Demand Shifts

75% of Enterprise B2B Will Grow Influencer Budgets, Forrester

Forrester's B2B Summit 2026 finds 75% of enterprise B2B companies plan to raise B2B influencer relations budgets as buying groups lean on outside voices.

By The Pull Desk·September 7, 2026·4 min read
Demand Shifts

75% of Enterprise B2B Will Grow Influencer Budgets, Forrester

The short version

THE SHORT VERSION: Forrester's B2B Summit 2026 research finds 75% of enterprise B2B companies will grow B2B influencer relations budgets over the next year as buying groups increasingly rely on external voices for fact-based insights. Budget is moving from paid media into partnerships with named operators, analysts, and category creators.

What happened

Forrester's B2B Summit 2026 takeaways flagged influencer relations as one of the fastest-growing budget lines for enterprise B2B. Seventy-five percent of enterprise B2B companies plan to increase influencer relations spending, tracking a shift Forrester frames as buying groups behaving like loose influencer networks rather than closed committees. The context is unforgiving elsewhere: overall B2B marketing budgets sit flat at 7.7% of company revenue, CFO pressure on marketing rose 52% year-over-year, and CFO support for long-term brand fell from 80% to 69%. Inside that squeeze, the one line item most CFOs are willing to fund is provable third-party voice — the specific operators, analysts, and category creators buyers already read.

Why B2B influencer relations budgets are moving this quarter

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The stat only makes sense alongside the 68% front-runner figure from the same Summit: buyers are picking winners in the dark funnel, and that dark funnel now runs through named external voices. Paid media influences awareness but not preference. A single podcast appearance on the show your ICP actually listens to now outperforms a quarter of programmatic display in most enterprise categories. Marketing leaders are moving budget accordingly, and finance is signing off because attribution has caught up: multi-touch tools now trace outside voice touchpoints to closed-won more cleanly than they did in 2024.

  1. Map three category creators your ICP already trusts
    Do not chase reach. Ask your ten best customers which podcast, newsletter, or LinkedIn voice they read weekly in your category. Concentration is usually brutal — the same three names will keep coming up. Those three are your entire target list, not a list of 300 influencers filtered by follower count.
  2. Fund partnership before sponsorship this quarter
    A $5,000 paid podcast slot converts worse than a $2,000 research collaboration with the same host. Fund the report, the joint webinar, the co-published data drop. This makes the external voice genuinely aligned with your point of view and gives the buyer a reason to remember which vendor produced the content.
  3. Instrument outside-voice touchpoints in your CRM before you spend
    Add a mandatory field in Deals and Opportunities for external influencer touchpoint (podcast, newsletter, LinkedIn voice, or analyst). Populate it during discovery calls, not attribution reviews. Without that field, the 75% budget growth cycle will hit your team as an unmeasured cost, and CFO scrutiny will reverse it inside two quarters.

By the numbers: 75% of enterprise B2B raising influencer relations budgets. Overall B2B marketing budgets flat at 7.7% of revenue. CFO pressure on marketing up 52% YoY. Long-term brand support from CFOs down from 80% to 69% in one year.

What to do this week

Interview five of your top customers by phone in the next seven days. Ask one question: which three people in your category do you actually listen to, read, or trust when researching vendors. Compile the list. Reach out this Friday to the top overlapping name with a founder-signed pitch for one specific joint asset — not sponsorship. Book the discovery call inside October so budget lands in Q4.

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