Instead of cold outreach, Accel Events hosts dinner events for potential customers and partners. They create a valuable community space for senior professionals to discuss shared challenges, without ever pitching their product. This builds trust and generates inbound interest and direct requests for calls, proving more effective than traditional sales tactics.

For a food business with a successful B2B wholesale or catering model, the immediate growth path is expanding that existing channel (e.g., from 45 to 90 partners). A brick-and-mortar location is a different business with high costs that can distract from the core strength.

The Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce effect demonstrates the power of combining disparate audiences. For a local business, this means collaborating with another non-competing local business (e.g., a mechanic and a restaurant). This strategic cross-pollination can unlock significant growth by exposing each brand to an entirely new customer base.

A significant part of Nuts.com's business was discovered by accident. They found that microbreweries across the U.S. were buying bulk ingredients like toasted coconut for specialty beers. This highlights the importance of analyzing sales data to identify and then intentionally serve unexpected, high-margin customer segments.

As ad costs rise and organic reach declines, B2B businesses should evolve their sales teams. Instead of focusing solely on cold outreach, empower them with the bandwidth and capability to build and manage a systemized network of referral partners. This creates a predictable and more profitable growth engine.

Instead of launching a service business from scratch, first build a targeted media asset like a local newsletter or directory. This attracts high-value customers at low cost, creating a lead generation engine you can use to partner with existing businesses or launch your own operation from a position of strength.

Jane Wurwand advises a premium food startup to avoid large supermarkets early on. Big chains demand high volume and have long payment cycles that can crush a new business. Instead, focus on small, high-end local grocers where the brand story can shine and payment terms are more manageable.

Instead of cold outreach, identify where employees of your target companies gather—like triathlons or industry events. Set up a booth and let them experience your product firsthand. This creates organic buzz and personal testimonials that travel back inside the organization, generating warmer leads than a direct sales approach.

A marketing agency acquired its industry's largest trade publication not to become a publisher, but to create a powerful lead generation engine. Owning the trusted media source for his target clients (real estate agents) provided an unmatched top-of-funnel strategy, driving high-quality leads directly to his agency.