How to use Affection, Relevance and Trust to turn risk-averse committees into fierce advocates.

Ask any B2B marketer what keeps deals from closing, and you’ll hear familiar answers: budget pressure, long sales cycles, misaligned priorities, procurement. But underneath all of that is something more human and more powerful:

The people on the buying side don’t want to be wrong.

In enterprise buying groups, risk isn’t an abstract concept. Choosing the wrong partner can mean missed numbers, angry customers, internal politics and real impact on someone’s career. That’s why, as the LinkedIn B2B Institute and Bain & Company’s recent Buyability report points out, buyers care as much about whether a decision feels “defensible” as whether a solution is objectively “best.”

At Mower, we’ve been exploring that same tension from a different angle. Our Making Fierce Friends research asked thousands of buyers what turns a brand from a replaceable vendor into a trusted ally they’ll stay with, pay more for and recommend. Across B2B and B2C, three qualities showed up again and again:

• Relevance – “You understand my world and bring me useful ideas.”
• Trust – “You do what you say and tell me the truth.”
• Affection – “You’re on my side, not just after my spend.”

Together, we call this the ART of Fierce Friendship: Affection, Relevance and Trust.

For B2B marketers, this turns the usual funnel thinking on its head. Lead scoring and retargeting matter, but the brands that win are the ones that feel career-safe and personally supportive to the people in the buying group. And they get there by deliberately building all three elements of ART.

Relevance: How You Get Invited In

We talk a lot about a “trust crisis” in marketing, but in B2B trust rarely comes first.

Before a buyer can decide whether to trust you, you have to prove you’re worth their attention. That’s the job of Relevance.

In our research, B2B decision makers described their most valued partners in strikingly similar ways. They said things like, “They really understand our industry and our business model,” and “They bring us ideas we haven’t thought of yet.” These are not comments about features; they’re about feeling truly understood.

Relevance shows up when a prospect thinks, “This brand clearly gets what my world looks like.” That impression is built by the way you:

• Speak their language – their vertical, their regulations, their customer dynamics.
• Illuminate their problems better than they could describe themselves.
• Offer perspective, not just product features – benchmarking, best practices, what good looks like.

Practically, that means evolving from flat, role-only personas (e.g., “IT Director at a mid-size firm”) to richer, context-based personas that reflect what this year actually feels like for them. That shows up in thought leadership that names the economic, regulatory or technological pressures facing their segment; diagnostic tools that help them see where they are on a maturity curve; and stories about organizations that look like theirs, not just logo walls of big brands.

And crucially in B2B, relevance has to extend beyond your champion. Buyability research shows that vendors are dramatically more likely to be chosen when the entire buying group has heard of them and sees them as a fit, not just the end user or technical lead.

In other words: if you’re only relevant to one person in the buying committee, you’re not relevant enough to win.

Trust: How You Earn the Right to Stay

Once you’ve earned attention with relevance, the real test begins: Can I count on you?

In Making Fierce Friends research, B2B buyers described trusted brands first and foremost as:

• Reliable – they deliver when they say they will.
• Transparent – they’re clear about pricing, trade-offs and limitations.
• Consistent – what sales promises matches what the team delivers.

That might sound basic, but it’s exactly where many relationships falter. Over-promising to win business, fuzzy scopes, slow responses when things go wrong; these are the moments where a brand either earns or erodes trust.

Buyability adds a crucial nuance here: in complex B2B purchases, trust and risk are the same conversation. It’s not just “Do I trust this brand?” It’s “If this goes sideways, can I defend this choice?”

High-trust brands help buyers answer “yes” to questions like, “Will this team be there for us if execution is harder than expected?” and “Are they honest about what they can’t do as well as what they can?” and “Have they helped organizations like ours succeed in comparable situations?”

Many decision makers won’t say it out loud, but a big part of the anxiety is, “I don’t know what I don’t know” when they’re evaluating options. The highest-trust partners don’t exploit that uncertainty; they surface it. They map the decision landscape, flag hidden risks and options, and say, “Here’s the full picture and here’s how we’ll navigate it with you.”

That’s what makes a decision feel career safe.

For marketers, this means trust-building can’t be left to contracts and customer success alone. It must be baked into the entire go-to-market motion: radical clarity in your messaging about pricing, commitments and realistic outcomes; proof that looks like your buyer’s world, including how you handled obstacles; and tight alignment across functions, so that what’s promised at the top of the funnel is what shows up in implementation.

Relevance opened the door. Trust is what keeps you in the building and makes a risk-averse committee feel they won’t regret letting you in.

Affection: How You Become a “Fierce Friend”

Affection can sound soft in a B2B context. No one is putting “warm fuzzies” in the board report.

But when buyers talk about the brands they fight to keep, the language turns emotional quickly. They say, “They go to bat for us when things get tough.” “They treat our business like it’s their own.” “It feels like we’re one team, not two companies.”

This is where Mower’s Affection pillar and Buyability’s top drivers converge. Buyers are far more likely to choose and stay with partners that share a compatible working style and values, are seen as long-term collaborators rather than vendors of record and come recommended by peers and colleagues they trust.

Affection isn’t about sending gifts or remembering birthdays. It’s about repeatedly showing you’re on their side:

• You show empathy when their world changes (a reorg, a tough quarter, a product delay) instead of just pushing for the next renewal.
• You make your client contact look good internally by equipping them with decks, data, and narratives they can use with their own stakeholders.
• You’re willing to absorb short-term pain—an extra sprint, pricing consideration, an urgent pivot—when it protects a long-term relationship.

When that happens, something powerful shifts. Your buyer doesn’t just prefer your brand; they advocate for you inside their organization. They defend the decision. They bring you into new conversations early. They champion you when procurement wants three bids.

Relevance opens the door and Trust keeps you in the building; Affection is what makes everyone inside fight to keep you there.

From Vendor to Fierce Friend

B2B marketing is full of sophisticated tools, models and dashboards. But at the center of every major deal is a small group of people asking a very human question:

“If this goes wrong, will I regret choosing them?”

In a risk-averse environment, that question is louder than ever.

Brands that can confidently answer that question because they’ve invested in Relevance, Trust and Affection don’t just win more business. They become the career-safe choice for cautious committees and ambitious climbers alike. They build the kind of fierce friendships that withstand change, support growth and turn “career risk” into “career making.”

Technology will keep evolving and channels will change. But in 2026 and beyond, the B2B advantage will belong to the brands brave enough to act less like vendors and more like the kind of friends their buyers are willing to bet their careers on.