Olga Bondareva works in B2B marketing at ModumUp, an AI-native agency. Bondareva's work focuses on helping businesses build buyer trust through social selling, communities, thought leadership and partnerships.
Olga Bondareva is most useful for building buyer trust through social selling, communities and partnerships.
Best for
Enterprise software vendors with long sales cycles wanting several-quarter LinkedIn trust programs.
Not for
Consumer brands wanting single sponsored posts measured on reach and installs.
Key takeaways
A two year social selling case reported 4,364 target contacts and 36 sales qualified leads.
Bondareva treats trust building as relationships, own authority and borrowed authority.
They advise judging social selling by pipeline over years, not quarters.
Check first: Confirm recent comparable program results, audience details and measurement expectations.
Main ideas
Trust is scarce; content is no longer the constraint · Buyers decide in private channels, putting the community at the centre · Judge social selling by pipeline and give it years, not quarters
Olga Bondareva shares practical ideas on B2B marketing, especially how companies can earn buyer trust when content is easy to produce but harder to believe.
Their work connects social selling and communities with thought leadership, events and partnerships.
They also write about using AI in agency workflows and making content useful to both buyers and sales teams.
Follow them for concrete examples of how these approaches fit together, including lessons from client work and industry conversations.
Bondareva’s distinctive idea is to treat trust-building as a connected system: build relationships, establish your own authority, and borrow authority from others.
In their TRUST framework, a community of target buyers can become the center: relationships grow there, public formats such as webinars and podcasts are developed with members, and members’ credibility helps carry the message further.
Their enterprise social-selling case makes the approach tangible, reporting 4,364 target contacts, 36 sales-qualified leads and four major deals over two years.
They also show how to adapt the system to the situation: in one RFP example, procurement outreach and partner research helped a client pursue opportunities, while another client chose not to bid because of the time and uncertainty involved.
Beyond strategy, Bondareva shares practical operating ideas, from AI-supported agency processes with human review to content advice centered on sales usefulness, local relevance and repeatable results.
Olga Bondareva argues that trust, not reach, is the scarce resource in B2B selling, and that cheap AI-generated content has made buyers harder to convince.
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The posts lay out a three-part system — build relationships, build your own authority, borrow authority — and test it against reported numbers: social selling programmes measured in pipeline, an invite-only community at the centre of an account-based motion, and internal AI agents handling research, outreach and project work. Bondareva also challenges common industry habits, arguing that procurement and bidder networks belong in outreach plans and that buyers make real decisions in private peer channels, where an absent vendor is not considered.
Trust is scarce; content is no longer the constraint
Bondareva argues that AI lets anyone produce content in seconds, leaving buyers less trusting of surface material and asking a different question: who has real expertise, and who will not derail the project?
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The answer is a set of “trust-building mechanics” in three parts.
Building relationships covers social selling, community building as part of an account-based marketing strategy, networking at events and long-term nurturing.
Building your own authority covers brand building, thought leadership, executive personal brands, employee advocacy, case studies and public speaking.
Borrowing authority covers strategic partnerships with non-competing companies that share an audience, analyst relations with firms such as Forrester and Gartner, B2B influencer work on LinkedIn, external guests on podcasts and webinars, and PR.
The ranking is deliberate: relationships come first because they sit closest to the deal, own authority second as a better strategic investment than borrowing it, and borrowed authority third.
The structure is demonstrated through the annual TRUST online conference, described as the sixth edition and formerly Social Selling Con, with 685 registrations from 58 countries and 103 people attending live. A later post presents the same three parts as one connected system rather than a checklist: a community sits at the centre, target accounts are invited in through social selling, public formats are built with members, and their credibility is borrowed.
An earlier post presents the framework as a ranked planning list for the coming year; a later post turns its three parts into a single loop, moving from a menu of tactics to one operating system.
Buyers decide in private channels, putting the community at the centre
Bondareva argues that as generated content floods public feeds, buyers move real deliberation into peer chats, private recommendations and closed communities — “dark social” — and that a vendor absent from those conversations is not on the shortlist.
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The working model starts with a target account list, invites the right people in through social selling, builds relationships and shapes the narrative inside the group, then creates public formats with those members — webinars, podcasts, live events and written pieces — so their voices carry the message outward and their authority is borrowed.
The illustration is Bondareva’s invite-only community and podcast, B2B Marketing Leaders, described as 400+ marketers.
The posts credit the system with five B2B deals closed for ModumUp at ROI above 400%, and say similar client projects generated more than $20M in deals.
The same community logic extends offline, with a private meetup for members around the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
Judge social selling by pipeline and give it years, not quarters
Bondareva reports a two-year social selling programme for a corporate workplace SaaS product covering email, messaging, video conferencing, cloud storage and task management.
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The programme ran from two executive LinkedIn profiles and targeted CEOs, CIOs, CDOs and CISOs at large enterprises in banking, retail, manufacturing, logistics and the public sector.
Outreach combined direct messages with softer networking sequences.
The posts favour combining inbound content and outbound outreach rather than treating either as optional.
Reported outcomes: 4,364 target contacts added, profile followers grown from 706 to 5,070, two LinkedIn newsletters reaching 1,450 combined subscribers, 610 event registrations from direct messages, 164 MQLs, 36 SQLs and four enterprise deals closed by the client.
Notably, 29 of the 36 SQLs came from direct-to-the-point outreach rather than softer sequences.
The best-performing content included enterprise case studies, personal posts and management topics: one product case study reached 41,000+ views, and a personal post about reading habits drew 9,000+ views and 80 comments.
There is a tension in the reported split: networking is often presented as the ideal for building relationships, but the posts’ own numbers attribute most qualified conversations to direct outreach.
A narrower but firm position: if a company decides to compete for RFPs, add procurement and sourcing contacts to the social selling plan; the published RFP is usually the last visible step, not the start of the buying conversation.
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The practice described includes writing to procurement to confirm whether a process is open, researching which companies have bid on similar public RFPs and proposing they team up, and testing sales teams’ assumptions about whether the budget owner would consider bidding at all. AI can identify open RFPs in an industry in about ten minutes.
For a robotics client that was not on an invite list, a message to procurement asking whether the process was open led to an invitation to take part.
On another project, a project manager reported that the client does not bid “because we asked several times.”
Bondareva pushed back, arguing that sales representatives are not always the people who own the budget decision.
The counterexample is deliberate: a retail automation client declines RFPs entirely because a process can run a year with no guarantee and the resources are not there.
Named AI agents run the agency, with rules for citing sources
Bondareva describes building AI into everyday agency work, not presenting it as a product.
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One post covers six autonomous agents, each with a playbook and named after Harry Potter characters, for work routing, project management and call notes, the CRM pipeline, LinkedIn outreach campaigns, marketing drafts and audience research. A second post describes the underlying internal operating system and database: call notes, chat history, project files and external research combine to build ABM target lists; local models handle sensitive data while cloud models take the rest; and LinkedIn drafts pass a quality check against 100+ parameters before human review.
The call-notes agent must cite its source and never invent a line that was not said; the outreach agent stops rather than skipping a check.
In the worked scenario, a Zoom client call becomes a target company list for LinkedIn outreach, with suggested approaches for each account and named contacts inside each company.
The list could feed automation, but a person reviews it first.
Guest views on content: buyer-centred, used by sales, localised
In a post summarising a 15-minute practitioner conversation, three guests offer views that should be attributed to them.
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Rachel Roundy, a product marketing lead at Snowflake, describes content as the fuel of the marketing engine — every channel runs on it and poor quality clogs the system — and argues against chasing virality when the audience is not the target buyer.
Ryan Lucas of FLSmidth focuses on what sales will actually use, asking sales directly whether an asset helps in the field or was just nice to build.
Irina Chernova of NetApp says local-language content, especially webinar recordings, consistently performs better, and ongoing programmes beat one-off bursts in markets like Germany.
Roundy reports that shifting materials at Intel away from brand jargon and toward the buyer raised social engagement by about 200%, roughly tripled the database and produced webinar conversion around 20%.
Lucas says product launch webinars worked because customers were not necessarily looking for updates, while value calculators were quieter externally but helped sales build a clear value case.
On AI, Roundy describes using it as a thinking partner rather than a copy factory, while Chernova uses it to draft follow-ups quickly, including German ones after webinars.
Borrowed authority, measured through other people’s numbers
The posts support the framework’s third pillar — borrowing authority from analysts, creators, partners and external speakers — mainly with results attributed to guests, not Bondareva.
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Across those talks, recurring themes are that volume is easy but trust is not, the messenger matters more than the message, mentions are not enough because brands need to be cited, and analyst briefings can lead to a report mention and a sale.
Dmitry S. of Harbinger is quoted on social selling year to date: 340 leads, 82 qualified conversations, $1.25M closed and $7.4M in pipeline.
Priyanka Dasgupta of Kyndryl describes employee advocacy around Google Cloud Next driving roughly $40M in influenced pipeline and around 400 leads.
Elsa V.
Paul of Columbus McKinnon describes demo days and training reaching 600,000+ people before that expertise was published for partners to carry.
Doug Kimball of Red Sky Health describes Gartner briefings leading to a report mention and a sale.
A creator network of 10 creators with more than one million combined followers is credited with about 50 million LinkedIn impressions in a year and 454 MQLs in four weeks from one event campaign.
This is the clearest statement of the system Bondareva uses and teaches.
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If you open only one post, make it this one: it defines the three-part framework the rest of the work refers back to.
Bondareva argues that easy content generation has made buyers distrustful, and that decisions now happen in private peer chats, closed communities and direct recommendations rather than public feeds.
The framework has three parts: build relationships through social selling, community building and event networking; build your own authority through live events, podcasts, newsletters and deep expert formats; and borrow authority through strategic partnerships, analyst relations, media, influencers and guest speakers.
The post describes running all three as one loop: a community sits at the centre, target accounts are invited in through social selling, peers shape the narrative, public formats are produced with members, and their credibility is borrowed back.
Bondareva reports that the invite-only B2B Marketing Leaders community has 400+ marketers, helped ModumUp close five B2B deals at above 400% ROI, and that similar client projects produced more than $20M in deals.
For brands planning a campaign
A campaign blueprint rather than a single tactic: recruit a target-account community first, then build public formats from it. That sequence offers an alternative to buying reach in public feeds, where buyers are less likely to decide.
Answers the practical question that follows the framework: which trust-building activity should get budget first, and why.
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Bondareva ranks relationship building first because it sits closest to the deal.
Activities include social selling, community building within an ABM strategy, event networking and long-term nurturing.
Building your own authority comes second, described as a better strategic investment than borrowing it; it covers brand building, thought leadership, executive personal brands, employee advocacy, case studies and public speaking.
Borrowing authority comes third: partnerships with non-competing companies that share an audience, analyst relations with firms such as Forrester and Gartner, B2B influencer marketing on LinkedIn, podcasts and webinars with outside guests, and PR.
The post also promotes an online conference built on the same structure.
For brands planning a campaign
The ordering is the argument: invest in relationships before reach, and treat borrowed credibility as a supplement. It directly challenges campaign plans that start with analyst mentions, PR or influencer spend.
The set's most detailed results account, with a realistic view of how long a programme takes and what it returns.
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Bondareva describes two years of social selling on two executive LinkedIn profiles for a corporate workplace product covering email, messenger, video conferencing, cloud storage and task management.
The campaign targeted CEOs, CIOs, CDOs and CISOs in banking, retail, manufacturing, logistics and the public sector.
Reported results: 4,364 target contacts reached; profile followers grew from 706 to 5,070; two LinkedIn newsletters reached 1,450 combined subscribers; direct messages generated 610 event registrations, 164 MQLs and 36 SQLs, of which 29 came from direct-to-the-point outreach rather than softer networking sequences; and the client closed four enterprise deals.
A product case study reached 41,000+ views, while a personal post about reading habits got 9,000+ views and 80 comments.
Bondareva concludes that LinkedIn works best when inbound and outbound are combined.
For brands planning a campaign
Direct messages produced most of the qualified conversations, so sales-ready outreach should not be treated as the softer, lower-priority option. The two-year timeline is a warning against judging social selling on a quarter.
A compact set of third-party numbers from several B2B teams, useful for comparing formats when choosing campaign mechanics.
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The recap covers the sixth annual conference, with 685 registrations from 58 countries and 103 people attending live.
Guest results include a senior marketing manager at Harbinger citing 340 leads, 82 qualified conversations, $1.25M closed and $7.4M in pipeline year to date; a director of field marketing at Kyndryl saying employee advocacy around Google Cloud Next drove roughly $40M in influenced pipeline and about 400 leads, and arguing that the messenger matters more than the message; a senior marketing manager at Columbus McKinnon describing demo days and training that reached 600,000+ people, later published so partners could carry the expertise; and a head of marketing at Red Sky Health describing Gartner briefings that led to a report mention and a sale.
A creator programme with ten creators and more than one million combined followers is credited with about 50 million LinkedIn impressions in a year and 454 MQLs in four weeks from one event campaign.
For brands planning a campaign
Compares several models — employee advocacy, partner-carried education, analyst briefings and creator events — each with its own measurement story. Useful when a buyer needs to match a mechanic to their sales motion, not just identify what's popular.
Shows what an AI-native agency automates day to day, useful when considering that kind of partner.
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Bondareva describes launching a first set of autonomous agents inside ModumUp for calls, CRM, LinkedIn campaigns, marketing drafts and audience research.
Six agents each have a playbook and are named after Harry Potter characters: one routes work across the team, one handles project management and call notes, one owns the CRM pipeline, one runs outreach campaigns, one writes marketing drafts, and one conducts audience research.
The call-notes agent must cite its source and not invent lines that were not said.
Bondareva presents the agents as a starting point, not a finished system.
For brands planning a campaign
Shows what automation means in practice: task routing, note-taking, pipeline hygiene and outreach management, with source-checking built in. When evaluating an AI-heavy agency, ask for equivalent evidence rather than accepting the label.
Explains why so much B2B content goes unused, with benchmarks and a measurement habit to copy.
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Bondareva interviews Rachel Roundy of Snowflake, Ryan Lucas of FLSmidth and Irina Chernova of NetApp.
Roundy describes content as the fuel of the marketing engine and reports that buyer-centred materials at Intel lifted social engagement by about 200%, roughly tripled the database and produced webinar conversion around 20%.
They also argue against chasing virality when the audience is not the target buyer.
Lucas focuses on what sales will really use: product launch webinars worked because customers were not necessarily looking for updates, and value calculators helped sales build a value case.
Chernova reports that local-language content, especially webinar recordings, performs better, and that ongoing programmes beat one-off bursts in markets like Germany.
For measurement, Lucas asks sales whether an asset helps in the field.
Roundy uses AI as a thinking partner rather than a copy factory, while Chernova uses it for fast drafts such as German follow-ups.
For brands planning a campaign
Offers a testable content brief: centre it on buyers rather than the brand, localise where relevant, and ask sales directly whether the asset is used. The 200% engagement and 20% webinar conversion figures offer rough planning benchmarks.
Answers a narrow but high-stakes question—whether and how to pursue an RFP—and shows how the team makes decisions with clients.
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Bondareva describes a robotics client that bids on RFPs.
When the client was not on an invite list, the team wrote to procurement to ask whether the process was open and whether the client could take part.
The team also looks up companies that have bid on similar public RFPs and suggests teaming up to strengthen a proposal.
On another project, a project manager said the client did not participate in RFPs because sales representatives had been asked several times.
Bondareva pushed back, arguing that the budget owner might see it differently and that open RFPs in an industry can be found in about ten minutes with AI support.
A retail automation client declined RFPs entirely because the process can run for a year with no guarantee, and the resources are not there.
For brands planning a campaign
RFP participation is a deliberate investment choice, not a default. If a brand bids, include procurement and sourcing contacts in the outreach plan: the published RFP is the last visible step, not the first.
Borrowed authority: analysts, influencers and external voices2
Social selling measured in pipeline, not impressions1
Content effectiveness and buyer-centric messaging1
RFP participation as a social-selling discipline1
Trust-building mechanics for B2B
Olga Bondareva frames trust as the central problem in B2B buying: AI has made content cheap and left buyers less certain about who has real expertise.
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Across the posts, the framework has three parts: building relationships (social selling, community building as part of account-based marketing, event networking, long-term nurturing); building your own authority (brand building, thought leadership, executive personal brands, employee advocacy, case studies, public speaking); and borrowing authority (strategic partnerships, analyst relations, B2B influencer work, external guests on podcasts and webinars, PR). A later post presents the three parts as one connected system rather than a checklist.
At the annual TRUST conference, Bondareva presents the framework in a talk and slides, then uses it to organize client work and community design.
For brands planning a campaign
Brands can use the three-part structure as a planning grid: decide whether the creator would contribute through relationship work (social selling or community access), authority work (original case studies or speaking), or borrowed authority (partnerships and analyst-facing formats).
Bondareva argues that as generated content floods public channels, B2B buyers move real deliberation into peer chats, private recommendations and closed communities.
Read more
Vendors absent from those conversations risk missing the shortlist. The practical approach in the posts is a target-account community: invite the right people through social selling, shape the narrative inside, then publish public formats with members so their voices carry the message outward.
For brands planning a campaign
A brand evaluating a private community or peer-network activation should ask how the creator builds the target list and which public formats carry member voices beyond the closed group.
Social selling measured in pipeline, not impressions
The most detailed case describes two years of social selling for a corporate workplace SaaS platform, run from two executive LinkedIn profiles.
Read more
Reported outcomes: 4,364 target contacts added, follower counts growing from 706 to 5,070, 610 event registrations from direct messages, 164 MQLs, 36 SQLs and four enterprise deals.
Bondareva distinguishes direct outreach messages from softer networking sequences; 29 of 36 SQLs came from the direct approach.
The best-performing content included enterprise case studies, personal posts and management topics.
One product case study reached 41,000+ views, while a personal post about reading habits drew 9,000+ views and 80 comments.
LinkedIn newsletters on the two profiles reached 1,450 combined subscribers.
Two executive profiles were run as one program targeting CEOs, CIOs, CDOs and CISOs at large enterprises in banking, retail, manufacturing, logistics and the public sector, with content and outbound outreach supporting each other.
For brands planning a campaign
For executive-led LinkedIn work, the creator's track record is in combined content-and-outreach programs, not one-off sponsored posts. Briefs should allow for multi-month timelines and access to named executive profiles.
Bondareva runs an invite-only B2B Marketing Leaders community of 400+ marketers and a podcast under the same name.
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The posts credit this system with five B2B deals for ModumUp at above 400% ROI. The community sits at the center, social selling brings target accounts in, and webinars, podcasts, live events and written pieces give members something to engage with.
Membership is the hub, with public formats built around member participation so attendees also help carry the message.
The community is invite-only, so a brand cannot simply buy placement; involvement runs through the creator's own programs.
For brands planning a campaign
A brand can consider sponsoring or guesting on community formats, but should expect qualification criteria and a fit check rather than open ad slots.
A post summarizing a 15-minute conversation with practitioners at Snowflake, FLSmidth and NetApp covers what makes B2B content useful.
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The recurring points: content fuels every channel, and poor quality clogs it; shifting from brand jargon to buyer-centered material lifted social engagement by about 200%, roughly tripled the database and produced webinar conversion around 20%; sales usability is the test (does the asset help in the field, or was it just nice to build?); local-language content, especially webinar recordings, performs better in markets like Germany; and consistency beats one-off campaign bursts.
For brands planning a campaign
A brand can brief the creator on buyer-centered content formats and expect pushback on vanity metrics. Frame measurement questions around sales use and repeatability rather than reach.
Two posts describe how the agency uses AI internally.
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One covers autonomous agents with defined roles: a director that routes work, a project-management and call-note agent that must cite sources, a CRM agent, an outreach agent running LinkedIn campaigns, a marketing-draft agent and an audience-research agent.
The other describes an internal operating system and database that combine call notes, chat history, project files and external research into ABM target lists, with local models handling sensitive data and cloud models handling the rest.
A quality-control pass checks LinkedIn posts against 100+ parameters.
For brands planning a campaign
The internal tooling shapes how deliverables are produced—research speed, quality review and audience lists—rather than being something a brand buys directly. It signals a fit for teams seeking structured, evidence-driven campaign work.
Borrowed authority: analysts, influencers and external voices
The third pillar appears in concrete cases in the conference recap: analyst briefings that led to a report mention and a sale, and B2B influencer work through a network of 10 creators with more than a million combined followers.
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The network produced roughly 50 million LinkedIn impressions in a year, and one event campaign generated 454 MQLs in four weeks. The recap also cites other speakers' results: 340 leads, 82 qualified conversations, $1.25M closed and $7.4M in pipeline from social selling, and about $40M in influenced pipeline from employee advocacy around a cloud event.
For brands planning a campaign
A brand can use these cases to judge whether the creator's recommended mix of analyst relations, creator networks and event campaigns fits its own buying cycle. The reported numbers offer benchmarks for that assessment.
Bondareva hosts the annual TRUST online conference, described as the sixth edition in 2026 and formerly Social Selling Con, with 685 registrations from 58 countries and 103 live attendees.
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They use the conference to present the framework through talks and case studies, and the recap doubles as a content asset. A separate post about a TechCrunch Disrupt trip shows the same approach offline: a private meetup for community members around a larger industry event, alongside stated interest in Physical AI, robotics, AI agents and fundraising.
For brands planning a campaign
A brand can reach the creator’s audience through conference speaking, session sponsorship or a co-hosted private meetup. The creator already turns event moments into content and community-recruitment opportunities.
A post on RFP work argues that procurement and sourcing belong in the social selling plan because the published RFP is usually the last visible step.
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Examples include writing to procurement to confirm an open process, which got a robotics client onto the invite list; researching prior bidders on LinkedIn to propose teaming; and an automotive client whose sales reps said they did not bid, while the budget owner might have seen it differently.
The approach maps procurement contacts and bidder networks before the formal process, then tests the sales team's assumption about who owns the budget decision.
The creator treats RFP participation as a choice, not a default. They describe helping a retail automation client decline because the process could run a year with no guarantee.
For brands planning a campaign
For long-cycle enterprise sellers, expect work to identify procurement contacts and bidder networks rather than a standard demand-generation campaign.
Olga Bondareva’s posts document three business relationships: ModumUp, the B2B marketing agency they call “our agency”; the invite-only B2B Marketing Leaders community and podcast they say they run; and TRUST, the agency’s annual online conference.
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Ask for named clients or sponsorship arrangements if those matter to your decision.
ModumUp
Owned business
Olga calls ModumUp 'our agency', describing it as an AI-native B2B marketing agency where Olga and the team run client campaigns and build internal AI agents for tasks such as call notes, CRM upkeep, outreach and audience research.
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The posts present ModumUp's client work, its trust framework and its own AI-native operating system as the basis of Olga's marketing writing.
An invite-only community and podcast for B2B marketers that Olga says they and the team run, with 400+ members.
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Episodes include interviews with marketers from Snowflake, NetApp and FLSmidth, and the community holds meetups alongside events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Olga cites it as a working example of the agency’s build-relationships, build-authority and borrow-authority system.
ModumUp’s annual online conference, previously called Social Selling Con.
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Olga opened the 2026 edition with the agency’s TRUST framework, presented through the B2B Marketing Leaders community and client work. The event drew 685 registrations from 58 countries and 103 live attendees, with guest speakers from Harbinger, Kyndryl, Columbus McKinnon and Red Sky Health.
Read Bondareva's posts as one running argument rather than a set of separate tips: cheap generated content has made buyers sceptical, so the work shifts to earning trust.
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Start with the two posts that state the framework plainly — trust-building mechanics and the recap of the TRUST conference, where the three parts appear as a single loop.
Then turn to the case material, where the framework meets numbers: a two-year social selling programme run from two executive LinkedIn profiles; the invite-only B2B Marketing Leaders community and podcast at the centre of an account-based motion; and a post on why procurement and bidder networks belong in an outreach plan.
The conference recap covers the borrowed-authority half of the argument, with guests rather than Bondareva supplying the results.
Posts on internal AI agents show how research, outreach and drafting are handled day to day.
For readers focused on content rather than social selling, the practitioner conversation on what makes B2B content actually get used is the widest entry point, though its views belong to the named guests.
Both publish practical B2B growth arguments grounded in reported numbers, and explain market positioning by choosing a narrow segment rather than fighting the incumbent everywhere.
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Bertaux maps four competitive angles — product, distribution, pricing and services — and argues that Microsoft Teams dominates pricing and distribution, so a challenger has to win on product and service.
Bondareva makes a similar move, ranking relationship work above borrowed authority because it sits closest to the deal.
Both also use a single long case study to carry the argument: Bertaux traces a European bank's growth from 3,000 to 18,000 contacts per quarter through weekly educational webinars, while Bondareva details two years of social selling that produced 36 sales-qualified conversations and four enterprise deals.
Bertaux writes from inside a product company, treating webinar-led demand generation as the growth engine.
Bondareva writes as an agency practitioner, putting relationship building, community and peer deliberation at the centre instead.
Bertaux focuses narrowly on competitive positioning and webinar programmes; they cover social selling, community, events, analyst relations and internal AI tooling.
Both interview marketing practitioners and publish detailed, number-heavy takeaways, while pushing back on content built for volume.
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Jacobson's conversations reach the same conclusion Bondareva argues for: persuade the 95% of buyers who are not in market yet, give value with no call to action, and build a real point of view because anyone can generate helpful content.
Jacobson's monday.com interview describes a newsletter with 70–80% open rates and three million-plus subscribers, built with no links and no nurture flows.
Bondareva applies the same logic by putting an invite-only community at the centre of the motion.
Jacobson works mainly as an interviewer and summariser, drawing the strongest material from named SaaS marketing leaders and their playbooks for content, ghostwriting and podcasts. Bondareva approaches the same territory through a personal three-part system, client results and a conference, giving readers one argued position rather than a series of borrowed ones.
Both write about business relationships as a growth system rather than a series of asks, and turn that idea into a practical structure.
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Riggs argues that partnerships fail when every contact is a request, advocating a check-in, give-before-you-get and prove-the-value pattern.
They also sort partner content into to-partner, with-partner, through-partner and for/about-partner categories.
Bondareva makes a parallel argument about buyers: a vendor absent from the private peer conversation is not on the shortlist.
They organise the response into relationships, own authority and borrowed authority.
Riggs stays focused on partner and channel programmes: co-marketing support, enablement materials, deal registration, MDF and the content that powers each. Bondareva covers a wider remit — social selling, community, events, analyst relations and AI operations — and treats partnerships as one of three routes to trust rather than the subject itself.
For campaigns aimed at B2B marketing leaders, the available audience information focuses on the groups Olga Bondareva convenes, not the make-up of their followers.
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Their LinkedIn profile had 16,698 followers as of 11 October 2026.
They run or host two named audiences: B2B Marketing Leaders, described in their own post as an invite-only community of 400+ B2B marketers, and the annual TRUST conference, which they say drew 685 registrations from 58 countries, with 103 attending live for its 2026 edition.
These are figures reported in their posts, not platform measurements.
Their content speaks to B2B marketing and sales practitioners, but that does not establish who reads it.
Their posts do not report followers’ locations, seniority or industries, or engagement rates; no per-post or video performance data is available here.
Client case numbers in their posts—for example, a two-year social selling programme reporting 4,364 target contacts, 1,450 newsletter subscribers, 610 event registrations and 36 sales-qualified leads—describe a client’s outreach programme, not Bondareva’s audience or reach.
Ask for recent results on comparable topics, depth and format, such as registrations, live attendance and follow-on conversations from TRUST 2026 or a comparable community session.
Also ask whether an audience survey covers geography, seniority or industry; profile data alone cannot answer those questions.
LinkedIn followers
16,698
LinkedIn profile record · 2026-10-11
B2B Marketing Leaders community size
400+ B2B marketers (invite-only)
Olga Bondareva's post describing her own community · 2026-09-28
TRUST 2026 registrations
685 registrations from 58 countries; 103 attended live
Olga Bondareva's post recapping her own conference · 2026-10-02
Olga Bondareva places partnerships within a three-part trust framework: build relationships, build your own authority and borrow authority.
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The borrowing layer covers strategic partnerships with non-competing companies that share an audience, analyst relations, B2B influencer marketing on LinkedIn, podcasts and webinars with external guests, and PR.
Partnership assets described in their posts include the invite-only B2B Marketing Leaders community and podcast, with 400-plus B2B marketers and practitioners from Snowflake, FLSmidth and NetApp; the annual TRUST online conference, whose sixth edition in 2026 drew 685 registrations from 58 countries, with about 103 people attending live; and client programs through ModumUp, the AI-native B2B marketing agency, which the posts tie to more than $20M in closed enterprise deals.
The posts provide no sponsorship package, deliverable list, rate card or public inquiry route.
Buyers should ask directly about partnership terms and availability.
B2B Marketing Leaders community and podcast
Buyer requirement
An invite-only community of 400-plus B2B marketers with a companion podcast.
Published guests are practitioner marketers from companies such as Snowflake, FLSmidth and NetApp, sharing first-hand case material rather than brand messaging.
No sponsorship tier, fee or booking route is listed, so brands must enquire directly rather than buy a defined package.
TRUST annual online conference
Buyer requirement
The sixth annual online conference registered 685 people from 58 countries, with roughly 103 attending live.
Speakers present client results and case studies.
Olga Bondareva's posts share recaps and recordings, but disclose no commercial terms, sponsor slots or fees.
Buyers should ask directly about availability and pricing.
Client programs through ModumUp
Buyer requirement
Client work runs through ModumUp, the AI-native B2B marketing agency, covering social selling, community building, ABM, content and outreach.
The posts connect those programs to long enterprise sales cycles and more than $20M in closed deals.
Brands buying this route engage an agency program, not a personal creator placement.
An enterprise software vendor with six-to-eighteen-month sales cycles wants a partner to run a relationship-led LinkedIn program across several quarters, targeting CIO, CISO, COO and budget-owner roles in banking, manufacturing, logistics, retail and the public sector, and measured on qualified conversations and pipeline rather than reach.
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This is the closest match to the documented work.
The most detailed case in Olga Bondareva's posts is a two-year social selling program run from two executive LinkedIn profiles for a corporate workplace product — email, messenger, video conferencing, cloud storage and task management — aimed at exactly those senior roles.
Reported outcomes were 4,364 target contacts added, profile followers grown from 706 to 5,070, 610 event registrations generated from direct messages, 164 MQLs, 36 SQLs, of which 29 came from direct-to-the-point outreach rather than softer sequences, and four enterprise deals closed by the client.
They report these results, which describe the engagement a buyer would be buying: executive-profile access, sustained outreach, and pipeline as the unit of account.
The commercial format also fits.
Work runs through ModumUp, described as an AI-native B2B marketing agency, so this is a structured program rather than a single sponsored placement.
The trust framework they present and teach — build relationships, build your own authority, borrow authority, run as one system with an invite-only community at the centre — gives a buyer a planning grid.
The posts credit that community channel with five B2B deals at above 400% ROI for the agency and tie client projects to more than $20M in closed deals.
Before discussing a campaign, ask for the rate, scope, recent comparable results on a similar topic and audience, the registrations and live attendance from the most recent TRUST conference (685 registrations from 58 countries, about 103 live), and any audience survey covering geography, seniority or industry.
The posts provide none of these details.
Also match the campaign to the creator's own sequencing: relationship work first, authority-building second, borrowed credibility third, with consistency over one-off bursts.
When to choose a specialist
A consumer mobile app or direct-to-consumer brand wants a single sponsored LinkedIn post judged on impressions and installs from a broad audience, delivered inside a few weeks.
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This is a weak fit based on the posts, for four concrete reasons.
First, the stated audience and the requested measurement point in different directions.
The posts are written for B2B marketing and sales practitioners, and the numbers a consumer brand would care about are exactly the ones Olga Bondareva argues against.
In the practitioner conversation they summarise, the Snowflake contributor pushes back on chasing virality because millions of impressions mean little if they are not the target buyer and not repeatable.
A campaign measured on raw reach runs against the creator's published position, so a buyer should expect a measurement conversation, not a reach guarantee.
Second, there is no documented way to buy the placement.
The posts show an invite-only community of 400-plus B2B marketers, an annual conference, a podcast and client programs through an agency, but no sponsor policy, rate card, deliverable specification or verified inquiry route.
A brand cannot price, book or assess a single sponsored post from what is published.
Third, the community is invite-only and positioned as the hub of the system, with membership framed as a qualification decision rather than an advertising slot.
A brand cannot buy its way into that room; involvement runs through the creator's own programs.
Fourth, the audience section supplies no consumer demographics, geography or seniority data.
The 16,698 LinkedIn followers recorded on 11 October 2026 describe a profile, not a validated consumer base, and the client programme figures in the posts belong to a client's outreach, not to the creator's reach.
Before considering a paid-reach buy, ask for documented consumer or cross-category work, a partnership offer with deliverables and terms, and audience composition data.
A worked campaign example
An enterprise cloud security vendor wants shortlist presence with CISOs and CIOs at banks and manufacturers, and is willing to run a multi-quarter program instead of a campaign burst.
The angle: copy the trust system as a sequence rather than a tactic list.
Step 1 — Choose the profiles the program runs on.
In the documented case, the program ran from two named executive LinkedIn profiles, not from a brand page, and both profiles published on management topics and enterprise case studies.
The vendor needs to commit its own executives' names and time before anything else is scoped.
The strongest content in that case was enterprise client case studies, personal posts and management topics; a product case study reached 41,000-plus views and a personal post about reading habits drew 9,000-plus views and 80 comments.
Personal and management material is not filler here; it carried the program.
Step 2 — Build the target list before producing content.
The case targeted CEOs, CIOs, CDOs and CISOs at large enterprises in banking, retail, manufacturing, logistics and the public sector, and added 4,364 target contacts over two years.
For a cloud security vendor, the equivalent is named security and technology leaders in the same sectors, assembled and qualified in advance, with LinkedIn newsletters set up on the chosen profiles as an owned channel — the reference program reached 1,450 combined subscribers and used newsletter notifications to bypass feed competition.
Step 3 — Write buyer-centred materials, localised where the market demands it.
Specific guidance from the practitioner conversation: move away from brand jargon, put the buyer at the centre, and ask sales directly whether an asset helps in the field or was just nice to build.
Reported benchmarks from that conversation include roughly 200% higher social engagement, a roughly tripled database and about 20% webinar conversion after the shift, and local-language webinar recordings outperforming in markets such as Germany.
Consistency beats one-off bursts.
Step 4 — Run outreach in two modes.
The reference program mixed direct-to-the-point messages with softer networking sequences of useful materials, webinar and conference invitations, and reported that 29 of 36 SQLs came from the direct approach, with 610 event registrations traced to direct messages.
For the security vendor, the straightforward approach should be the default and the soft sequence the supplement, not the reverse.
Step 5 — Put a private layer in the middle.
The trust framework puts an invite-only community at the centre: invite target accounts through social selling, shape the narrative where peers ask each other for recommendations, then publish formats with members so their credibility carries the message.
A vendor can co-host a small closed session for its target list and build public material from it; it should not expect to buy seats in the existing B2B Marketing Leaders community.
Step 6 — Add borrowed authority deliberately, and price it as a supplement.
Documented examples include analyst briefings that led to a report mention and a sale, and a creator network of ten creators with more than a million combined followers credited with about 50 million LinkedIn impressions in a year and 454 MQLs in four weeks from one event campaign.
Use these as benchmark shapes for comparison, not as promised results.
Step 7 — Set the measurement and the clock at the start.
The unit of account is MQLs, SQLs, pipeline and closed deals, not impressions.
The reference engagement took two years; a one-quarter pilot should be framed as a test of list quality and content response, not of deal flow.
Before signing, negotiate scope and fee directly: the posts include no rate card, deliverable specification or inquiry route.
Ask for audited performance data and an audience composition survey.
None of the conference slides, recordings, videos or transcripts referenced in the posts were available to readers, so the framework is documented only through Olga Bondareva's written accounts.
Choose Gilles Bertaux when the same long-cycle brief is better served by turning education into a repeatable webinar demand engine than by executive-profile social selling.
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The documented case is a European bank that grew from about 3,000 to nearly 18,000 contacts per quarter by running weekly educational webinars on market and investment topics.
The program moved from early traction to a recurring editorial rhythm, built quarterly, run by a core team of two and wired into CRM flows and event-based nurturing.
That is the shape to buy when the buyer wants an always-on content and registration engine that compounds, and the company has a clear value proposition and someone to own the editorial line.
Bertaux's published advice on competition also fits a saturated category: pick a segment the incumbents serve poorly, build a specific product and marketing opinion for it, and keep sharpening the positioning instead of fighting a larger player on price and distribution.
For an enterprise software vendor with six-to-eighteen-month cycles, this alternative suits the stage when the priority is a steady flow of qualified contacts into a nurturing system, or the vendor cannot commit its own executives' names and time to personal-profile outreach.
The documented example counts contacts per quarter and lead-gen events, not SQLs, pipeline or closed deals.
That changes the unit of account from what a campaign aimed at measuring pipeline expects.
The posts do not describe a LinkedIn outreach mechanic, executive-profile social selling or private community layer; the case relies on webinars, CRM nurturing and a small team's editorial discipline.
Bertaux reports the results, which are not independently audited, and the account-level numbers describe a client's program rather than Bertaux's own audience.
A buyer taking this route must build qualification, outreach and pipeline attribution on top of the contact flow.
Choose Erik Jacobson when the vendor already has an in-house content team and the missing piece is a plan for reaching buyers long before they are in-market.
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His interviews with monday.com's Yael Miller and Kandji's Sylvia LePoidevin address the same long-cycle decision from the strategy side: split content effort between the small in-market segment and the large audience that will buy in six to eighteen months; give value with no links, no CTAs and no nurture flows in a plain-text newsletter; run a ghostwriting program for executives matched to the right writer; build a podcast as the anchor that feeds newsletters, clips and sales enablement; and prefer people-led LinkedIn accounts over company pages because the algorithm favours them.
The measurement progression is spelled out too: start with impressions to get the flywheel moving, then use sales call recordings to catch when content is mentioned, then ask buyers how they heard about the company.
This is the better choice when the need is to design a content engine the client operates, or when the buyer needs credibility for a 95% audience strategy that cannot be justified by click attribution.
The posts report other practitioners' playbooks; they do not document an executed program with pipeline, SQL or closed-deal outcomes.
They do not describe outreach sequences, a target-list construction method or contact counts, so a buyer hiring for relationship-led execution still needs an operator.
The claims and figures belong to the named interviewees and are not independently audited; with only two posts, each comparison rests on a narrow sample.
If the need is someone to run executive-profile outreach and hand over qualified conversations, this alternative supplies the strategy and benchmarks, not the labour.
Choose Lindsay Riggs when the route to the same senior buyers runs through partners rather than directly from the vendor's own profiles.
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The posts set out how to keep partners invested: check in before renewal, give enablement and demand generation support before asking for pipeline, simplify deal registration and MDF, and keep proving value so partners do not prioritise someone else.
They also map partner marketing content across four audiences: to-partner enablement, training, portals and appreciation; with-partner co-branded solution sheets, case studies and joint webinars; through-partner customisable email sequences, sales scripts and playbooks partners can put their brand on; and for/about-partner internal messaging, press and executive presentations.
This is the better choice when an enterprise vendor sells through resellers, integrators or solution partners, and the immediate problem is partner activation and co-marketing support rather than direct shortlist presence with CIOs and CISOs.
Content equips partners to carry the vendor's message, while partner engagement discipline sets the program's operating rhythm.
This is partner marketing, one step removed from direct LinkedIn outreach to end-customer executives.
The posts do not report social selling mechanics, contact, MQL or SQL figures, or audience targeting data, so they do not demonstrate the pipeline mechanism measured by a campaign aimed at pipeline.
A buyer needing named-buyer outreach still has to run that work separately; Riggs' material helps the partners doing it and the vendor's program around them.
The two posts present the author's own recommendations, not an audited partner program with reported revenue.
Olga Bondareva's posts cover the three-part trust framework and its presentation at the annual TRUST conference, the invite-only B2B Marketing Leaders community and podcast, a two-year social selling programme with reported results, a practitioner conversation on B2B content, internal AI agents and systems, and RFP practice.
Comparison sections draw on two posts each from Gilles Bertaux, Erik Jacobson and Lindsay Riggs.
The posts do not show publication timestamps: they reference 2026 activity, including the sixth annual TRUST conference and an October 13-15 conference trip, and Bondareva's LinkedIn profile shows 11 October 2026.
Deal counts, pipeline figures, ROI and attendance numbers come from Bondareva and the named practitioners quoted in the posts and were not independently audited.
Client examples are described by industry only, never by company name.
No rate card, sponsorship terms, deliverable specification, inquiry route or audience composition data appear in the posts here, and the slides, videos, newsletters and session recordings referenced in the posts are not available, so commercial terms and audience makeup remain unknown.
