Publication date:
Publication from:
Over the last decade of my work as a VP of Business Development, and almost seven years at Brightgrove, I have seen hundreds of experiments across acquisition channels: scalable cold outreach, AI-powered pipelines, large internal BDR teams, lead-generation agencies, conferences, performance advertising, partner networks, and more. Some produced a steady stream of opportunities, some produced fewer. But all of them worked.
Then generative AI arrived and started to change the way buyers discover and evaluate potential partners.
We are witnessing the rise of GEO (Gen AI Optimization), as companies increasingly consider how their expertise will be discovered, surfaced, and cited by generative AI systems. According to Forrester, the share of business buyers using AI during the purchasing process increased from 89% to 94% in just one year.
All this is happening alongside declining returns from traditional outbound. AI made drafting and sending thousands of sales emails cheap and practically instant, but the results went in the opposite direction.
This is an imbalance AI creates for B2B marketing and sales: when synthetic volume rises, another message from a less known vendor becomes easier to ignore.
Enterprise IT buyers already have good reasons to be skeptical. Large technology engagements are expensive, complex, and difficult to evaluate from marketing materials alone.
A warm introduction changes the starting point, as it reduces the credibility gap that a new vendor must overcome. The buyer is evaluating a company that has already passed through someone else’s trust filter.
Our findings are almost aligned with broader industry data. Cold outbound struggles to hit a 1% to 2% close rate and generates limited engagement overall, with OneAway reporting a 1.24% reply rate across an analysis of more than 1.5 million cold emails. Some open sources suggest that partner-led opportunities perform significantly better — 41% referral-lead-to-deal conversion rate, consistent with the 30%–50% range we observe for referrals and verified partners.
At any given moment, roughly 95% of B2B buyers are not actively in the market for your services, according to the 95:5 rule developed by Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
Cold outreach burns resources (which are quite limited in our market) trying to catch the rare 5% by banging on their doors. Warm partnership networks, on the other hand, activate precisely when an in-market need arises, carrying built-in trust straight to the decision-maker.
A trusted partner does not have to persuade every company in their network to buy something today. They simply need to remember who can solve a particular problem when that problem actually appears.
ITU already brings together companies with different capabilities, industry experience, technologies, client relationships, and delivery capacity. Everyone here is part of a professional community with a reputation to protect. How can we make those complementary strengths easier to discover and activate when a real commercial need appears? We can build a trusted network of go-to contacts within ITU, organized by industry and technology.
ITU could help members quickly identify the right people within the community to approach when they need specific expertise, capabilities, or market knowledge. This could be a curated network of trusted contacts organized around areas such as:
When a member has a concrete commercial need, they should be able to quickly understand who within the ITU community may be relevant and who they can contact directly. Depending on the case, members could agree on partnership terms and a delivery model.
One CEO or business development leader can know only so many people. One company’s clients will expose it to only part of the market. A functioning partner ecosystem expands that surface area.
The strongest version of such a network is a system in which members understand one another’s capabilities, know how to initiate cooperation, have commercial models they can adapt to specific cases, and can learn from aggregated evidence about what actually works.
For IT Ukraine Association members, that could turn community participation into something commercially measurable: shared capabilities, shared client trust, and, ultimately, shared pipeline. And the value goes beyond winning one project, because you also protect the client relationship by helping the client solve the problem—even when your own company cannot solve every part of it.
If you are an ITU member looking to collaborate or co-deliver on enterprise projects in OTT Videostreaming, PropTech, Hospitality, Aviation, or Renewable Energy—let’s connect on Linkedin.
When one member earns trust, more of the ecosystem should be able to create value from it—and return that value when the next opportunity appears.
