Today’s MarTech Top Voice: Influ2 CEO & Co-founder Dmitri Lisitski.
We are thrilled to present the next episode in our MarTech Top Voice Interview Series, featuring Dmitri Lisitski, Co-founder and CEO of Influ2 – the world’s first and leading person-based advertising platform, redefining B2B engagement at the contact level. In simple terms, PBM (Person-Based Marketing) has redefined a marketer’s perception of precision targeting, revenue attribution, and the alignment of marketing and sales in enterprise go-to-market strategies. Dmitri is undoubtedly the originator of the Person-Based Marketing (PBM) concept.
Presently, Influ2 enables B2B revenue teams to go to market with the ABM strategy at the contact level. This method allows marketers to not only identify, engage, and measure actual buyer interactions but also to do so without depending on account-level intent signals that are often ambiguous. Enterprise innovators such as Capgemini, Appsflyer, and Hexaware, who deploy Influ2, trust the company to be the bridge that fills the gap between marketing precision and sales action. They do so through the use of solutions like Audienscope, Cohort Designer, and contact-level intent modeling.
Dmitri’s viewpoint aligns closely with the broader evolution of B2B marketing, which is shifting towards the adoption of hyper-personalized engagement, measurable revenue impact, and AI-driven buyer intelligence. The way he is doing it continues to motivate marketing professionals from all over the world to reevaluate the real impact of marketing in an era characterized by data overflow and a buyer-first digital world.
Let’s dive in with Dmitri.
MarTech Insights (MTI): Hi, Dmitri. Welcome to the Marketing Technology (MarTech) Top Voice Interview Series. We are inspired by the work you have done in your career. How did your background and experience shape the path that led you to co-start Influ2?
Dmitri: Before Influ2, I was a co-founder of GlobalLogic, a large IT services company. We did a number of roll-ups, and the company grew rapidly. It was ultimately sold to Hitachi with a headcount of over 30,000 people. However, after my exit, I felt unsettled by the fact that marketing had no real influence on the company’s success. I kept thinking about what kind of marketing approach would actually work for an enterprise-focused GTM. Then, I attended Demandbase’s conference in 2015. ABM was the answer to what we lacked at GlobalLogic. However, I quickly realized that while ABM as a strategy was great, Demandbase’s technology was too imprecise to deliver on the ABM promise. Two years later, I met my co-founder, Vladimir Mikhalko, who had an idea for how to solve the precision problem, and that’s how Influ2 emerged.
MTI: You are the pioneer of Person-Based Marketing (PBM). How has PBM evolved from a bold concept into a defining category in B2B advertising? How would you describe its most contemporary definition today, and how does it stand apart from ABM and intent-based marketing approaches?
Dmitri: We initially envisioned person-based marketing as a fundamentally different approach from ABM.
Our homepage title back then was “Forget ABM, introducing PBM.” However, we quickly realized there was nothing wrong with ABM as a strategy, and we weren’t really introducing anything fundamentally new on a strategic level. ABM shines through contact-level execution: you target accounts, but there are very specific buyers and buying groups you care about within those accounts.
Account intent is great, but only if you can identify who exactly had that intent, at the contact level. The buyer’s journey is also a great concept, but each buyer, even within one buying group, has their own journey. That’s why you need contact-level orchestration. Finally, if you think of revenue influence, you need to be able to go down to the contact level to know who, when, and where engaged, and how that engagement led to revenue. So now, instead of trying to create a new category, we simply help marketers make their ABM programs shine through contact-level execution.
MTI: Influ2 has grown into a world-class contact-level advertising platform trusted by global B2B teams, including Capgemini, Appsflyer, and Hexaware. What key product evolutions or customer learnings have been most pivotal in shaping Influ2’s growth trajectory?
Dmitri: I believe there have been two major product breakthroughs since Influ2’s launch in 2017. The first was the release of Influ2 version 2. We rebuilt the whole product, making a leap from a simple contact-level advertising tool to a complete solution that enables contact-level orchestration and revenue influence modeling. With v2, customers could design any buyer journey, connect it to an existing ABM program or create a new one, provide sales teams with actionable insights, and see how it influences revenue.
The second breakthrough is happening now. We’ve introduced Audienscope, a module that provides contact-level intent information, including search, third-party content, and social. With Audienscope, we finally found the missing piece in the ABM puzzle to make it truly actionable. Intent is great, but only if you can tell who has that intent, and we’ve finally solved that.
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MTI: Influ2’s library features standout resources like the “Contact-Level ABM Framework” playbook and “Buyer Signals & Ad Strategy” webinars. Could you share how customer feedback and these thought leadership assets have influenced your product evolution, particularly around tools like Cohort Builder or contact-level intent tracking?
Dmitri: Frankly, we’ve never added a feature in Influ2 out of pure imagination. Every capability is based on customer requests, and we were lucky to have very smart early customers who helped shape our product. Of course, we don’t just do what customers ask. A customer request is a signal of a need, but we have to dig deeper to uncover the underlying problem so we can solve it for all our customers.
Cohort Designer was born when one of our most sophisticated customers told us, “Hey, I know I could create a campaign in SFDC to select an audience for you, but my SFDC is full of campaigns and hard to manage, could you just grab the audience yourself?”
Likewise, almost every customer asked us, “If you do contact-level ads, could you also capture intent on the contact level?” That’s what pushed us to think about how to build this capability.
MTI: Modern B2B marketing stacks are often crowded and fragmented. How do you see Influ2 fitting into, or even reshaping, the modern martech stack to help marketers achieve campaign success without adding complexity?
Dmitri: Yes, there’s definitely platform fatigue – which is why we avoid the term “platform” internally. We integrate into other marketing and sales products as much as possible to minimize friction. Of course, we still need a user to interact with our product, but we make sure data exchange with other platforms is seamless, so everyone else in the organization can leverage Influ2 without ever logging into our product.
MTI: From predictive targeting to creative optimization, how is Influ2 leveraging AI to enhance contact-level ABM, and what do you see as the most immediate opportunities for AI in B2B advertising?
Dmitri: AI can solve a lot of previously impossible problems — from contact-level targeting and attribution to making sense of marketing data and translating it into actionable sales signals. The key is not to take any random AI tech and try to apply it to advertising or ABM, as many vendors do. Slapping an “AI” badge on something doesn’t help. The approach should be the opposite: start with a customer problem we couldn’t solve before, and then look for something in the AI toolkit that could help solve it.
MTI: In your experience, what KPIs or success benchmarks best demonstrate the true value of contact-level advertising compared to traditional digital campaigns?
Dmitri: The most common mistake is to think of contact-level advertising as just another inbound digital channel that generates MQLs. Contact-level ads work as part of an ABM program that connects directly to the outbound sales process; there are no MQLs.
The right way to evaluate an ABM program’s value is by measuring how much sales development and conversion rates improve thanks to the program. Traditionally, that’s hard to measure with ABM tools, but contact-level execution makes it possible. You can now track marketing-influenced sales results and compare them to the cold sales process. Contact-level execution gives you enough data for this analysis.
As a result, you can see how much the sales pipeline and revenue were influenced by your program, and you can directly compare influenced vs. cold pipeline generation, as well as influenced vs. cold sales, giving you a clear picture of how much extra pipeline and revenue your ABM program generates.
MTI: Looking ahead, what industries or verticals do you see as the earliest adopters — or biggest beneficiaries — of contact-level advertising at scale, and why?
Dmitri: The earliest adopters are in tech, financial services, and professional services. These industries deal with complex sales cycles and multiple decision-makers, so reaching the right contacts directly creates an immediate advantage. They’re also more willing to test new approaches that give sales and marketing clearer traction.
Over time, any industry with high-value, multi-stakeholder deals will see the biggest benefit. That’s where contact-based advertising has the most impact.
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MTI: As you look to 2026 and beyond, what’s your prediction for the next big shift in martech and digital advertising, and how is Influ2 preparing to help B2B organizations stay ahead of that curve?
Dmitri: Our initial thesis that led to the inception of Influ2 is now becoming a mainstream trend: marketers are realizing that account-level execution of their ABM programs is neither precise enough nor actionable, so they’re looking for contact-level solutions. Even incumbents like Demandbase are gradually shifting toward this concept with their introduction of buying groups and people recommendations. We also see a bunch of smaller startups trying to capitalize on this trend.
So as a result, Influ2 has expanded its capabilities toward becoming an end-to-end contact-level ABM engine.
MTI: What innovations or Martech trends do you think will most influence Influ2’s roadmap in helping customers deliver more relevant, humanized engagements and experiences at scale?
Dmitri: The biggest influence on our roadmap is how buyers actually want to be engaged.
People are tired of generic messaging; they expect outreach to feel relevant to their context. That’s where AI can help – not as a gimmick, but by giving marketing and sales a better signal on who’s showing intent and what matters to them.
Another trend is the push for real alignment between sales and marketing. Both sides want to connect with the same people in the account, but they’ve traditionally worked from different playbooks. We’re building so they can act on the same contact-level insights and create one consistent experience.
MTI: Tag a marketing leader from the industry whose response you would like to see at the MarTech Insights Top Voice program: Davis Potter
Dmitri: Davis Potter
Thank you so much, Dmitri, for your time today! We look forward to having you again at our Top Voice Series.
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About Dmitri
Dmitri Lisitski is the CEO and Co-founder of Influ2. A continuous entrepreneur and innovative B2B advertising concept leader, Dmitri has also been responsible for the creation of GlobalLogic, a company with 30,000 employees in the IT services sector that was bought by Hitachi. He is a graduate of Columbia Business School and London Business School, from both of which he holds an MBA.
About Influ2
Influ2 is one of the world leaders in Contact-level Account-Based Marketing (ABM), started in 2017. The company helps the sales departments to focus their efforts on one or several buyers with ads that are concise, to track the impact on revenue, and to use intent insights at the contact level to have better coordination of sales and marketing. The company has offices all over the world and is rapidly expanding its customer base in the technology, finance, and professional services industries, and continues to be a benchmark for customer-centric, data-driven B2B engagement. It brings Account-Based Marketing (ABM) to the contact-level. Built for the messy reality of B2B, Influ2 allows revenue teams to act on contact-level intent, reach named buyers with ads, and accurately track revenue impact. Leveraging Influ2’s proprietary technology, hundreds of B2B companies have transformed their go-to-market approach with contact-level ABM. Founded in 2017, Influ2 has over 100 employees working around the world.
