A CIO at a bank, the MD of a retailer, a business owner with a full diary and a well-trained nose for a pitch. By the time your sales team gets into the room with any of them, the question of who they trust has usually been settled. The meeting confirms it; it rarely changes it.

Forbes made the point well when it published its 2026 list of the world’s most influential chief marketing officers in June: the executive posting daily and dominating the trade press may be influential – or may simply be visible.

Visibility and influence are not the same thing. Many South African business-to-business (B2B) technology brands still measure how often they show up. Their buyers are measuring something else: whether they already know and trust the name.

Research firm 6sense surveyed nearly 4 000 B2B buyers for its 2025 buyer experience study. On average, buyers made first contact with a seller only once they were 61% of the way through the buying process. And 77% of the time, they bought from the vendor they had already ranked first.

More of that early research now starts with an AI tool that answers the question before anyone picks up the phone. So the persuading happens months before the demo. It happens through the articles buyers read, the events they attend and the names that keep turning up in the right places.

That is why an advert and a piece of expert insight do such different jobs. The ad asks for attention. The insight, on a platform the buyer already trusts, confirms something they were half inclined to believe. One interrupts, the other earns agreement.

Edelman and LinkedIn’s 2024 study of 3 500 B2B decision-makers bears this out. Nearly three-quarters (73%) said thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for judging a company’s competence than its marketing materials.

The circle is small

South Africa’s senior decision-makers listen to a small circle of voices. If your brand is not in that circle when a decision comes up, you are starting from behind, however good the product is.

On TechCentral, 78% of readers are senior leaders or managers, and 36% are MDs, CEOs or business owners. More than 60% read it weekly or daily. In TechCentral’s 2025 survey of 572 readers, 57.7% named it the South African technology publication they trust most, against 20.3% for the nearest competitor. And 58% rated it four or five out of five for their professional awareness and decision-making.

That isn’t a subscriber count – it’s the room the decision gets made in.

What influence looks like in practice

Three things separate influence from noise:

Consistency: One sponsored article does not build trust. Turning up steadily does. The brands technology leaders recognise are the ones that show up between launches, not only during them.
Platform: Where a piece appears matters as much as what it says. The same 800 words carry more weight alongside journalism the reader already trusts than on a company blog. And as more buyers start their research with AI tools, the sources those tools draw on matter, too.
Substance: Thought leadership works because it gives something useful before it asks for anything. One reader, who described themselves as C-suite, put it plainly in the survey: “What the tech can do is not nearly as important for C-Suite like me as what impact it can have on my business and my customers.” The minute a piece reads like a pitch, it stops working. I am aware of the irony of writing that in a piece with our name on it, so I will keep the next part short.

Where Publishared fits in

We help brands earn a place in conversations that are already happening, in the media senior leaders read and in the rooms where they meet. Done well, the sales team never starts from zero. By the time a CIO picks up the phone, the name is already familiar.

If your brand needs to be trusted before the pitch, not just visible during it, that is a conversation worth having.

Michelle Losco is CEO of Publishared, which works with technology vendors and South Africa’s IT distributors on thought leadership, account-based marketing and events.
Disclosure: Publishared is the parent company of NewsCentral Media, publisher of TechCentral. This article is promoted content, supplied by Publishared