How Salesforce Uses B2B Creators to Win Enterprise Deals

Introduction

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Salesforce are leading the way when it comes to B2B creators. I sat down with their Global Director of Social and Influencer Marketing, Ashlyn Remillard, a while back and it was one of most interesting conversations I have had on this topic.

While manyB2B companies are still debating whether creator marketing is serious. Salesforce is already winning deals with it.

Ashlyn  led the Webby-nominated Ask More of AI campaign, ran creator-driven activations around the Super Bowl and Formula One, and has built one of the most thoughtful B2B influencer programmes in enterprise marketing. She does not chase followers. She builds trust at scale.

In this article of The Creator Economy for B2B, Ashlyn breaks down how Salesforce approaches B2B influencer marketing, what it actually takes to select and brief creators, how employee advocacy connects to creator strategy, and where the whole space is heading over the next 18 months. If you are trying to use the creator economy to reach an enterprise buying committee, this conversation is the one to start with.

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Key Takeaways

• Creator selection is entirely audience driven. Follower count is almost irrelevant. The only question that matters is whether this creator already has access to the audience you are trying to reach.
• B2B brands are reallocating media dollars away from traditional channels into creator partnerships because the returns are there. This is not an experiment. It is an efficiency shift happening at scale.
• You do not need a large budget to get started. Influence exists inside your business already. Executives, employees and existing partners are all potential creators. Start building those relationships today.
• Always-on creator partnerships are the goal. One-off activations are fine, but the real value comes when a creator becomes a consistent voice for your brand over time.
• B2B is still marketing to humans. The buying committee making a million-pound enterprise decision is consuming the same social feed as everyone else. Your campaign needs to earn attention in that context, not just the B2B one.
• Briefing and brief-back is the process that protects both the brand and the creator. You brief them. They brief back. That dialogue shapes what actually gets published.
• AI creators are coming. Salesforce is already looking at it. The question is not whether AI influencers will exist in B2B, but how they work alongside human creators to drive better outcomes.

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How Salesforce Actually Selects Creators

Every campaign Ashlyn's team runs is entirely bespoke. There is no template. The question at the start of every brief is the same: who are we trying to reach, and who already has their trust?

That sounds straightforward. It is harder than it looks.

In B2B influencer marketing, the instinct is to default to the obvious names. Industry analysts, LinkedIn voices, people who post about your category. That is a reasonable starting point. But Ashlyn's approach is more precise. The creator is a route to an audience you do not have access to. The selection criteria flows entirely from whether their audience contains your buyers. Follower count is secondary. Relevance is everything.

One story she shared landed hard. Salesforce ran an awareness campaign with a creator who sits well outside the typical tech and AI space. An A-list name, not a traditional B2B voice. A senior decision-maker at a major professional sports league saw the content, recognised the Salesforce message, and called them the next day. Ready to deploy Agentforce across the entire organisation. An enterprise deal initiated by an awareness play built around a creator nobody would have put in a B2B targeting brief.

That is not a lucky outcome. It is what happens when you stop building campaigns for your own echo chamber and start thinking about where your buyers actually spend their attention.

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Why Media Dollars Are Shifting Into Creator Campaigns

Ashlyn has been working in social since before it had a formal career track. What she is seeing now is different. Traditional media budgets are moving not gradually. The results in the creator space are outpacing conventional channels, and the business case has become hard to ignore at the CMO level.

This connects to something I have seen consistently across 30+ conversations on this podcast. The brands that are scaling creator programmes fastest are not doing it because it feels innovative. They are doing it because the numbers are better.

At Salesforce, the shift started with a simple question: where do these media dollars go further? The answer kept pointing towards creator partnerships. Not because traditional media stopped working, but because creators bring something traditional media cannot: pre-existing trust with a specific audience. You are not building that trust from scratch with an ad. You are borrowing it from someone who already earned it.

For B2B companies managing long sales cycles, that is not a small thing. The buying committee trusts very few voices. Getting into their feed through a creator they already follow and respect is a different category of reach.

The Brief-Back Process: How to Protect the Creator Relationship

One of the most practical things Ashlyn covered was how Salesforce actually manages creator relationships at campaign level. The answer is a two-stage briefing process.

You brief the creator on the campaign, the goals, the message. Then they brief back. They tell you what they heard, what their audience will respond to, and where the brief does not land for the people they have built trust with. That conversation shapes the final deliverables.

This matters more than most brands realise. When you brief a creator and hand them a rigid script, you are not using them as a creator. You are using them as an ad unit. Their audience knows the difference. The brief-back process forces the brand to understand that the creator has obligations to their own audience that exist independently of whatever campaign objective is on the brief.

Ashlyn was direct about this. If Salesforce could reach that audience themselves, they would not be using the creator. The creator brings creativity and trust. Protecting those two things is not a compromise. It is the mechanism that makes the campaign work.

The Ask More of AI Campaign: What Actually Happened

The Webby-nominated Ask More of AI campaign is worth looking at closely, because the structure it used is replicable.

Salesforce had a TV spot. Standard enterprise marketing. The problem is that a TV spot has a fixed lifespan and a fixed reach. Once production closes, the story stops. Ashlyn's team worked with agency partner New Motion to build a parallel social world around the same campaign. They cast an influencer in the TV spot itself. Not a speaking role, but a physical presence in the story.

That presence gave them a bridge from broadcast into social. The creator could pull their own audience into the campaign narrative, extend the story episodically as the Agentforce product evolved, and reach an audience that the TV spot alone would never have touched.

The Super Bowl activation followed a similar logic. No IP rights, no official partnership. But Salesforce had Agentforce in market, and they built a football-adjacent social campaign around creators and a Salesforce solutions engineer building a real agent live, against the clock, during the equivalent of halftime. Larger reach on social than the Super Bowl ad itself, by Ashlyn's own estimation.

The pattern is consistent. Start with a cultural moment or a product launch. Build a creator layer that can tell a longer, more specific, more human story than a produced spot can. Let the creators take the message to audiences you cannot reach directly. Measure what moves.

Getting Started Without a Big Budget

The most useful thing Ashlyn said, and the thing I find myself repeating to founders and demand generation leads who come to me saying they want to build a creator programme, is this: you can start today without a budget.

Influence is not unique to people with large social followings. Executives are influential. Employees are influential. Partners are influential. The creators you are looking for may already be inside your business, or one conversation away from you.

The brands that are building creator programmes at scale started small. They built relationships first. They proved out a format. The budget followed the results.

That is the pattern worth copying. Not the Salesforce Super Bowl activation. The relationship-building that made it possible.

Where B2B Creator Marketing Goes Next

Ashlyn's predictions for the next 6 to 18 months point in one direction: always-on.

Right now, most enterprise creator programmes are campaign-by-campaign. A creator is activated for a launch, an event, a product moment. The goal, when budgets allow, is to move those relationships into something closer to brand ambassadorship. Creators who are embedded enough in your story that they can speak to your audience consistently, not just when there is a campaign live.

The other variable she flagged is AI creators. Salesforce is already looking at what a literal AI influencer looks like and what role it could play alongside human creators. She was clear: this is not a novelty play. If it happens, it happens because there is a genuine commercial reason for it.

That is the right framing. The creator economy for B2B is not about being creative for its own sake. It is about building trust with buyers at scale, before your sales team shows up, and doing it through voices your buyers already respect. The format evolves. The mechanism stays the same.

Ready to turn B2B influence into pipeline?

If this conversation sparked something, Kleos can help you find the B2B creators your buyers already trust and get their content in front of your buying committee using Thought Leader Ads.

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