SignalOther/ 22 April 2026/ 1 min read
A UK compensation company was fined 90,000 pounds by the ICO in March 2025 for 95,277 automated marketing calls. The consent the company relied on had been collected by a third-party data supplier whose consent statement did not name the calling organisation. The 'we bought the list, the broker had consent' defence has now been formally rejected.
Sales teams that buy or rent UK contact data should treat this case as the operative ICO position on consent provenance.
The regulator's reasoning: PECR regulation 19 requires consent to be specific, informed, and freely given for the calling organisation. A broad consent statement collected by a data supplier does not transfer to a downstream caller unless that caller is named in the consent text the data subject saw at the point of collection.
Operationally, this kills the bulk-list-with-blanket-consent procurement model for any campaign involving automated or pre-recorded calls. The remaining lawful path is one of: (a) live human-dialled calls to non-TPS-registered numbers without pre-recorded content, (b) consent collected directly by the calling organisation, or (c) corporate subscribers under PECR's email exemption (with UK GDPR still applying to the named contact).
Signal
AI tooling has begun to reshape how UK B2B sellers practise the methodologies they have been trained on. Specific patterns: AI-augmented MEDDPICC scoring against deal data, AI-driven discovery question suggestions, AI-summarised call analysis against methodology checkpoints, AI-generated business cases and value framing. The methodologies themselves are largely unchanged; the practice of them is being rebuilt around AI augmentation.
Explained
There is no universally best sales methodology. The right choice depends on segment, deal size, cycle length, buyer sophistication, team experience, and existing infrastructure. A practitioner walkthrough of the choice criteria, with honest assessment of where each major methodology fits.
Explained
GAP Selling (Keenan, 2018) is a problem-centric sales methodology that emphasises deep discovery of the gap between the buyer's current state and desired future state. The methodology pushes hard against feature-led pitching: the seller must understand the buyer's situation more thoroughly than competing methodologies typically demand. Adopted by a meaningful share of UK B2B SaaS sales teams since 2020.