What Is the Alternative to SEO and Cold Calling for B2B SaaS Vendors?

Most B2B businesses are still generating new business the same way they did twenty years ago. Cold calling, pay-per-click, gated forms, and a prayer. According to Sifted — an FT company — founders are straining relationships with investors by expecting them to help secure introductions and assist with new business generation. And investors are equally frustrated when portfolio companies cannot hit profitability. Nobody is solving the actual problem. They are just pointing at each other.

Irrespective of every MarTech promise made over the past decade, B2Bs are still cold calling. They know it takes roughly 400 calls to find one interested party at around 75 calls per day. That is a near-hopeless ratio and every person making those calls knows it. One word explains why it continues: desperation.

Everyone hates receiving a cold call. Every receptionist is instructed to block them. Every decision-maker has learned to ignore unknown numbers. And yet companies keep hiring BDRs, handing them a list, and telling them to get on with it. We have seen the same behaviour repeated for thirty years and the result has never changed. Read our full breakdown here: Stop Cold Calling.

Some businesses have gone further — obtaining consumer purchase data, matching IP addresses against company names, cross-referencing email addresses and mobile numbers against senior personnel from business databases, and calling those people at weekends. That is not prospecting. That is harassment with a spreadsheet. And it tells you everything about how far some companies have drifted from rational strategy.

The person making those calls is typically the least experienced in the business. Yet according to investor logic, they are performing the most critical function: finding new revenue. Meanwhile, the highly paid and often oversized marketing team — whose sole remit should be generating qualified demand — is busy arguing about brand guidelines and reporting on impressions. Something is badly broken.

B2B SEO: What Actually Happened

Many people will push back on this. So let me be precise. I am not dismissing SEO as a discipline. I am saying that the specific way B2Bs have been doing SEO is broken — and Google has now confirmed it with its own algorithm.

For years, CMOs instructed their teams to follow the herd: produce thin content at volume, publish multiple times a week, optimise every title tag, and wait for traffic. Google's core updates from 2023 and 2024 have dismantled that entire approach. In March 2024, Google folded its Helpful Content system directly into its core ranking algorithm. The result was a 45% reduction in low-quality, thin, and SEO-first content appearing in search results. Sites that had followed all the so-called best practices got hit hardest. If you built your digital strategy on high-volume thin content, you have lost ground you are not getting back. See our SEO Guide for B2B for the full picture on what this means practically.

What Google now rewards is long-form, educational, well-structured evergreen content — written by people with real knowledge, for real readers, not for search engines. Short-form multi-weekly posts do not move rankings in B2B. They never really did. The SEO industry spent a decade telling businesses otherwise, and a significant number of companies wasted serious money finding that out the hard way.

What makes this worse is that no business should be building its entire go-to-market on a platform it does not control and cannot predict. Google changes its algorithm whenever it chooses. No bank would lend against that as a revenue plan. No investor should either. Browse our SEO articles for more context on how this plays out across different B2B sectors.

Going After Your Total Addressable Market

Here is a question I have asked hundreds of B2B businesses: do you have a database of every company in your total addressable market? Most do not. Some have a vague idea of who they are selling to, but very few have sat down, defined their TAM precisely, bought a proper database, and built a consistent programme to reach every company in it.

The numbers are straightforward. There are roughly 44,000 businesses in the UK that employ more than 50 people or turn over more than £5 million. If your TAM is 10,000 companies, then between 1% and 15% of them begin a buying process every single week. That is between 100 and 1,500 companies actively moving toward a purchase decision at any given time — and most businesses have no idea which ones they are, because they are not watching. They are cold calling or running pay-per-click to whoever happens to search the right term that day. That is not a strategy. That is hoping.

The business plan that justified investment in the first place was based on a TAM. So why are most B2Bs not maintaining a specific database and targeting those companies consistently? That one metric — your TAM, systematically addressed — is the thing that changes everything. If you had the data and the approach, you would not be dependent on pay-per-click at all. Read more about what a proper digital approach looks like at B2B Digital Growth.

Marketing Automation: The Golden Goose That Never Laid

CMOs sold CEOs a straightforward story. Buy the automation platform, feed it leads, nurture them through the funnel, and watch the pipeline fill. CEOs believed it. They kept believing it for years after the evidence had stopped supporting it. Marketing automation was designed for B2C consumer behaviour. It was grafted onto B2B and it has never worked properly in that context.

The standard B2B marketing playbook is Google or LinkedIn pay-per-click, linking to a landing page with a multi-field form. Research from 6sense found that only around 3% of B2B website visitors fill out forms — and that figure has been consistent for over a decade regardless of industry or company size. People are not filling out your forms because they are afraid of what happens when they do. They know a BDR will call them within minutes. They would rather stay anonymous.

Gartner's 2024 survey of B2B buyers found that 61% prefer a rep-free buying experience and 73% actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. Some companies even gate every useful page on their websites — meaning organic visitors, people who found you without you spending a penny, are immediately turned away. It is hard to think of a more effective way to waste a marketing budget.

ABM: How Vendors Solved Their Own Cancellation Problem

After 6sense published research around 2014 showing that 97% of buyers do not self-identify on websites, something needed to change. By 2016, Account Based Marketing had appeared. Conveniently, the marketing automation vendors — Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot and others — launched ABM add-ons just as CEOs started questioning why their automation platforms were not generating results.

The pitch was clever. When a CEO challenged whether marketing automation was working, the response was: "Are you communicating directly with each buyer and influencer at every target company?" The answer was always no. So instead of cancelling the automation platform, they bought the ABM layer on top of it. The tech stack grew. The team needed to manage it grew. The marketing budget grew. The results did not.

What nobody told these businesses was that ABM requires position-specific content for every stakeholder involved in a buying decision. Research now suggests there are somewhere between ten and sixteen people involved in a complex B2B purchase. Writing tailored content for each of them, across every target account, is simply beyond the capacity of most marketing teams. So the default position became: do what we can and accept that nothing more can be done. That is the conclusion the automation vendors were happy for you to reach — because it kept their subscription running.

I want to be clear on one thing. I am not dismissing email platforms or email service providers. Every B2B business still needs to communicate with its market. The issue is what you are sending, to whom, and with what expectation attached.

Recent HubSpot data shows that 96% of business buyers want to self-serve and self-educate before speaking to a salesperson. Nobody in the industry found that surprising. What is surprising is that the companies publishing that data have not built a solution that addresses it.

Brent Adamson — who spent nearly two decades as a senior research leader at CEB, now Gartner, and has written for the Harvard Business Review on exactly this topic — has made the same point for years. B2B buyers want to self-serve, self-educate, remain anonymous, and establish their own understanding of ROI before speaking to anyone in sales. They are not being difficult. They just do not want to reveal their intent and immediately receive a barrage of calls from BDRs who have been told to close them that week.

The research on this could not be plainer. Gartner's own figures show that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total buying time in direct contact with potential vendors — and that 17% is spread across all suppliers under consideration, not just you. The data has been available for years. The industry ignored it and kept selling automation software instead.

What You Should Do Instead

There is no replacement for cold calling in the traditional sense — because cold calling does not work and should not be replaced with something similar. It should be abandoned. Stop spending money on BDRs who will churn faster than any other role in your business. The numbers do not support it and they never have.

• Build a database of your total addressable market. Buy it if you have to. This is the foundation of everything else.
• Remove all demand generation forms from your website. Let prospects browse, learn, and evaluate your entire offering without being asked to identify themselves. They will come to you when they are ready.
• Run a consistent, automated social media programme on LinkedIn. We post over 500 adverts and content items every day, with no month-on-month repetition. The volume creates ongoing impressions and the variety sustains engagement at a level most businesses have never experienced from a single channel.
• Plan and broadcast a weekly live show hosted by your salespeople. Not a webinar. A proper show, built for your TAM, that educates and demonstrates expertise over time. This is the single most effective trust-building tool available to a B2B business right now.
• Run an outbound email campaign to your TAM database, inviting them to the show and to your open-access content. Email is still one of the most effective B2B channels — as long as you are sending something worth reading.
• If you have budget, upload your TAM database to LinkedIn and run banner adverts targeted directly at those named individuals in their newsfeeds. You are no longer hoping they find you. You are appearing in front of them repeatedly.

This approach takes a few months to build momentum. The cost is a fraction of what most businesses are currently spending on pay-per-click and cold calling combined. The exposure and engagement it delivers will exceed anything your current strategy has produced. That is not a bold claim. It is what the model consistently delivers when it is built properly and executed with discipline.

The evidence for all of this has been sitting in plain sight for years. The research from Gartner, 6sense, Brent Adamson, and others all points in the same direction. Buyers do not want to be interrupted. They want to find you, assess you on their own terms, and reach out when they are ready. The only question is whether your business is visible and credible enough to be found — and whether you have removed every barrier that stops them from learning about you once they do.

That is what the salesXchange strategy is built to solve.