NPS has survived more obituaries than almost any other metric in B2B marketing — and it's still standing. Bain & Co.'s newest research doesn't try to kill it off again; it argues the real predictor of B2B growth is something else entirely: whether a vendor makes a buyer's 'day one' shortlist, the mental list formed before anyone picks up the phone. Tony Larks, a B2B marketing leader with over 20 years of experience spanning sales, enterprise technology and zero-to-one startup builds, read that research and asked the obvious next question — could you estimate your shortlist position without ever surveying a buyer?
➡️ Tony walks Joel through the AI prompt he built to do exactly that — scoring companies against Bain’s five-part framework using nothing but public signals: analyst coverage from the likes of Gartner and Forrester, peer review sites such as G2, forums including Reddit, and even employee sentiment on Glassdoor. He shares the story of an NPS score skewed by SMB customers who’d rather pay a compliance fine than do the hard work of getting compliant, unpacks why ‘shortlist share’ risks becoming exactly the kind of vanity metric NPS became if marketers try to game it with PR spend, and explains why fixing the fundamentals — service, roadmap transparency, honest pricing — beats gaming any signal. He’s open-sourced the tool and is giving the prompt away free to anyone who wants it. If you’ve ever wondered whether your brand is even in the room before the RFP lands, this conversation will change how you think about being ‘in the market’ versus being in contention.
What You'll Learn
• What's actually wrong with NPS, the B2B trust metric — and why nobody's replaced it, until now
• What the ‘day one list’ is, and why Bain says most lost deals were never winnable to begin with
• How Tony built an AI model that estimates buyer confidence from public signals alone, and where the approach is strongest and weakest
• What brands should actually do once they know where they sit on the shortlist
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction: Why We're Finally Talking About NPS
01:35 - Meet Tony Larks: From Sales Floor to Startup Marketing Leadership
04:45 - From Sentiment Tracking to Bain's ‘Day One List’
09:28 - What's Actually Wrong With NPS (And What Isn't)
12:14 - NPS's Cultural Blind Spot: Sevens, Nines and Detractors
15:07 - Inside Bain's Day One List: Why ‘Lost’ Deals Were Never Winnable
17:56 - Do You Need Bain's Budget? Mining Your Own CRM Data
21:02 - The Hidden Buyers Bain's Framework Surfaces
23:55 - Building an AI Proxy for Buyer Trust: How the Shortlist Matrix Works
26:26 - Estimation vs. Measurement: How Rigorous Is Good Enough?
28:07 - The Gaming Risk: Can Shortlist Share Be Bought?
31:26 - Could ‘Shortlist Share’ Become the Next Vanity Metric?
33:27 - What Marketers Should Actually Do With Their Score
35:02 - Explaining the Two-by-Two Grid
36:13 - NPS Isn't Dead, It's Just Incomplete
37:42 - Wrap-Up and How to Get the Tool
About the guest
Tony Larks is a B2B marketing leader with over 20 years of experience, starting his career in sales before moving into marketing roles spanning distribution, systems integrators and enterprise technology businesses. He has spent his most recent years leading zero-to-one marketing builds inside startups, and over the past year has been building a suite of AI agents to track brand and market sentiment — work that led him to develop the open-source ‘shortlist matrix’ featured in this episode.
Tony on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonylarks/
Blog featuring shortlist matrix prompt: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-measuring-market-share-start-shortlist-tony-larks-hazje/?trackingId=BHbT3G1Q76e9aaY0PZoOcg%3D%3D
About the podcast
This is a full episode of Trust & Influence in B2B, hosted by Joel Harrison, founder of Joel Harrison B2B.
Joel on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joelharrison/
If this was useful, subscribe for more on trust, influence and the metrics that actually predict B2B growth — and tell me in the comments where you think you’d land on the day one shortlist.
