There’s an uncomfortable truth sitting at the heart of most B2B marketing right now.  Recommendation is the most influential driver of revenue, but it can only be indirectly influenced – and it’s even harder to measure. 
 

The channels you can measure are rarely where the real decision gets made. The channels where it does – the peer conversation, the internal Slack thread, the industry roundtable where someone says “we use them, they’re good” – leave almost no trace in your CRM, nor those Martech tools that show attribution that, as marketers, we’re held accountable to. 

 
Bain & Co. found that more than 80% of B2B buyers arrive at the market with a shortlist already formed, and 90% end up buying from that shortlist.  

Forrester describes the modern B2B buying process not as selection, but confirmation. The decision, in most cases, is already in motion before your campaign lands. 

Recommendation is at the heart of this, so why do so few B2B marketers actively create marketing to influence it?   

 
Most B2B marketing strategies aren’t built for this reality. They’re built for the 5% who are actively in market, optimised for signals that are easy to count, and measured against attribution models that tell a confident but incomplete story. 

This was the subject I discussed with Joel Harrison on his podcast, Trust & Influence in B2B, and one I feel passionate about. Why? We’ve built Velo’s entire commercial proposition around “being good enough to recommend” and used it as an enabler to drive internal standards, impact for clients, and ultimately grow the business. 

We used Velo as ‘client 0’ to prove the approach works. Now, we’ve shared how we make it work for our clients with our Recommendation Marketing Playbook. 

It’s a 15-page strategic guide to introduce the idea that the most powerful force in your pipeline isn’t the one you’re spending the most effort and budget on – it’s the one you can’t track. Peer recommendation. Word of mouth. The quiet credibility that means your brand is the one people think of, talk about, and ultimately choose. 

The playbook sets out the evidence (and there’s a lot of it!), explains why recommendation is becoming an algorithmic advantage as well as a human one, and introduces the 6Rs framework: a practical model for building influence in the spaces that matter – including the ones you can’t see. 

The 6Rs covers: 

• Reveal – mapping the invisible influence networks behind the buying decision 

• Resonate – creating messages designed to spread inside organisations you’ll never enter 

• Reinforce – building the credibility signals that make recommendation feel safe 

• Reach – activating champions, communities and peer networks as marketing channels 

• Relationship – turning conversations into compounding advocacy 

• Review – measuring what actually moved the deal, not just what was easy to count 

If your pipeline depends on being the recommended choice in your category, this is worth your time.