Schedule

Start your day with a delicious breakfast while connecting with fellow attendees. Fuel up, make introductions, and get ready for an inspiring day of learning, collaboration, and innovation at Ignite B2B

Welcome and introduction to the event. Overview of the day's agenda and key goals.

B2B research rarely fails because the data is wrong—it fails because it doesn’t earn the influence needed to drive decisions. Insights teams often deliver rigorous findings, only to see them stalled, debated, or overridden by instinct, politics, or urgency. In this session, competitive intelligence and insights expert David Kalinowski introduces a practical, human-centered framework for building credibility and accelerating decision confidence in complex B2B environments. Rick Marchetti, AVP of Strategic Research, Planning & Execution at The Hartford, adds a real-world practitioner perspective on how insights are evaluated, challenged, and ultimately acted upon inside a large enterprise. Together, they explore how credibility is established early, how insights must align with real decision dynamics across functions, and how research teams can reduce hesitation when certainty is limited and stakes are high. Attendees will leave with actionable strategies and tools to ensure their insights are not just informative—but indispensable when it matters most.

In B2B organizations, insights leaders must navigate complex buying ecosystems, disparate stakeholders, and hard-to-reach customer populations—while still delivering measurable business impact. In this candid panel, senior brand-side insights executives share how they are leveraging AI-powered solutions, advanced analytics and smarter activation strategies to meet rising internal expectations and accelerate decision-making. From influencing cross-functional buying committees to translating research into revenue-driving action, panelists will discuss their most vexing challenges, emerging industry shifts and how they are redefining the strategic role of insights within their organizations.

Take a short break to stretch, grab a coffee, and chat with fellow participants. Use this time to exchange ideas, meet new colleagues, and build connections that can spark future collaboration.

B2B research often relies on insight from hard-to-reach decision-makers. The majority of quant data is collected from online sample sources with no validation or transparency. That raises questions about data veracity, given the rise in survey fraud and AI.

This session explores the use of validation and facilitation in quantitative research as a better alternative. We outline how this method offers stricter validation of B2B respondents’ identities, while ensuring that the sample is representative. The successful impact of this approach is demonstrated through a global case study with hard-to-reach decision-makers from Verizon Connect.

• How agencies and consultants collect B2B data today, and the drawbacks of that approach

• The argument for using validation and facilitation to collect quantitative data, instead of online surveys

• A case study from Verizon Connect demonstrating how this method is applied in global research with hard-to-reach decision-makers

• Considerations about this data collection method and its impact on client and stakeholder buy-in

Presented by: 
- Nik Werk, Founder and Managing Director, Werk Insight
- Michelle Perez, Associate Director of CX Transformation, Verizon Connect

AI is rapidly reshaping B2B sales – but adoption is uneven, and skepticism is still high. Get first-hand the eye-opening findings from Boston Consulting Group’s original “qual at scale” study with ~400 B2B sales professionals. Expert researchers unpack where AI is creating real value for sales professionals today, the barriers to maximizing its potential, and What Sellers Want from AI in the future. Along the way, they’ll share lessons learned in how to design research that credibly captures early-stage B2B adoption and drives stakeholder action.

What participants will gain
· A clear read on AI sentiment + trust barriers shaping adoption in B2B sales teams
· Today’s proven AI use cases vs. the “next frontier” sellers are asking for
· Tactics for credible, influential B2B research: engaging hard-to-reach pros, blending qual + quant, and using authentic respondent voice to drive alignment & action

Presented By:
- Kelly Kutas, Senior Director, Center for Customer Insight and Customer Demand & Innovation, Boston Consulting Group
- Sarah Kim, Senior Knowledge Analyst, Boston Consulting Group
- Aneesh Dhawan, CEO & Founder, Knit

We'll have topical conversation starters to choose from to help break the ice and facilitate connections - or chat about your latest favorite streaming binge.

Presented by: Howard Fienberg, SVP, Advocacy, Insights Association

As AI becomes standard in research workflows, B2B researchers must scale faster without sacrificing UX rigor. This session introduces a “Hybrid AI” methodology for developing personas and user journeys—using AI to map complex B2B ecosystems and synthesize niche audience data, while validating outputs through core UX principles. You’ll learn how to combine speed and depth to deliver high-impact insights that maintain human-centered integrity and strengthen stakeholder alignment.

Learning Objectives:
- Integration Framework: Identify where AI can accelerate synthesis within the B2B research lifecycle—without replacing primary data validation.
- Validation Techniques: Apply methods to ground-truth AI-generated personas against qualitative UX standards.
- Stakeholder Influence: Communicate the value of AI-augmented insights as a complement to rigorous research, not a substitute.

Transforming how a large B2B organization communicates isn’t easy—it’s complex, slow, and requires enterprise-wide alignment. Yet many B2B organizations remain stuck in product-focused marketing, even as buyers demand more personalized, human-centered engagement. In this session, we’ll share how one of the world’s largest healthcare services organizations is shifting from transactional marketing to a proactive, persona-driven strategy. Currently in the midst of this transformation, the team has interviewed 106 hard-to-reach employers and brokers, mapped the full B2B decision-making ecosystem, and defined eight distinct personas with unique buying pain points. We’ll discuss how these insights are being activated across Sales, Tech, and Marketing through structured socialization and strategy sessions—along with the 2026 roadmap to pilot and scale personalization enterprise-wide, backed by senior leadership. You’ll walk away with practical takeaways, including:

- How to map influencing voices and pain points across complex B2B buying journeys.   
- Frameworks for turning research into real messaging change across teams.   
- Examples of how persona insights can spark cross-functional collaboration beyond Marketing

Presented by:
Brianna Sylver, Founder, Sylver Consulting
Allison Gormley,  Marketing Orchestration and Insights Senior Manager, The Cigna Group

Recharge for the final sessions and continue to forge valuable connections.

This session focuses on the methodological design of ethnographic research in the B2B commercial vehicle sector. It demonstrates how in-context fieldwork with hard-to-reach audiences, like truck drivers, uncovers overlooked factors (usage experience, operational realities, and trust) that shape complex B2B purchasing decisions beyond the single buyer.
Participants will learn how:
- Ethnographic fieldwork enables access to hard-to-reach B2B audiences
- Observing everyday practices strengthens data quality in B2B research
- How field-based insights can be communicated to support shared understanding across internal stakeholders.
Presented by:
Dr. Aybil Göker, Co-founder, Habitus Research

Engaging physicians in B2B research is a persistent challenge: they are time-poor, heavily surveyed, and often disengaged from long questionnaires or traditional interviews. This session shares a real pharma case study from ELMA International that used AI-moderated, asynchronous voice interviews to explore doctors’ unmet needs across the disease journey—from symptom recognition to treatment management and information seeking. The approach enabled ELMA to capture deeper insights while reducing time and cost compared with prior survey-led methods. The session will walk through how the study was designed, where the methodology delivered clear advantages, and where limitations remain. The focus is practical: what worked, what required adaptation, and how B2B researchers can determine when AI-moderated interviews are the right tool for engaging hard-to-reach professional audiences.

Participants will learn:
- How to improve participation among hard-to-reach B2B audiences. See how asynchronous, AI-moderated voice interviews increased engagement among physicians compared with traditional surveys.
- How to design interviews that uncover unmet needs across complex journeys. Learn how ELMA structured questions to capture challenges across diagnosis, treatment management, and information behaviors without overburdening respondents.
- When AI-moderated interviews deliver value—and when they don’t. Gain a practical framework for deciding when this method offers better ROI than surveys and when human moderation remains the better choice.

2026 Trends for the Contrarian Marketer is the latest installment from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, offering a fresh, evidence-based perspective on what truly drives growth. Moving beyond conventional predictions, the series delivers principles designed to help marketers differentiate, gain market share, and accelerate performance. At its core, it addresses a critical question: Which trends will matter most for B2B marketers looking to stand out in 2026 and beyond? Presented in an engaging, interactive format, the Trends series translates complex industry findings into clear, actionable insights, making it both a strategic resource and a source of inspiration for modern B2B marketers.

Presented by:

- Danielle Hydro, Research Lead, B2B Institute, LinkedIn
- Derek Yueh, Partnership Lead, B2B Institute, LinkedIn

Wrap up the day's sessions with a relaxed networking reception. Enjoy light refreshments and drinks as you continue conversations, make new connections, and reflect on key takeaways with peers and speakers.