Accenture just made its biggest-ever cybersecurity acquisition, buying Australian firm CyberCX for a reported $650 million. The move comes after high-profile breaches at Optus, Medibank, and Qantas rattled millions of customers and put data security on the front page.

If the market sees breaches everywhere and you’re silent, buyers assume you’re next. Competitors’ failures don’t stay contained. Every breach drags the whole category down, unless you counter it with clear trust action supported by messaging.

Security posture has become part of the value proposition. In the B2B arena, protecting customer data is now as critical to growth as the product itself.

Turns out business decision-makers don’t trust enterprise I.T. providers. Shocker, right?

Nearly half think they don’t understand their challenges and as many B2B SaaS companies have learned, traditional ads don’t close the gap, so Dell went where the trust already lived: Reddit.

Business decision-makers don’t switch off their humanity when they clock out. Like many of us, they spend a lot of time online in their communities. They scroll Reddit, hang out in forums, and trust peer-to-peer discussions as much as analyst reports. Dell’s I.T. Squad tapped into that reality, turning real Reddit threads into a comedy series that spoke the language of its audience.

72M impressions, 1,000% follower growth, and a 200× lift in credibility, proof that trust is built faster when you meet buyers where they actually spend their time.

Community is the most important messaging category for B2B brands moving forward.

It’s where trust is built and where untapped potential waits for the companies with the vision and discipline to authentically harness it.

We help B2B teams show up where trust is built, shaping narratives, positioning, and brand systems that turn participation into leadership.

Forrester’s Rick Bradberry is calling it the next supercycle: the Seventh Wave. AI agents co-sell with humans, solution engineers replace relationship managers, and buyers expect personalization at machine scale. The cost of sales rises before it falls, but the growth curve belongs to teams who adapt early.

The Seventh Wave raises the bar. Technical depth and AI fluency are now the baseline for growth.

We love analyst reports in these parts. Like a lot. But, according to TrustRadius, 77% of buyers now consult user reviews, while reliance on analyst reports has fallen to just 14%.

That’s down 60% since 2022.

With Google’s AI Overviews reshaping search and zero-click behavior accelerating, buyers rarely reach vendor collateral or analyst PDFs. Instead, they lean on the voices they trust most: peers, customers, and communities.

As discovery shifts to zero-click and social proof, user reviews and community sentiment is the primary lever for trust.

Zero-click results. AI overviews. Peer reviews.

Discovery now happens before anyone hits your site and most funnels aren’t built for it.

We help B2B teams adapt: aligning brand and demand, amplifying customer proof, and building content designed to surface where buyers actually look. Let’s make sure your message lands.

Buyers don’t wait for your pitch anymore. They trade notes in Slack groups, scroll Reddit threads, and check review sites long before they talk to a rep. That’s where reputations are made or broken.

Boardroom strategies might set the vision, but it’s the conversations in communities that decide whether your brand shows up with credibility. One peer recommendation can do more than a million in ad spend. One bad story can sink you faster than a competitor ever could.

—Jay