How to Find B2B Sales Partners and Build a Network of Marketing Allies

Who Can You Become Allies With?

The B2B new business problem has not changed. What has changed is how much harder it has become to get anyone to pick up the phone, open a cold email, or engage with generic outreach. If you are still relying on your sales team to cold call their way to target, you already know it is not working. Around 400 calls to find one interested party. Seventy-five calls a day. You do the maths.

Marketing, like psychology, is about understanding behaviour. When it comes to new business, it is about anticipating what your prospects will do before they do it, and then positioning yourself to be found when they go looking. And they are going looking on their own. Research now consistently shows that 83% of B2B buyers define their requirements before speaking to anyone in sales. By the time your phone rings, the shortlist is already written.

So whilst everyone in your sector is wrestling with the same problems, the question worth asking is not "how do we do more of what we are doing?" It is: where is the actual opportunity for B2B businesses right now?

• Where is the real commercial excitement for businesses selling B2B?
• What can you do differently that your competitors have not thought of yet?
• How do you inject genuine engagement into your communications with suspects, prospects and customers?
• What is your USP as a company — and I do not mean your product. I mean you.

CTPS and GDPR — the walls keep getting higher

Neither you nor I enjoy being cold called. We both know that. And the regulatory environment has made it structurally harder to do it anyway. The Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS) allows UK businesses to register their numbers against unsolicited sales calls, and as of April 2025 that register holds over 1.2 million business numbers. It is a legal requirement not to call them. Add GDPR on top and both the phone and the inbox can go very quiet, very fast.

The cruel irony is that those restrictions hit everyone equally. Including you. The same rules that stop someone cold calling your business stop you cold calling theirs. The question is not how to get around those walls. The question is how to build a commercial model that does not need to.

Hiring more salespeople is not the answer

When boards start worrying about new business, the reflex is almost always the same: get more salespeople. It is the wrong answer. More salespeople with a broken approach just accelerates the cost of failure. In the same way a website needs to be built around conversion rather than just traffic, a business needs to be built around how buyers actually behave — not how sellers wish they would.

A few things have not changed. People buy people. And buyers do a staggering amount of research before they will speak to anyone. The current picture from 6sense and Forrester is that buyers are 70 to 83% of the way through their decision before first contact. In many cases, Forrester says, B2B buying has become a process of confirmation rather than selection — the buyer already knows who they want before the conversation starts. If you are not visible during that research phase, you are not on the shortlist.

There is nothing dramatically new in marketing. There is certainly no quick-fix for generating new business. But there is a structural approach that most B2B businesses have never seriously tried.

What about networking?

You have probably tried networking. Most people have. And whilst it can be a pleasant enough way to spend a morning, very little serious B2B business comes from it. The first problem is that most people in the room are micro businesses. They do not have access to the size of companies you need to reach.

The second problem is the assumption that everyone will hand over introductions to their best customers to someone they met forty minutes ago over a bacon roll. That is never going to happen.

In practice, cold networking rooms are full of people who want to sell and nobody who wants to buy. It often feels like everyone is there to take what they can and then move on to the next event. For serious B2B companies, it is a poor use of time and budget.

If you walked into a bank and told the manager your new business strategy was cold calling and networking, they would not lend you a penny. And they would be right.

Everyone is fighting the same battle

No matter what you sell or who you sell it to, the same forces are working against you. CTPS, GDPR, gatekeepers, inbox overload, and an audience that is doing its research quietly, on its own, long before it is ready to talk to anyone. Nobody is immune to these pressures.

Technology can help, but only if you know how to use it and have the right model underneath it. The same goes for social media. Which platforms? What content? Written once and broadcast everywhere, or targeted by audience and written for each channel? These are real questions without easy answers.

The bottom line is this: we both know how we like to be approached when we are in buying mode. The problem is that too many salespeople forget they are buyers too. They push, chase and pressurise — driven by targets from above — and in doing so they destroy the very relationships they are trying to build.

The idea that changed everything

The concept behind salesXchange Syndicates came out of writing Integrate — The Essential Business Technology and Marketing Handbook. The central observation was simple: if business owners were willing to cooperate with each other in a structured way, new business would become substantially easier and more profitable for all of them.

But equality mattered. A three-person company hooking up with a two-hundred-person national business would not be a fair arrangement for either side. So we built the model around balance. Every business in a syndicate group should have comparable turnover, comparable customer numbers, and — critically — complementary products and services. Nobody competes with anyone else in the group. Everyone sells to the same kind of buyer.

One of the main drivers was also coverage. The goal was to provide something that covered every aspect of marketing and new business generation by using the existing talent inside each member company — not by making everything they had already built redundant overnight.

For more on how this works in practice, take a look at our collaboration articles — they go into the mechanics in detail.

Keep it simple

Business owners have enough to think about. That is why we plan and manage everything in advance, so the MD can set it and forget it without adding another drain on their time.

Our focus is on two phases. Phase one is short-term: structured introductions and fast access to new business through each other's existing customers. Phase two is long-term: content marketing that builds the foundation to attract inbound interest over time.

If someone told you their marketing plan would take nine months before you saw any return, you would tell them where to go. So would I. That is why the two-phase model exists: short-term gain built alongside a long-term strategy. Not one or the other.

salesXchange Syndicates

We bring together five businesses that sell to the same audience but do not compete on product or service. We combine their customer databases on our secure servers and do not share the underlying data with anyone — not within the group, not externally.

The existing customers are invited to join the new syndicate marketing group, either by email or by the sales team as part of their normal customer contact activity. After launching the new group website, we run a marketing programme that includes one-to-one introductions, content marketing, and face-to-face communications through managed events.

The reason new business is hard to win is obvious. What is less obvious to most businesses is that working with the right allies removes most of those obstacles at a stroke. Instead of one company's content, one company's audience, and one company's relationships — you have five. The combined reach, credibility and customer base of a group of complementary businesses is worth far more than the sum of its parts.

Collaboration is the competitive advantage most B2B businesses have never used

When you look at the cost of headcount and technology, competing independently against well-resourced organisations can feel close to impossible. Explore what collaboration and syndicate marketing actually costs against what you are spending now. Most people who run the numbers are surprised they did not look at this sooner.