Why Working with Like-Minded B2B Businesses Is One of the Most Underused Growth Strategies

Getting Serious About New Business

Every new business generation method you have ever tried was borrowed from someone else who borrowed it from someone before them. Cold calling, telesales, direct mail, networking events — none of it was ever guaranteed. Most of it was barely functional. And yet, decade after decade, businesses keep repeating the same cycle because nobody wants to admit the approach was broken to begin with.

For anyone who has been in sales for more than ten years, the old playbook is painfully familiar:

• Cold calling — knocking on doors collecting compliment slips, or dialling through lists hoping someone would pick up. We tracked roughly 400 calls to find a single interested party at around 75 calls per day. That is five days of effort for one conversation.
• Telesales — sweet-talking your way past the gatekeeper only to land with a cross MD who has better things to do than talk to a salesperson. The interruption model, dressed up as a sales strategy.
• Direct mail — posting company brochures and hoping the receptionist did not bin them before they reached the boss. The conversion rates were dismal. The postage costs were not.

Getting to know suppliers and potential partners before social networking existed was no less painful. You were on the receiving end of desperate telesales calls from people who wanted a fifteen-minute appointment to present their company — even though you were not in the market to buy. Or you attended Chambers of Commerce events that were stuffy, artificial, and over before you had said anything useful to anyone. And in any case, everyone in the room was there to sell, not to buy.

Everyone was looking for the angle

In the telecoms industry in the 1990s, everyone latched on to selling cheaper calls as the hook to open a conversation about a new phone system. As everyone started doing it, the competition got brutal. I heard of one sales manager who sellotaped the handset to a telesales rep's hand so he physically could not stop dialling. Incredible — but that is what a purely numbers-driven model produces. If you throw enough of it against the wall, some of it sticks. It is not a strategy. It is a brute-force workaround for a model that does not actually work.

Then along came social media

The promise was that we could now reach everyone and anyone without having to pick up the phone or knock on a door. For about five minutes, it felt like the answer. It was not.

The clue is in the name. It is social media, not business media. What you say to your friends is not what you want to say to your customers. Social media became the telesales interruption of the twenty-first century — just louder, faster, and cheaper to scale.

It is also too random. A large contact list does not mean a pipeline. Far from it. The bottom line is that you need to be where your customers actually are, and more often than not, that is not on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or even LinkedIn. Who genuinely has time to read update after update? Even when you are trying to build a presence, you are being drowned out by everyone else's noise. We know from our own research that 83% of B2B buyers define their purchase requirements before speaking to anyone in sales. They are researching digitally, quietly, and on their own terms.

Social media and the age question

With Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and X all competing for attention, the critical question is: what is the age demographic you are targeting, and where are they actually spending focused time? Research now confirms that millennials and Gen Z account for 71% of B2B buyers. They are digitally driven, they do their own research, and they are less reliant on traditional sales processes like cold calling than any previous generation. Older decision-makers tend to spend less time scrolling and more time absorbing content they have specifically chosen to engage with. Bear that in mind when you plan your next campaign. The channel mix matters less than understanding precisely who you are trying to reach and how they prefer to be informed.

Start thinking like a customer

The real shift happens when you stop thinking like a seller and start thinking like a buyer. Ask yourself: how do you like to be sold to? The answer is probably not being constantly prodded, poked, or pinged into persuasion.

When anyone decides to buy a business-related product or service, it is based on a gradual decision-making process. Will this make money or cost money? Will it bring me closer to promotion or lose me my job? Those are the two real questions every buyer is working through, whether they articulate them or not.

We are all in business to make money. Networking is a good starting point and talking with other business people is always useful. But as a standalone strategy it is not strategic enough. It does not pay the bills with any consistency. You need something more structured than a room full of people all trying to sell to each other. That is where collaboration and syndicate marketing starts to make genuine sense.

Return on Collaboration — not just ROI

Everyone knows ROI. Years ago, Cisco introduced the concept of Return on Collaboration — ROC — and the findings have held up well. The research split ROC across three areas, and the results were significant across all of them.

• Operational ROC — reducing and avoiding costs. Eighty percent of companies saw operational savings of up to 170%. That is not a rounding error.
• Productivity ROC — finding efficiencies. A Frost and Sullivan study of over 3,500 business and IT leaders found that collaboration delivered the highest returns in exactly the areas where people interact most: R&D and sales and marketing. Not the back office. The revenue-generating functions.
• Strategic ROC — building competitive advantage. This was harder to measure, but the pattern was clear. Companies that collaborated well found themselves ahead of their markets, not chasing them.

You can read more about how this applies practically in the context of B2B marketing collaboration and syndication.

What does this mean for your business?

If you are already part of a networking group, you have taken the first step. The next step is identifying your perfect collaborators. They may not be in the room with you right now, but you can use your existing network to find them. You are looking for business owners who sell to the same type of customers you do, but who do not compete with what you offer.

Think about what it would mean if a business owner called you to say their approach to market was similar to yours, their customers were similar to yours, but they sold something completely different and there was no competition. And the reason they were calling was to recommend you when they were in front of those customers. How would that feel? That is what structured collaboration actually delivers.

Selling with the room

Most people in networking groups talk about selling to the room, or selling through the room. The smarter move is to sell with the room. That means selling to each other's customers and prospects through a structured process — like a SalesXchange Syndicate — without compromising your business or falling foul of data protection obligations.

The key is consistent communication with your joint customers and prospects throughout the month. You expand your reach. You add genuine value to your customers. And you do it without needing a larger team or a bigger marketing budget.

"But isn't that what networking is supposed to be about?" Yes, in theory. But here is the reality: most people involved in networking groups, particularly younger businesses, have not yet developed enough trust or experience to properly apply the giver's gain principle — the idea that the more you do for others, the more they will do for you. So when you ask someone to introduce you to their customers, what often goes through their mind is: "I wouldn't introduce you as I barely know you." The structured syndicate model removes that ambiguity entirely.

More business than you can handle

There is more business out there than any one company can reach alone. The customers you want to speak to are often already talking to the person sitting next to you at your regular networking event. They just do not know it yet.

Stop thinking of your business as an island. Think of a group of businesses as the Maldives — individual islands, each independent, but connected and stronger together than apart. That is exactly what a well-structured collaboration group looks like.

The measure of this model — whether you call it collaboration, syndication, group working, or a co-op — is the ability for businesses to operate independently while maintaining a consistent, shared connection with customers and prospects. Whether you use a SalesXchange Syndicate structure or build your own version, the principle is the same. You all need each other. Being overly protective of your customers once they have bought from you will not serve you in the long run. Your competitors are not standing still.

Keep an open mind. Investigate the opportunities of working with others. The businesses that grow fastest are rarely the ones doing it alone.