B2B sales
How to Get Introductions When You’re Entering a New Market
In a familiar market, your brand, your customer stories, and your network do the early trust-building work. In a new market, none of that transfers. Three systematic entry paths that build warm-intro coverage before you have any local relationships of your own.
The new-market cold-outreach problem
Cold outreach is already the hardest version of B2B acquisition. Belkins benchmarked 5.8 percent email reply rates and a 4.82 percent dials-to-meeting conversion across millions of cold contacts in 2024. Those numbers assume some baseline of brand recognition: the sender is at least findable, the company has some presence, a fraction of recipients have encountered them before.
In a new market, that baseline disappears. The brand is unknown. There are no customer stories the prospect has heard. No one in the buyer’s network has mentioned you. The cold outreach numbers get worse, not better, when the sender is completely foreign to the recipient’s context. You are asking for trust you have not had the opportunity to earn.
The warm introduction solves a different problem. It does not ask the prospect to extend trust to an unknown entity; it borrows the trust a connector has already built. When someone the prospect knows and respects makes an introduction, the frame shifts from "unknown vendor asking for time" to "someone I trust thinks this conversation is worth having." Schmitt, Skiera and Van den Bulte, in a peer-reviewed study of 10,000 customers at a German bank, found that referred customers had 16 to 25 percent higher lifetime value and roughly 18 percent lower churn than non-referred customers. The mechanism is trust transfer: the connector’s credibility substitutes for the reputation you have not yet built.
The challenge in a new market is that you do not have the connectors. The three paths below address that directly.
Three entry paths
These paths are not mutually exclusive and the most effective market-entry strategies use all three in sequence: start with the diaspora network (fastest, but finite), move into community ecosystems (scalable, slower to build), and layer in partner co-introductions (highest quality, requires relationship investment).
1. Your diaspora network
Every market has a diaspora: professionals who operate there but came from somewhere else, or who have worked in both places and maintain relationships across both. If you are expanding from Sweden to the UK, your most immediate warm-intro asset is the people in your first and second degree who have UK professional relationships: a former colleague now based in London, a university contact who joined a British firm, a customer who has a UK subsidiary. These connections have one foot in a world you understand and one in the market you are entering. They can introduce you from a position of shared context ("I know this company from working with them in Stockholm") that carries more weight than a cold approach from an unknown entity.
The systematic version: build a list of every person in your LinkedIn network currently based in the target market, or who has worked there within the last five years. For each one, identify what they do now and whether their current role gives them relationships with the types of companies you want to reach. The goal is not to recruit 200 casual contacts. It is to identify 10 to 20 people who have genuine access to the buyers or partners you care about, and who you know well enough to make an honest ask.
2. Community ecosystems
Every market has structured introduction ecosystems: professional communities where introductions between members are expected, normalised, and often reciprocal. The most reliable of these are peer advisory groups and structured referral networks.
BNI (Business Network International) is the largest structured referral network in the UK, with hundreds of chapters. Each chapter meets weekly, and the explicit premise is that members refer business to each other. A single chapter engagement can connect you to 20 to 40 active connectors at once, all of whom are already oriented toward making introductions. The activation friction is low because the introduction norm is baked into the community structure.
YPO (Young Presidents’ Organisation), Vistage, and EO (Entrepreneurs’ Organisation) serve a different level: founders and senior executives who exchange peer advice and, frequently, commercial introductions. A credible referral from a YPO or Vistage peer carries more weight than almost any other warm-intro source because the network is selective and the relationships are substantive. Gaining entry takes time, but a single member who agrees to sponsor you into a community event gives you access to a cohort of connectors all at once.
Industry associations and alumni networks offer a lighter version of the same structure: people who already have a reason to help one another, and where an introduction from a mutual member carries built-in credibility. The UK has deep professional association networks across finance, technology, consulting, and legal services, many of them centred in London but with regional chapters.
The key principle with community entry: find the connectors in the community before approaching the buyers. Your goal in the first wave is to identify 5 to 10 people who are genuinely well-networked within the community and who would be willing to introduce you to the accounts you want to reach. Those connectors are the product at this stage, not the buyers directly.
3. Partner co-introductions
Every market has local players who serve the same buyers you want to reach, but who do not compete with you. An accountancy firm that serves UK SaaS companies. A legal firm whose clients are the CEOs you are targeting. A technology partner whose implementation work puts them inside the companies you want as customers. These are the natural candidates for a co-introduction arrangement: they introduce you to their clients, and you introduce them to yours.
The co-introduction model works because the introducing partner is not doing you a favour; they are delivering value to their own client by connecting them to a relevant provider. The client receives an introduction to something potentially useful; the partner reinforces their own reputation as a well-connected advisor. When the arrangement is framed correctly, it does not feel like a sales referral arrangement; it feels like curation.
To identify the right partners: start from your ICP and ask what other providers those buyers use that are not you. A SaaS company buying from you probably also works with an implementation partner, a CRM provider, a legal firm, and an HR advisory firm. Any of those is a potential co-introduction partner. The ones most worth approaching are those whose clients are the best-fit prospects for your product, ideally companies they work with deeply, not transactionally.
The ask is specific: "We both serve the same kind of companies. When one of your clients is running into [the problem you solve], I’d like to be the person you introduce them to. In return, here is where I think I can add value for your clients by connecting them to you." A one-page brief describing the problem you solve, the profile of companies it applies to, and a clear statement of when an introduction is warranted makes it easy for the partner to act.
The activation-first model
Knowing which entry paths to use is not the same as knowing how to execute them. The most common failure mode in new-market entry is confusing awareness activity with trust-building activity: spending on advertising, event presence, and brand content in a market where no one knows who you are, and being surprised when the pipeline stays cold. The activation-first model inverts that sequence.
Seed before you scale
The most common mistake in new-market entry is trying to build broad awareness before establishing any local trust. A company with no local track record running a high-spend acquisition campaign gets poor unit economics because the brand is unknown and there is no social proof. The more effective sequence: identify 50 to 100 high-quality connectors in the target market first, focus entirely on activating them to their first introduction, and use that activity as the proof you take to the first buyers.
Treatwell, when scaling its salon-booking marketplace into new European cities, learned the same lesson: they could sign up tens of thousands of salons but the platform only succeeded when enough salons were active and booking-ready. The activation metric, first transaction completed, was the real threshold, not signup count. For an introduction marketplace, the equivalent is first paid introduction: a connector who has completed one introduction and been paid for it is meaningfully different from one who signed up and did nothing. Focus the early phase on driving that first transaction, not on growing the registered connector list.
Give them something to send immediately
A connector who wants to help you but has nothing specific to send will not introduce you. The activation bottleneck is almost always the same: the connector has goodwill but no mechanism to act on it. Remove the mechanism friction entirely. Provide a template introduction they can send word-for-word: a short paragraph that explains who you are, why the person receiving it would find the conversation useful, and a specific ask (a 20-minute call, a particular question you want to explore). The template should be written in the connector’s voice (not corporate copy) so it feels like something they would genuinely send.
Show connectors which of their existing connections are being sought before they commit. A connector who can see that five of their LinkedIn contacts match the profile of buyer actively looking for what you offer is far more motivated than one being asked to cast into the dark.
Use the early supply as the demand pitch
Once you have 20 to 30 active connectors in a specific community or vertical, you have something concrete to take to the first buyers: "We have X verified connectors in the London SaaS / recruitment / financial services space, actively making introductions. You can access them from day one." That is a materially different conversation than asking a buyer to join a platform where no one they care about is active yet.
The first buyers should be selected for their ability to generate early success stories, not for deal size. A company where the introduction leads to a qualified meeting within four weeks, documented and shareable, is worth more in the early phase than a larger enterprise that takes six months to evaluate. Those early success stories become the social proof that makes the next wave of connector and buyer activation easier.
The UK as a case study
The UK is an instructive example because the structural conditions for warm-intro market entry are unusually favourable. The UK affiliate and referral market was £933 million in 2024, growing at 7.3 percent annually, the fastest in Europe, ahead of Germany at 6.7 percent and France at 5.7 percent. The cultural disposition toward paid referral relationships is already there; the mental model does not need to be introduced.
LinkedIn penetration in the UK stands at approximately 47.5 million users and 136 percent of the working-age population, the fourth highest in the world. The average UK professional has 144 connections. The supply of potential connectors with genuine LinkedIn relationships is roughly 14 times Sweden’s equivalent pool.
Against this backdrop, the three entry paths look like this in practice: the diaspora path uses existing relationships between Swedish or European contacts who now operate in the UK; the community path uses BNI chapters (hundreds in the UK), YPO groups, and Vistage peer advisory circles; the partner path uses UK professional services firms, implementation partners, and technology providers whose clients are your target buyers. None of these requires spending on UK brand-building before you have any UK social proof. All three generate the introductions that create the early track record that makes subsequent market activity less expensive.
Gartner research on B2B buying finds that buyers allocate roughly 17 percent of their purchase evaluation time to meetings with potential vendors. The rest goes to independent research, peer consultation, and internal discussion. Getting in front of a buyer at all, let alone convincingly, requires access that cold outreach increasingly cannot provide. Warm introductions, in a new market as in any market, are the channel that creates that access before you have the brand to create it on your own.
Frequently asked questions
Why is entering a new market harder through cold outreach than in familiar markets?
Cold outreach in any market depends on name recognition to convert. In a familiar market, some fraction of recipients will know your brand, have heard of customers you work with, or have seen your content, each of which substitutes for direct trust. In a new market where you have no track record, none of those shortcuts work. The email reply rate for cold B2B outreach in general is around 3.4 percent; Belkins benchmarked this across 16.5 million cold emails in 2024. In a market where the sender is completely unknown, the effective rate is lower still. The fundamental problem is not the outreach tactic; it is the absence of trust capital that warm introductions build over time.
Is the diaspora network approach scalable?
It scales as a starting point, not as a long-term channel. The diaspora is a finite resource: you will work through the relevant connections relatively quickly, especially in a market you are just entering. Its value is as the fastest way to get to the first 5 to 10 introductions in a new market, which are the most important ones: they generate the initial track record, the first social proof, and the first connections into community ecosystems that will eventually supply a much larger volume of warm-intro coverage. Think of diaspora as ignition, not engine.
How do partner co-introductions differ from a formal affiliate or referral program?
A formal affiliate or referral program is a systematic channel: standardised terms, tracked via software, often cash-based, designed to scale across many partners. Partner co-introductions are a relationship channel: negotiated case by case, often reciprocal rather than cash-based, typically involving a small number of partners with deep access to the accounts you care most about. The distinction matters because the co-introduction model is more appropriate in the early market-entry phase, when you do not yet know which partner relationships will prove valuable enough to systematise. Formal programs make sense once you know which co-introduction arrangements are working and want to scale them. In a new market, start with the relationship model.
How long does it take to build useful warm-intro coverage in a new market?
The honest answer is three to six months to have enough active connectors to generate a consistent flow of introductions, and six to twelve months to have enough market track record that the introductions carry social proof. The research on B2B buying consistently shows that peer recommendation is the most trusted form of influence. Gartner finds that B2B vendors get roughly 17 percent of the time a buyer allocates to evaluating a purchase, and that personal recommendations outperform that channel for credibility. The value of building warm-intro coverage in a new market is not just the introductions themselves; it is that each successful introduction deepens the social proof that makes the next introduction easier. The compounding is real, but it takes time to accumulate.
Does the Day One shortlist effect apply in new markets?
Yes, and it may matter even more. Research from B2B buying behaviour studies consistently shows that the buyers who end up purchasing go to a specific set of vendors they already have a positive impression of, often described as the Day One shortlist. Vendors not on that list rarely win the deal regardless of their product’s strengths. In a familiar market, you build your way onto that shortlist through brand, content, customer reference, and conference presence. In a new market where none of those assets exist yet, a warm introduction from a trusted peer is the primary mechanism for getting onto the shortlist at all. Being referred is, in effect, being shortlisted. Schmitt, Skiera and Van den Bulte found that referred customers had 16 to 25 percent higher lifetime value. The upstream cause is that the trust transfer at the point of introduction selects for better-fit buyers from the start.
How does LetsBridge support new market entry?
LetsBridge provides a structured way for businesses to request warm introductions to specific decision-makers in a new market, and for connectors, the people who have genuine relationships with those decision-makers, to act on those requests and be paid for the introductions they make. The model is designed precisely for the scenario where a company needs local trust capital it does not yet have: rather than relying on the buyer knowing who you are, the introduction transfers the trust from a connector who already has the relationship. For teams entering a new market, this provides a systematic channel into target accounts that would otherwise require months of cold outreach or expensive in-market hiring.