AI is eroding trust in B2B.
It's blurring the reality between what's real and what's fake. Inboxes are infiltrated. Content is more homogenous than ever. The volume itself is mind-boggling to keep up with. Polymarket recently posted that over 40% of long-form content on LinkedIn is now fully AI-generated (also thank you Sam Jacobs for your post that turned me onto that stat).
And we’re seeing firsthand how it impacts GTM teams on the day-to-day. Let me share just one example.
An AE at one of our customers was about to close a massive deal. It was late stage and looked like they were at the finish line going into procurement. Then, a competitor vibe-coded non-production-grade features over the weekend and pitched them like they’d been in production for years.
On a demo, the buyer couldn’t tell the difference. So the AE did the one thing a competitor can’t fabricate: they brought in a champion.
They found someone who had actually used the competitor’s product months earlier, and put them in the room to speak to the reality. Deal won!
Human Trust: CAPTCHA for the AI Age
That deal was saved. But the dark side of stories like this are happening everywhere. And when tech and pitches are infinitely replicable, the only un-fakeable asset you have left is a real customer telling the truth about a real experience.
In a weird way, this human validation is becoming almost like a CAPTCHA for the AI age. Of course I mean that from the need to understand what’s real, not the whole annoying and tedious find the motorcycle thing (or those in this CAPTCHA from hell Reddit thread).
A Shining Moment For Customer Marketing
At an organizational level, Customer Marketers have been the unsung heroes of this reality for years. At Champion, we’ve had the incredible opportunity to work with some of the best on the planet. They operationalize trust across the enterprise, connecting their customers to revenue moments all across the customer journey, while preserving the human element, leading with mutual value over extraction, and becoming strategic growth drivers that knock down silos across marketing, sales, success, and product. We call that Customer Revenue Orchestration.
And, in an era where it feels like AI is creating more noise than ever, the right customer champion, at the right moment, is the difference between winning and losing.
Sounds Interesting? Let’s go to the numbers
Stories, anecdotes, and trends aside, we’ve seen firsthand the impact great customer marketing has on an organization, delivering new business introductions, closing deals, driving retention and expansion.
Zooming out, the numbers show these teams are running a full revenue-driving function. Here are a few of the numbers achieved by our customers:
- $30M in direct revenue attribution.
- $60M+ in influenced revenue at a single company.
- 5x increases in conversion rates when a champion enters the deal.
- 20% greater sales cycles when connecting a trusted customer into a deal as a reference
- 30% increased retention on accounts with engaged champions
This is true revenue orchestration, and it’s the direct result of what fast growing companies invest in. Champions that are deeply embedded in the GTM journey and tied directly to Revenue Operations, sitting at the table with the CRO is how revenue actually happens today.
These results can be seen across our Hall of Fame with leaders driving change and impact at their respective companies.
What’s Ahead
The line in the sane we see: In the AI era, customer trust is everything. Think of it as GTM infrastructure.
The companies that win the next decade won't be the loudest or the ones distributing MORE content for the sake of it. They’ll be the ones with a roster of trusted champions, orchestrated across the entire GTM journey.
More simply put: Your customers are your core source for your next customers.
This is a future that’s exciting. One where human relationships win. One where investing in your customers and their success is first and foremost. One where your most efficient growth source—your customers—are fully recognized and attributed.
And one where business is made more human.
That's why today, we're relaunching our website around this exact idea, including a new Hall of Fame where you can meet some of the champions behind these numbers in their own words. In a post about what's real vs. what's fake, it felt right to let them do the talking.
