Finally! A replacement for NPS... or is it? | How Tony Larks hacked Bain & Co's groundbreaking 'shortlist score'

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)