The Future of Influence Awards 2026

For the first movers, risk takers, and practitioners building the future of B2B influence.

Who Is This For?

In a discipline that's still being defined, the Future of Influence Awards exist for one thing: to recognize the first movers, risk takers, and practitioners already orchestrating influence across the pools of trust their buyers consult.

An award for practitioners breaking the playbook.

Marketing in B2B is more than ever built on trust and influence.

Functions like analyst relations, customer engagement, influencer relations, and AI influence that were once on the periphery are now at the core of orchestrating influence in the buyer journey.

If you saw the shift and started building something different, the Future of Influence Awards will shine a spotlight on your team.

No shoe-ins. No seniority required. Just authentic recognition for the practitioners rewriting how B2B influence gets built.

The Categories

Category Makers Award

For the AR teams that have transformed analyst relations into a market-making discipline — earning placement in the reports that define their category, shifting analyst narrative before positioning calcifies, and showing up in AI-generated answers before a shortlist is ever built.

Precision Advocacy Award

For the customer marketing and advocacy teams that have moved beyond broad activation toward mobilizing the right customer voice, in the right channels, at the right moment — understanding that customer proof doesn't just influence people anymore, it influences the systems those people turn to for answers.

Credibility Compounders Award

For the influencer relations teams that have moved beyond one-off activations toward building relationships with the external voices that carry real authority with buyers - understanding that trusted third-party credibility now shapes the AI-powered discovery systems buyers consult before they ever reach a vendor.

Influence Orchestration Award

For the organizations that have evolved past siloed influence programs toward a deliberate, cross-functional strategy that orchestrates trust across every pool of credibility their buyers consult — rethinking how influence gets measured because the old signals stopped telling the truth.

IO Champion Award

For the individual who made IO real inside their organization - securing the budget, earning the buy-in, and building the cross-functional alignment that turned a new idea into a program with results.