The future of B2B growth

I'll keep the predictions brief because I'm more interested in what you do with the framework than in my forecasts. But a few observations about where B2B growth is headed, and why advocacy will matter more, not less, as these trends accelerate.

AI floods the content market

Generative AI has made it trivially easy to produce branded content. Blog posts, email sequences, ad copy, social posts: all of it can now be generated at a fraction of the historical cost. The inevitable result is a flood of AI-generated B2B content that is competent, on-message, and indistinguishable from everything else in the category.

In a world where every company can produce unlimited content at near-zero cost, the content itself stops being a differentiator. What differentiates is the source. A post from a real practitioner sharing a real experience, written in their own imperfect, human voice, stands out against a sea of polished AI-generated brand content precisely because it is visibly, unmistakably human.

Being legible to machines

The other half of the AI shift gets less attention and matters at least as much: buyers themselves are increasingly researching through AI.

A growing share of B2B evaluation now starts with a question typed into an AI assistant rather than a search engine. "What are the best tools for X?" "Compare A and B for a mid-market team." "What do users say about C?" The assistant composes its answer from the public web: review sites, social platforms, community discussions, and whatever content exists about your product and category. The buyer may see your product for the first time inside an AI-generated answer, shaped entirely by what the machine could find and trusted enough to cite.

This changes what advocate content is worth. A customer's LinkedIn post used to have one audience: the humans who scrolled past it. It now has two. The same public, authentic, specific content that persuades a human reader is exactly the material AI research tools draw on when they characterize your product. A rich body of customer content is no longer just social proof for people. It's the source record the machines consult on your behalf, in conversations you will never see.

The practical implications, based on the work we're doing at Kindling on our own presence:

Keep advocate content public and indexable. Content locked in portals, gated PDFs, and private communities is invisible to both audiences. The public web is the substrate AI systems read. Everything in this book about the public channel applies double here.

Be consistent about names. AI systems assemble their picture of your product from fragments across many sources. If your company, product, and category are named consistently across advocate posts, review sites, and your own pages, the fragments cohere into a clear entity. If the naming is scattered, the picture is scattered.

Make your own pages machine-readable. Publish an llms.txt file. Maintain clean, plain-text or markdown versions of your key pages alongside the designed versions. Structure your product and category descriptions so a machine parsing them gets the same story a human visitor does. This costs little and it determines how accurately AI tools describe you.

Invest in review-site presence. G2 and its peers are among the most heavily weighted sources in AI-composed answers about software. The Chapter 4 distinction holds (a review helps deals, a public post builds pipeline), and review volume now also shapes what AI tools say about you, which gives reviews a second job.

Name your category and use the name. If you're doing something new, the words you use for it become the retrieval key. This is part of why I've been so deliberate about the term Advocacy-Led Growth. A named, defined, consistently used category term is something both buyers and machines can find, ask about, and repeat.

None of this replaces the human channel. It compounds it. Every advocate post does its first job in the feed the week it's published, then keeps doing a second job in the training data and retrieval indexes of the tools your future buyers will ask.

Trust becomes the scarcest resource

Every trend in B2B marketing is converging on a single constraint: trust. Buyers are more skeptical. Content is more abundant and less differentiated. Sales outreach is more automated and less personal. AI-generated content is making it harder to distinguish real perspective from machine-produced marketing.

In this environment, the companies that have invested in building trust through their customer base will have an advantage that is nearly impossible to replicate quickly. You can spin up an ad campaign in a week. You can launch a content strategy in a month. You cannot build a library of authentic customer advocacy in less than six months to a year. The companies that start now will have a structural lead over those who wait.

The operating system emerges

I believe we're in the early innings of a category shift. The tools, the platforms, and the operational practices for running advocacy as a real growth channel are just starting to emerge. Within a few years, I expect ALG to be as established a part of the B2B growth playbook as PLG and SLG are today.

The companies that build their advocacy muscle now, that invest in the infrastructure, relationships, and operational discipline to run this channel well, will be the ones that define how the category matures. They'll have the data, the case studies, and the advantage that comes from being early in a structural shift.

That's the opportunity, and it's why I started Kindling.

The convergence of GTM motions

I expect the next five years to produce a convergence of growth motions rather than a succession of replacements. The most effective B2B SaaS companies will not be "PLG companies" or "sales-led companies" or "advocacy-led companies." They will be companies that run all three motions in a coordinated way, with each one feeding the others.

Product-led growth creates the user base. Sales-led growth closes the enterprise deals. Advocacy-led growth builds the trust that makes both of those motions more effective. The company that masters this convergence will have a growth engine far more resilient and efficient than any single-motion competitor.

Advocacy has a unique role in this convergence because it is the one motion that is truly customer-driven. PLG is still company-initiated: you build the product and the funnel. SLG is still company-initiated: you hire the reps and run the process. ALG is the only growth motion where the primary content and distribution comes from outside the company. That's what makes it both harder to build and harder to replicate.

The next decade of B2B marketing

If I had to bet on what B2B marketing looks like in 2035, my bet would be this: the companies that win will be the ones whose customers are visibly, publicly, and authentically talking about them. Not because they were asked to or paid to, but because the product is good enough and the relationship is strong enough that sharing the experience feels natural.

The role of the marketing team will shift from creating content to creating the conditions for content. From buying attention to earning trust. From controlling the narrative to supporting the narrators.

That shift is already happening. This book is my attempt to give it a name, a framework, and a system. I hope it's useful.