You’re going out to dinner with your foodie friends, and it’s your turn to choose a spot. There's a new Mexican place you’ve been wanting to try – but do you dare recommend it?
If it’s just something you’ve walked by a few times or gotten a flyer for, maybe not.
But what if it got written up in the paper? What if it has an Instagram page with thousands of followers and lots of engagement? What if you’ve heard from neighbors that their mole verde is to die for?
If that’s the case, you may feel more comfortable. Lots of people have endorsed this place. You aren’t putting as much of your reputation on the line because you’re aligning yourself with what many trusted sources have already said. If the food is terrible, your future credibility won’t be too badly damaged.
The emotional core of this scenario is similar to what plays out when someone is trying to decide whether to recommend your B2B tech company to their internal buying committee.
And too often, a B2B brand hasn’t invested in the kinds of things that would remove the burden of recommendation from the shoulders of your internal champion. They haven’t invested in establishing themselves as a legitimate, trustworthy brand among the people qualified to make that assessment.
As a result, the internal champion may decide the consequences for being wrong about your company (i.e., loss of professional credibility and organizational capital, never mind poor performance) are too great and the buying committee goes with the bigger, “sure thing” name in your space.
In this piece, we’ll explain how you can escape that cycle with help from PR>.
B2B technology companies tend to focus on sales efforts that prove the efficacy of their technology.
Those are important, but they don’t perform well in a vacuum.
Here’s why: each of your competitors also offers viable technology that solves real pain points. If you focus solely on technology, you’re asking your buyers to get in the weeds with you. You’re asking them to weigh the specifics of what your product can do against the specifics of what your competitor can do.
In many cases, the complexities at play will be beyond the understanding of some people on the buying committee. At that point, they’ll say things like, “Why aren’t we just going with [the best-known name in your market]?”
Or maybe, “What is [biggest competitor] using?”
In other words, when you over-index on selling on specs, non-technical buyers look for other signals to help them make their decision. Internal champions for your brand find themselves in the position of defending you against better-known competitors. At that point, they have to be hardcore believers to put their political capital on the line to keep fighting for you.
Because if your product doesn’t live up to the promises, they’ll be the ones who were wrong.
They’ll be the ones whose recommendations aren’t taken seriously in the future.
Most people aren’t willing to sacrifice that – especially if they’ve never worked with your organization before.
So what's the solution? Invest in the efforts that take the pressure off the shoulders of your internal champion. Invest in building trust for your brand.
Potential buyers are looking you up long before they become a lead in your pipeline: 70 percent of the B2B buying journey happens before buyers make contact with your salespeople.
And fully 61 percent would prefer not to interact with sales at all (they’d rather do independent online research).
What they find during that independent research determines whether or not they’ll schedule a demo.
Even more important: only five percent of your potential market is actively looking for your product at any given time. If you try to build trust only with the five percent of active shoppers, you likely won’t have enough time to win them over.
The key, then, is to invest in trust-building activities that impact the 95 percent of your audience that’s not actively looking for your services right now. When you do that, a few things happen:
Now let’s take a look at how to build that trust.
B2B tech companies become trusted when they consistently demonstrate the following:
You should make this evidence available on your website and social channels. Think: case studies (credibility), thought leadership content (authority), and active social profiles (network). All marketing efforts show momentum.
But what a brand says about itself only carries so much weight. What other people say about your brand counts a lot more, at least in terms of building trust.
Invest in a PR program, and you’re instantly building the kind of trust that moves the needle in buying conversations. That’s because every PR win comes with an implicit third-party endorsement of your trustworthiness:
These signals are incredibly valuable in the context of internal buying decisions.
When your brand has won awards for innovation, when your thought leaders have been featured in publications and podcasts, and when your CEO has been quoted by journalists, a prospect’s internal champion doesn’t have to risk political capital when they recommend you.
That’s what gets you onto initial vendor lists. And then, when your sales team gets involved, they’re answering niche product questions because buyers already understand who you are and what you do. They trust you even before they have a tangible reason to, so the discussion can focus on specs.
Trust is the primary way PR helps to shorten B2B tech sales cycles.
But two other mechanisms also offer a boost.
First, familiarity. PR programs are powerful not because they “generate news” but because they find meaningful ways to repeat your core messages. Repetition is essential when you’re communicating to would-be buyers, especially if what you sell is in any way complex.
Here’s a good rule of thumb: if your internal SMEs aren’t sick of your core messages, you’re not repeating them often enough. When things start feeling boring internally, that’s when they start to seem inevitable externally.
Another way PR can help shorten your sales cycle is by helping you show up in LLM results.
We know that 94 percent of B2B buyers use LLMs as part of their vendor search process.
To produce their answers, LLMs pull content from the web. According to MuckRack’s most recent research on what LLMs are citing (updated December 2025), here’s what LLMs cite in answers:
(Note: another 12 percent of citations come from owned corporate blogs, so content marketing is also important for showing up in LLM results.)
To be clear: showing up in LLM responses isn’t a good sole reason to invest in a PR program. But investing in a PR program will help you show up in LLM responses.
If you’re not comfortable taking a chance recommending a new restaurant to a group of friends, you’d better believe your buyers aren’t comfortable risking their professional reputation recommending that their company invest in some unknown B2B startup.
When you invest in building your own reputation, your buyers don’t have to jeopardize theirs. You become a trusted player in your space and, ultimately, an obvious choice for anyone seeking what you offer.
Want to jump-start the process? We’d love to help you see where your biggest opportunities lie. Set up some time to talk.