Reputation Work Shapes A Buyer's View Before The First Sales Call

Reputation work has moved to the front of the B2B buying process. A buyer researching a purchase now starts with an AI assistant, then takes the answer to peers, analysts and the vendor to check it. Most of that happens before a seller hears the company's name, and the buyer arrives at the first call with a view already formed.

Anastasiya Trukhina is the Head of Reputation at a licensed gaming operator, where she runs brand and crisis communications and negotiates sponsorship deals. She has worked in communications since 2012, moving from agency PR into games and fintech. At one gaming studio, she closed a publishing deal worth more than €200,000 and a €90,000 contract to sell game keys. Trukhina also previously managed a global brand communications budget of more than $5 million across 40-plus regions.

"Reputation is a thing that you need to do constantly, day by day, and there is never enough. You never get to this point when you can say, 'Yeah, that's generating revenue.' There are some teams that do not generate revenue that you can see," says Trukhina. Her audiences are players, partners, regulators and former staff, and each of them forms a view from a different place. Much of the gaming industry still runs unlicensed, so being licensed is worth saying out loud.

Reputation without a number

Trukhina compares reputation to a firm's legal department. Legal produces contracts, agreements and NDAs, and the people waiting on them mostly find it slow. "These guys are making the risks lower for the company," Trukhina notes. "One lawsuit and everybody is like 'Oh my God, legal team, please help us.'"

Trukhina runs into the same notion when she justifies the budget for an industry conference. Leads and meetings from the event convert into a pipeline number. She also uses the floor to see partners the company already works with, and the value of those conversations shows up in the strength of the relationship instead of in that quarter's numbers. "A lot of things are not as simply measurable as the amount of leads," Trukhina explains.

Today's buyers and partners ask questions about a company to AI assistants, then check the answer against people they know. The systems build those answers out of third-party sources, and generative AI now outranks every other source buyers call meaningful, by a factor of two. "One of the main reputational trends right now is AI perception," notes Trukhina. "Our contractors are now having this regular AI monitoring. Is this company good? Is this company a fraud?"

The password question

Most of what gets said about a gaming operator sits on public sites. Reddit carries much of it in English-speaking markets, with local forums doing the same elsewhere. Each review site has an account behind it that someone at the company is supposed to own. "I would start the audit with a very simple question," Trukhina says. "Do they know the passwords for Trustpilot, Casino Guru and AskGamblers website? Does someone in their team have these accounts? Many companies will fall on this question."

Ratings sit outside a team's control. Attempts to move them get accounts banned, but a team can act on the complaints underneath them. A common one is a player posting publicly that a payout has not arrived, and taking a day to fix it counts as a good result. She holds a separate target on search, at 70% of the news results on Google's first page. "My KPI here is that 100% of the reviews must be answered," adds Trukhina. "The SLA needs to be around 24 or 48 hours."

All of that depends on someone having decided which markets count. A brand that names the Netherlands a priority should be able to name the Dutch sites that matter and say whether it has a Dutch-language presence on Reddit. Trukhina puts all of it ahead of any argument about whether reputation drives revenue. "Do they have a strategy?" Trukhina concludes. "I know that's simple and basic, but a lot of people don't have these basic and simple things. If you have a direction, you have 50% of the answers to all of your questions."

The views and opinions expressed are those of Anastasiya Trukhina and do not represent the official policy or position of any organization.