The question of who influences a business-to-business purchase has always been murkier than its consumer counterpart. There are no unboxing videos, no haul content, no teenagers dancing with enterprise software. What there is, instead, is a long and winding road of credibility — the analyst who gets quoted, the practitioner who answers questions in Slack channels, the customer who will take a reference call.

Directive, a B2B performance marketing agency, is now offering what it calls InfluenceOS, a framework meant to help brands identify, cultivate and measure the voices that shape how buyers find and evaluate them. The agency, which has positioned itself as a specialist in the category, says the framework treats influence as an ongoing channel rather than a campaign — a distinction that may sound like semantics but reflects a real tension in how the industry has approached the discipline.

"B2B influence has never been about finding the person with the biggest audience," said Larissa Williams, managing director of Directive Communications. "It is about finding the people who already have credibility with the buyers you need to reach."

The framework is organized around five programs: employee advocacy, customer creators, practitioner partners, expert influence and strategic networks. Each is tied to business outcomes — qualified leads, pipeline, revenue impact — rather than the follower counts and engagement metrics that have long served as the currency of influencer marketing. (Whether those metrics ever meant much in B2B is a question the industry has been politely declining to answer for years.)

Garrett Mehrguth, Directive's founder and chief executive, said the shift from reach to relevance is critical. "A large audience does not necessarily translate to influence," he said. "For B2B brands, the value of a voice often comes down to who listens, why they listen and what happens next."

InfluenceOS sits within a broader offering the agency calls DiscoverabilityOS, which links public relations, organic social, influencer partnerships and paid social into a single approach. The framework is offered through the agency's communications services.

The premise is not new — the idea that credibility matters more than reach has been a staple of B2B marketing thinking for decades. What Directive is betting on is that it can now be measured, not just believed.

Original story published in Adweek: "Directive Launches InfluenceOS to Measure Influence of Trusted B2B Voices"