54% of Companies Get Over 20% of Their Revenue From Partnerships: The B2B Cross-Promotion Marketing Strategy I Use (Step by Step)

Research from Partnerize found that 54% of companies say partnerships drive more than 20% of total company revenue. More than a fifth of the top line, coming from audiences someone else built. And most sales teams I talk to still file partnerships under “nice to have, maybe next quarter.”

Here’s the problem that makes cross-promotion worth your time: cold outreach puts you in front of people who have never heard of you. A partner’s audience puts you in front of people who already trust someone that vouches for you.

In this guide, I’ll show you exactly how to build a cross-promotion strategy that turns partner audiences into pipeline, with lemlist as the engine. You’ll get the scenarios worth acting on, the channels that actually move, a sample partner outreach message you can copy, and the workflow I use to find complementary brands before anyone else pitches them.

What is cross-promotion?

Cross-promotion is two or more parties agreeing to share audiences.

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

You partner with another professional (an influencer, or another business altogether) to promote each other’s business or service, which increases visibility and drives sales for both sides.

The point is mutual benefit: expanding reach, attracting new customers, generating more sales. You can get there through co-branded advertising, joint promotions, product bundling, referral programs, and shared marketing initiatives.

Cross-promotion is often used by businesses that target similar or complementary customer demographics. It also works between businesses in completely different industries that happen to share overlapping audiences.

By partnering with complementary brands, you tap into new markets, raise your brand visibility, and build connections with potential customers you’d otherwise pay a lot of money to reach.

A very common example is McDonald’s. They feature a new film in their Happy Meals, or prepare a giveaway for festivals:

I’d add one thing most guides skip. Cross-promotion is a channel you operationalize, not a concept you nod along to. If it never makes it into a sequence, a calendar, or a CRM field, it isn’t a strategy. It’s a good intention.

When can you use cross-promotion?

You can run cross-promotion at any point in your business. Some moments make it land much harder.

Product launches

When you launch something new, you want buzz, especially if the product targets an audience you don’t currently serve.

Say you’re launching a product for runners. A podcast episode with a seasoned, admired runner gets the word out faster than any amount of paid traffic.

Seasonal promotions

During holidays, special events, or seasonal trends, you can partner with complementary brands on joint promotions or themed campaigns.

For seasonal pushes, your best plays are social media posts and email marketing.

Joint events or sponsorships

Hosting or sponsoring events with other businesses gives both sides exposure to each other’s audiences.

Start with a webinar if you’re early. Go bigger with a live event where you can offer bundles, gifts, and giveaways.

React to a partner’s intent signal

This is the one almost nobody runs, and it’s the one I’d implement this week.

A brand that just raised a round has budget and a mandate to grow. A brand that just opened five marketing roles is building a distribution machine. A brand that just shipped a new product needs eyeballs on it right now. Every one of those moments is a partnership window, and it closes fast.

Intent signals agents track hiring, funding, and launch activity across the companies you care about, then push the alert to you while it still matters. Instead of emailing a prospective partner on a random Tuesday, you email them the week they’re desperate for reach.

Timing does most of the persuasion work. A generic partnership pitch gets ignored. The same pitch, sent three days after their Series A announcement, gets a reply.

Benefits of cross-promotion

Cross-promotion is meant as a mutually beneficial partnership. It’s right there in the name.

But what do you actually get out of it?

Increase your audience

First, you reach double the audience you normally do.

Partnering with another brand lets you tap into their existing customer base and put your brand in front of people who had no idea you existed.

You’ll also reach different people, not just more of them. That’s what lets you grow into new segments and scale to needs you weren’t built for originally.

By promoting each other, both brands gain visibility across multiple channels: social media, email newsletters, websites, and whatever else you both own.

Find and qualify complementary brands faster

Reach is useless if you partner with the wrong people. This is where most cross-promotion dies, somewhere between “we should do partnerships” and a spreadsheet nobody updated.

Build the partner list the same way you build a prospect list. The B2B lead database lets you filter 450M+ contacts by industry, headcount, tech stack, and location, so you can isolate brands whose customers look exactly like your ICP without owning the same product.

Then qualify them. Data enrichment agents research each company against the criteria you define, so you know whether a brand’s audience overlaps with yours before you spend two weeks negotiating with them. Audience fit, growth stage, content output, whatever matters to you.

A quick concession: you can do this manually with LinkedIn and a lot of coffee. I’ve done it. It works, and it takes about ten times longer per qualified partner.

Drive revenue

Double the audience, and sales follow. For most of us, that’s the whole point.

Cross-promotion drives revenue in a few ways:

• •

  Increased sales

Exposing your products to a wider audience through a partner brand means new customers who may buy, which lifts your sales revenue.

• •

  Upselling and cross-selling opportunities

Cross-promotion highlights complementary products or services from both brands, which opens upsell and cross-sell paths.

Look at what Absolut Vodka did with Tabasco in 2026, rolling a co-branded spicy chilli vodka into 50+ markets. Two brands, one product, two customer bases introduced to each other at once.

• •

  Higher conversion rates

Collaborative campaigns tend to convert better, because people buy more readily when a brand they already trust makes the recommendation.

• •

  Subscription and membership growth

If your cross-promotion involves subscriptions or membership programs, a partner brand can grow your subscriber base and your recurring revenue.

Especially if you go the affiliate route.

Expand your network

With a good cross-promotion strategy, partnerships keep rolling in. You end up with a bigger network of trusted partners and colleagues in your industry and outside it.

Here are several ways to expand your network through cross-promotion:

• •

  Identify complementary brands

• •

  Offer value to your partners

• •

  Create joint promotions, such as giveaways

• •

  Use social media to post about each other and share content

• •

  Guest blogging or podcasting

Build trust with your partners and clients

Trust compounds, and it’s the asset that makes the second partnership easier than the first.

• •

  Select reputable partners

When you choose a partner with a strong reputation and values that match yours, you prove to your existing clients that you only work with the best. That makes you look like a trustworthy resource by association.

• •

  Keep your brand messaging and performance consistent

Keep your messaging consistent across every cross-promotion channel. Consistency reinforces your brand identity and builds trust with partners and clients who recognize your voice.

Deliver on your promises too. Meeting deadlines, shipping quality content, providing good customer service. Reliability builds trust over time.

• •

  Communicate your expectations clearly

Be transparent about your intentions and expectations for the collaboration. Spell out the goals, the benefits, and the likely outcomes before you start.

• •

  Always deliver value

Focus on what your partner gets. High-quality content, products, or services that meet their needs and beat their expectations. Value earns you the next collaboration.

• •

  Maintain your integrity

Hold your ethical standards across every cross-promotion activity. Avoid anything deceptive or misleading. Transparency and honesty are what make long-term relationships possible.

• •

  Be open to feedback and collaboration

Encourage open communication throughout the process. Listen to their input, address concerns quickly, and solve problems together.

How to set up your cross-promotion strategy

Setting up your cross-promotion strategy takes careful thought and a real plan. Contacting influencers left and right asking for a partnership isn’t a strategy.

So what works?

Define your goals

Before you build a list of potential partners, know what you want out of this.

With cross-promotion you’re usually targeting an entirely new audience, so you need to know who that audience is. That means building a new ICP.

Use the buyer persona generator to define your new client before you go looking for someone to introduce you to them.

Do your research

Look for people whose ethics and ideals match yours. You don’t want your message rewritten or watered down by association.

Researching cross-promotion partners is what separates a collaboration that pays from a logo swap nobody notices.

Key things to check:

• •

  Relevance

• •

  Audience reach

• •

  Brand reputation

• •

  Engagement metrics

• •

  Content quality

• •

  Collaboration history

• •

  Communication style

• •

  Legal and ethical considerations

Reach out to them

Decide beforehand which channels and platforms you want to use, and what you can do for them.

Lead with the benefits you offer. You can negotiate later if either side isn’t happy with the terms, but approaching someone with no clear objective costs you deals down the line.

Here’s the shape of a partner pitch that gets replies. Short, specific, and built around their win:

Subject: {{companyName}} x {{myCompany}}

Hi {{firstName}},

You just launched {{trigger}}. My audience of {{audienceDescription}} has the exact problem it solves.

Proposal: you get a dedicated feature in my next newsletter ({{listSize}} subscribers), I get a mention in yours. Same week, same effort on both sides.

Worth 15 minutes to scope it?

Two rules when you adapt it: max four sentences in the body, and no exclamation marks. Partnership emails that read like fan mail get treated like fan mail.

Run the outreach itself through multichannel sequences so a partner who ignores email still sees you on LinkedIn, and keep every reply in one place with the unified inbox instead of hunting through four tabs to find out who agreed to what. You can write the messages from scratch, use AI, or start from our library of templates.

For what it’s worth, lemlist holds a 4.6 out of 5 rating on G2 across 1,424 verified reviews, so you won’t be the first person running partner outreach through it.

Be respectful of the schedule you set up

This seems obvious, and people still blow it. Keeping up your end of the bargain is the whole deal.

Once you’ve agreed on how you’ll promote each other, stick to the plan. Miss your commitments and you let your partner down, which puts the entire partnership at risk.

If content posting on LinkedIn is part of your agreement, use a post scheduler. It lets you show your partner the schedule and keeps you from missing a deadline.

Cross-promotion channels

With this many promotion channels available, picking just one is hard. Good news: you shouldn’t.

Gartner’s 2026 survey of 645 B2B buyers found buyers used an average of seven information sources during a recent purchase. Seven. If your cross-promotion shows up in one of them, you’re a footnote. If it shows up in four, you’re a pattern.

Here are a few of my favorite channels for cross-promotion, plus some templates to get you moving.

Referral programs

Cross-promotion gets sharper when you combine it with referral programs to expand reach and acquire new customers.

Referral programs are word-of-mouth marketing, built to incentivize existing customers, clients, or partners to send new customers your way.

In a referral or affiliate program, someone else promotes your business and receives a benefit in return: money, discounts, or free merchandise.

Not sure how to get partners for your referral program? Use this template to get started.

Podcasts and video interviews

Podcasts, video interviews, and webinars are excellent formats for two parties to work together, remotely or in the same room.

They let you engage an audience and talk honestly about both offers and how they fit together. We do the same thing on lemlist’s own channel, where guest conversations double as a distribution swap for everyone involved.

If you need ideas for finding guests, check out this template for inspiration.

Social media

Consider the nature of your business when you pick a platform.

For business-oriented or professional audiences, LinkedIn and X are your best picks. For online selling or a more one-to-one approach, Instagram wins.

Whichever you choose, agree with your partner on posting dates, formats, and tagging before the campaign goes live. Vague social commitments are where most cross-promotions quietly die.

WhatsApp and SMS

This is the channel almost nobody uses for partnerships, which is exactly why it works.

Email is where your partner’s inbox goes to drown. A short message on WhatsApp the morning of a joint webinar, or an SMS reminder two hours before a co-hosted live session, keeps the collaboration on schedule without another meeting.

Use it for the operational layer: launch-day nudges, asset reminders, confirmation that the post went out. Save email for the pitch and the contract.

Key takeaways

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, so counting on a little help from a friend is never a bad idea.

Cross-promotion gets you in front of an audience that already trusts someone who trusts you. Done properly, you double your reach, grow revenue, and build connections that keep paying long after the campaign ends.

The part that trips people up is execution. Finding the right brands, catching them at the right moment, and following up across channels without losing the thread.

So start there. Build your partner-prospect list in the B2B lead database, set up signal tracking on the brands you want, and send the first ten pitches this week.

Start a 14-day free trial. No credit card required, full access to every feature.