credible movement shows up in behaviour and commitment: a sceptic opening up, someone bringing finance into an open commercial conversation, a champion advocating in the room, two previously separate functions solving a problem together. Those are far stronger signals than attendance, or a warm smile. Interpreting them takes discipline too, separating what was explicit from what was observed and what was merely inferred. As anyone who has walked out of a pitch convinced it went brilliantly knows, the room can mislead.

Then someone has to own it. For Claire, that’s the account owner or client partner, because they own the commercial goal, with marketing, events and revenue teams helping to interpret the signals and act on them. Without that, “a lot of value just slips through the cracks.” In JPC’s research, 76% of senior practitioners said the biggest value leak happens before or after the experience, not in it.

Claire’s summary of what separates the two approaches was blunt. If you can’t say what should change, why it needs a human moment, and who will act on what you learn, “it’s just a lovely event, it’s not experiential ABM.” In a market where AI can manufacture almost any signal, the moments that build trust are scarcer than ever. That’s exactly why they deserve more thought than a booking form.

What to do with this

None of this needs a bigger budget, just more deliberate choices about the moments you already invest in.

• Before you book anything, answer Claire’s four questions: which accounts and people really matter; what you need to change, whether that’s confidence, perception, alignment or commitment; why it requires a human experience rather than another channel; and what you would expect to see if it worked, or failed, and who will act on it.
• Map influence, not the org chart. Test your assumptions about who decides, especially where your relationship is strongest, because good access to a senior stakeholder is not the same as influence over the outcome.
• Define a FROM to TO shift for each stakeholder who matters, and agree in advance the behaviours that would show it has happened, so you capture evidence in the room rather than from memory afterwards.
• Use AI for the heavy lifting of research and preparation, but ring-fence the moments that need judgement, empathy and commitment, and be open wherever AI stands in for a person.
• Give one named commercial owner responsibility for what each experience changes, and review the account plan after every significant interaction, not just at the quarterly review.

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