By Priya Raman

Most B2B brands have barely started with influencer marketing. Asked where most sit on Directive's five-step maturity framework, Larissa Williams, managing director of communications at the agency, did not soften the verdict: "They are in the basement, up to their waist in water."

The problem is structural, not cosmetic. B2C influencer marketing runs on a direct-response numbers game: brands pick creators with the largest followings and pay on commission, backed by short sales cycles and products that demo well on camera. B2B has none of that. Sales cycles are long, audiences are niche, and, as Williams put it to MarTech, nobody can deploy a customer data platform in front of a mirror while a phone records the action.

There are signs of movement. Some B2B brands are exploring creator video to build credibility and capture the attention of LLMs. But while B2C has agencies and matching databases to pair creators with brands, most B2B firms remain stuck at the starting line.

What replaces the direct-response playbook?

Long-term partnerships, not affiliate deals. That is the model Williams sees taking hold in B2B, and it is the basis of InfluencerOS, the five-step framework Directive built for B2B teams.

The sequence matters:

• Start with employee and customer advocacy.
• Move up the maturity curve to external creators.
• Add analysts.
• At full maturity, build advisory councils that reach beyond your own customer base.

The logic behind step one is simple. A paid influencer says nice things and moves to the next brand when the contract expires. Customers pay the brand to use its products, and employees have skin in the game too. "Your employee programs are the No. 1 resource that you can activate quickly," Williams said.

Before any of that, an organizational question needs an answer: who owns influencer marketing? In most companies Williams has seen, it sits on someone's plate alongside several other duties, usually in brand marketing or communications, sometimes in customer marketing. "I have yet to come across a dedicated, full-time influencer person in these organizations," she said.

How do you measure spend without clicks?

Without a direct-response model, B2B marketers cannot justify influencer spend with traffic and click metrics. Williams recommends a total addressable market lens instead: measure the percentage of the TAM the team has had a conversation with before and after the program. That, she argues, carries more weight than pointing to clicks.

Timing and funding set the guardrails. Teams that have not yet hit diminishing returns on demand-capture channels such as Google and paid social are probably too early for influencer work. But Williams also warns the opposite camp — companies running RevOps and MOps "like well-oiled machines" — that they are leaving something on the table. "You should spend more on brand creation," she said. "[Influencer marketing] is brand creation."

Her funding rule is blunt: "never start a new channel with less than $20K." Once funded, let the program run for two times the length of the sales cycle, because the first cycle is spent figuring things out as you go.

What changes next?

Williams predicts dedicated influencer headcount on B2B marketing teams within three years, alongside more B2B creators making content their livelihood. For practitioners today, the practical question is not whether to hire a creator but whether anyone owns the program at all — and whether the brand can fund it past one sales cycle before judging results.