How B2B Companies Turn Their Business Partners into Company Ambassadors

By Mehmet Davut2023–2024

A study of how a young B2B company with a small marketing budget can enter new markets through the partners it already works with.

Trade fairs, conferences and sponsorships work for B2B companies, but a young company rarely has the budget for them, and what works in one country does not carry over to the next. Advertising on consumer channels seldom reaches the few people who make a B2B purchase. Yet a B2B startup already works with many companies before it reaches its customers: payment providers, identity checks, integration partners and, in time, its customers themselves. This project asked whether those partners could become the company’s ambassadors, in new markets as well as at home.

It is a literature study with a case analysis of a B2B startup preparing to enter new markets. The theory comes from three fields: culture, community and relationships. On culture, it builds on Anderson’s idea of culture as an imagined community. On community, it uses stakeholder theory (Freeman), brand community (Muniz and O’Guinn), Vogl’s seven principles of community and Burke’s theory of identification. On relationships, it uses the commitment-trust theory (Morgan and Hunt), shared value (Porter and Kramer) and research on storytelling.

The result is a three-part approach. The first part is culture. If culture is something a group imagines, a company entering a new market does better by placing itself in a larger, global culture than by adapting to each local one, for example by anchoring its purpose in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The second is community. The company treats its partners, its customers and its customers’ employees as stakeholders and gathers them around a shared idea, through content that helps them in their own work and by supporting its partners’ events as well as its own. The third is turning members of that community into ambassadors, which rests on trust, value the partner can see, mutual benefit and one consistent story that partners can retell in their own markets.

One finding reaches beyond the case. A purely functional promise, such as simpler purchasing, travels poorly: where labour is cheap, the same problem can be solved by hiring. An emotional benefit tied to a global goal carries across markets more easily. Partners also find it easier to talk about a company whose content describes what the two achieved together than about content that mainly sells the company’s own product.

The project closes with advice for Turkish startups, which often prove a product in Türkiye first and only then try to fit Europe and the United States. Starting with a global vision, around goals shared across markets, makes that later step cheaper. In the project’s words, a startup should be a startup of the world instead of a Turkish startup. The approach is offered alongside the usual routes of events, commissions and acquisitions, for companies that cannot yet pay for them.

The findings were shared with the case company’s management, who asked to consult me on marketing decisions afterwards.

A master’s project in Marketing Communications, Istanbul Bilgi University, supervised by Asst. Prof. Dr. Ayşe Bengi Özçelik. Written in Turkish and not published.