Hey everyone,

Maybe it's just me, but it feels like every week there's another AI tool that's supposed to fix outbound.

A better enrichment platform. A better intent provider. A better personalization tool. A better email writer.

At one point our stack just kept growing because every tool promised to solve one specific problem.

But looking back, the campaigns that actually worked weren't necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated setup.

Most of them came down to:

targeting the right companies reaching out at the right time having reliable data and sending a message that actually made sense

Now I'm wondering if I'm overthinking the tech stack and underthinking the fundamentals.

For those running outbound every day...

Have you simplified your stack over time, or does it naturally get bigger as you scale?

I'm genuinely curious where people draw the line.

Hi,

We are a small B2B team, mostly selling into mid sized companies with deal sizes in the 10–30k range we don’t need massive volume, we need a steady flow of qualified inbound leads each month, but the current setup is somewhat stitched together. Right now our set up is HubSpot form, manual lead review, Gmail/LinkedIn follow ups and occasional cold outbound.

It technically works, but it’s slow and very dependent on whoever is online. I’ve been looking into AI SDR tools and different ways to automate qualification and scheduling. Every demo looks great, but it’s hard to know what works once real leads start coming in.

What I’m trying to figure out is whether teams are letting AI handle inbound qualification end-to-end now, or if it’s still supporting SDRs behind the scenes.

After spending the last few weeks dissecting why upper-level operations stall out, a very specific and uncomfortable pattern keeps showing up.

You watch directors and VPs work 60 hour weeks, running themselves into the ground trying to patch every leak, put out every fire, and keep the momentum alive. Everyone around them calls it 'hard work' or 'dedication.' But if you actually look at the structural architecture, it’s not dedication. It’s a symptom of a system that only functions because the leader is acting as the primary bottleneck.

They aren’t scaling the business, they’re personally subsidising its structural failure with their own bandwidth. Most enterprises don't stall out because of the market, they stall out because the leadership is trapped acting as an expensive, over-functioning anchor.

I've been running an email campaign targeting CIOs and CTOs of life sciences. Getting a good open rate but why is no-one replying? Event to a personalized email? Also, what is a work around to get to speak to someone with all calls going to an answering machine

I work in a pretty new area. We help businesses improve their website’s agent experience so they can convert AI traffic better. I know you may hear that and think AEO/GEO. There is some overlap, but we focus on what actually happens when AI agents visit the website and interact with it.

Most people I contact have never thought about agent experience as something a website could improve. I get it. It’s still an unfamiliar concept, and it’s hard to explain in a cold email without writing five paragraphs.

That’s why I’ve been trying something different.

Before contacting a company, I prepare a detailed report about its website. And when I say detailed, I mean we put a lot of work into each one:

• We crawl every page of the website the way an AI crawler encounters it. Most free audit tools inspect only one URL in a browser. We go through the entire site and also crawl it with JavaScript off. That gives us hundreds of data points covering site structure, crawler access, content availability, and freshness signals.
• We test the full path from crawler access to citation. We check rendering, crawler permissions, cloaking, schema, entity markup, authorship, supporting evidence, E-E-A-T, and freshness.
• We score the website across four answer engines and test the company live in each one. A lot of audit tools stop after checking the website itself. We also capture how each engine cites the company, which sources it uses, and what appears in the actual answers.

I know there’s real value in these reports because I’ve seen how much work goes into them. The problem is that none of that matters if the person never opens the link.

I personally hate cold emails that try to bait you into replying without explaining what they want. So I put the full report in the first email so i don't need to write slops like “Want me to send it over?” or “Book a call”.

But it still looks like an unsolicited email from a stranger, even when the report has a lot of value. Maybe I’m overthinking this, but is it the wrong strategy to put this much work into the first email before they’ve even replied?

If you were selling something people don’t immediately understand, how would you approach it?

I'm curious what people are actually doing in practice. We have a process but it feels patched together and I want to see if we're missing something obvious before I try to rebuild it properly. For context we're a B2B SaaS, list of about 25k, mix of inbound signups, event contacts, and some imported from third party tools. Currently cleaning quarterly but no real verification at intake.

I send about 50 connection requests a day with personalized notes but it takes me quite some time to write each. I try to mention something specific like the person's profile but it's draining and I don't have an idea which messages are getting replies.I need help on how I can personalize at a scale and show what is working. How do you deal with this and what works for you? I appreciate any help on this.

I work at Noetio, where we focus on GEO audits for businesses using various AI engines. I've seen firsthand how getting a B2B software vendor recognized by Perplexity AI can be challenging.

To improve your visibility in Perplexity AI responses, it’s crucial to optimize your website's content. Start by identifying the specific terms your target audience is using. For example, if you're in the project management software space, consider incorporating phrases like "best project management tools" or "effective team collaboration software" into your content.

Quality backlinks are also important. Reach out to industry blogs or forums and share valuable insights or case studies to build your authority. The more credible your site appears, the better your chances of being cited by AI engines.

Additionally, keep your content fresh. Regularly updating your site with new articles or resources signals to AI that your content is current and relevant. While this approach takes time and doesn't guarantee immediate results, it can significantly enhance your chances of being included in AI-generated responses over time.

hey guys,
So l've been scaling up our outbound lately, and honestly, the infrastructure management is driving me crazy. Right now, the routine is buying new domains, setting up the DNS, putting them in a warmup tool for a couple of weeks, sending , and then watching them inevitably burn out or land in spam after a short while.
It feel like a never- ending cycle.
Im curious how the bugger agencies or seasoned founders here handle this. Are you guys just accepting constant domain rotation as a permanent cost of doing business, or is there a specific setup or tool stack that actually keeps your sender reputation stable long - term?
Would love to hear how you guys are managing this without losing your minds lol.

You or your sales team have probably come across numerous times prospects which say "send me on some more information". And it can be very tempting to send them on a brochure of your services.

This time last year I spent a substantial compiling a 12-page brochure. It had everything - benefits - case studies -answers to most common objections and testimonials. All professionally designed with copy designed for a B2B audience.

-50 prospects send brochures send brochure

-50 prospects send A4 flyer (printed on both sides) with biz card attached

About 2 weeks after sending, the "brochure" and "A4 flyer" cohort was sent a LinkedIn Request

Result: This was a very small sample size but the A4 flyer were 3x times more likely to connect via Linkedin than those who received the brochure.

Lesson:

Cognitively a 12-page brochure is a like a 5 course meal. Way too much information to digest even with a clear layout. The A4 flyer in comparison is like a half-size KitKat bar - easily digestible. Don't send a brochure. Send an A4 (Letter) sized flyer instead.

What are your experiences? What printed material (if any) have you seen work best?

I run a high-end outdoor gear brand based in Denver. We’ve spent the last year pouring money into SEO and it actually worked—we are sitting in the Top 3 for almost all of our big keywords. Our traffic in Google Search Console looks beautiful, but over the last 60 days, our conversion rate has just fallen off a cliff.

It didn't make sense until I did some "vibe-checking" as if I were a customer. If you scroll just a little bit past our official site, there’s a Reddit thread from two months ago where someone complained about our warranty process. It’s not even a fair review (they broke the gear themselves), but the comments are full of people saying "good to know" and "thanks for the heads up."

It’s like we’re paying for the perfect SEO only to lead people to a search page that secretly tells them not to buy from us. We’re getting the clicks, but we’re failing the invisible trust test 10 seconds later.

I’m starting to realize that rankings don't mean anything if the "sentiment" around the brand is toxic. How do you guys actually track and manage this "hidden" noise before it kills your bottom line?

Hello all,

I am planning to go to a food expo as a visitor, what do you suggest I should do to market my company as well. We are psyllium husk and powder manufacturers and I am planning to attend Indus Food Expo Gandhinagar.

There’s a finance-based Indian SME (basically a DSA dealing in personal and home loans) who contacted the agency I work for, regarding marketing his finance company . For context the owner of my agency is an ex-colleague of the agency owner. And having spent few lakhs on meta ads was not getting traction. My agency's motto is simple and that's how we sell our services - we recommend organic growth, build brand foundations and then market via high-quality social media posts and other platforms. But we recommend to do this for at least 6 months to see results. Website is a huge part of this. ANyways, all this was made clear to the owner right from the get go and we agreed to work at a much lower than market rate, considering the relationship between our promoter and that company's founder. He had been posting AI-gen stuff on his personal founder profile for last 6 months and getting an average of 3 likes on linkedin. On Insta it was similar except for a few testimonial videos which did well.

We built the complete brand colours (logo already existed), themed graphic templates and messaging framework (including Founder's tone and brand voice) to position as a founder-led brand. And from month 1 itself churned out high-quality content, even dividing it into categories, like product-led, prmotional, etc., making sure we have a balanced mix of image, video, carousels etc. and posted weekly from both founder and company page (which we now created). Results were better than before, going upoto 10 likes and similar impressions. and every week he would question the performance when we actually made it clear that we need 6 months minimum. He suddenly decided he did not have the patience and dropped us after 2 months itself and went with an agency producing cheesy tranding reels and completely AI -written posts. Since then, abotu 4 months his results remained the same, worse than what it was even initially.

But in the last 2 weeks, he's suddenly showing up on my feed, postting almost 4 times a week and all his posts are blowing up with 200 likes plus. Content is still AI written, altough he has now done away with the zillion emojis he was using.

I am just wondering, is there something I am missing, some secret override or engagement farming of some kind? The engagement seems to be coming from genuine accounts and not bots.

because the linkedin algo is one of the most difficult to crack and his post's success is just not making any sense to me considering the high quality posts we were doing and the s**t that is being posted now.

We always seem to hit the summer blues when appointments slow down.

I used to rely heavily on cold email, but this year deliverability has fallen off a cliff. I can still send, but I can’t consistently land in the inbox. Most of it appears to be going straight to spam.

Currently rebuilding the entire cold email setup with new domains warming.

How are you driving appointments this summer? What channels are actually working for you right now?

Our best-converting messaging this year came straight out of sales call recordings.

The exact phrases prospects used to describe the problem, and the objections they raised right before they bought, all that stuff writes better copy than anything we brainstorm in a doc.

Mining it by hand is where it breaks down though, I was listening back to calls and pulling quotes into a swipe file, which was fine for a few calls but fell apart the moment call volume picked up, so I started testing a couple AI call tools to pull the recurring language out for me.

Tried BuildBetter and Grain and went with one of them, and it groups the repeated phrasing into themes I can hand straight to the copywriter.

Still figuring out the optimal workflow, but the raw customer language beats invented positioning every time.

The tool matters less to me than the process, so what does your path from call transcript to a usable angle look like?

I recently subscribed to Instantly, but so far it seems like all it does is send and receive a bunch of random, spammy looking emails.

It marks the emails as not spam and moves them out of the spam folder, but it never seems to create realistic conversations or reply back and forth within the same thread. Wouldn’t it be more effective if the accounts actually replied to each other and created natural looking email threads?

Most of the warm up emails also look extremely spammy. They often include random campaign codes or strange text at the end, which makes the whole process feel artificial.

Can Gmail still be manipulated this way, or have these warm up methods become mostly ineffective?

Is Instantly genuinely one of the best email warm up services, or are there better alternatives that create more realistic engagement?

Hi there, we have a pool of 15-20 LinkedIn profiles of our employees from which we’re planning to do LinkedIn outreach for pipeline generation. Each of them have LinkedIn premium and are verified profiles.

We don’t want to expose our employees profiles to automation tools such as Heyreach, expandi, etc. and hence would have a person handle all of the outreach.

What setup do we need so that we could handle outreach across 15-20 LinkedIn profiles without getting any profile banned(apart from leads and spintaxed message sequences)? Someone told us to login all profiles to a browser such as gologin and manage all profiles in the same.

Do we need multiple laptops, internet providers, etc. to coordinate outreaches via all profiles safely?

I’m trying to learn more about GTM engineering, and there’s one part of the outbound workflow I’m still trying to understand.

Once a company matches the ICP, does it normally go directly into an outreach campaign, or does someone investigate whether the account is actually worth contacting right now?

For teams that evaluate accounts before outreach:

• Who owns that decision?
• How often are accounts reviewed?
• What signals tell you that the timing is right?
• Do you investigate every account or only high-value ones?
• What parts of the process are still manual?

I’d especially appreciate a real example from a recent campaign, because I’m trying to understand how this works in practice rather than only in theory.

Honnêtement, déléguer ta création de contenu à 100 % à une agence externe, c'est souvent jeter l'argent par les fenêtres en B2B. Ils ne connaîtront jamais ton produit aussi bien que toi.

Dans ma boîte, on a totalement changé de fusil d'épaule. Au lieu de payer des influenceurs externes ou des rédacteurs qui font des posts génériques, on est passés par l'agence Big Neurons. Leur truc, c'est de former quelqu'un de notre équipe en interne pour qu'il devienne notre propre créateur de contenu (ils appellent ça l'Influenceur In-House).

Résultat : c'est ultra authentique, ça nous appartient, et niveau acquisition ça convertit 10 fois mieux parce que les prospects sentent la véritable expertise métier. Regarde ce modèle, ça correspondra beaucoup mieux à ton besoin de ROI

Curious to know how your intent-based campaigns are performing, which intent signals you prioritize, and what platform you use for intent data. Would appreciate any insights into this.

I work for a sales consultancy and we've tested out a couple different services for renting LinkedIn profiles. The first guy couldn't get us any profiles after a month and gave us a refund. The second company, Aimfox, took a month to give us our first profiles and they are getting shut down every other day so they need to keep replacing them.

On top of all that, my general sense is if you are trying to build a relationship with a potential customer then it's a really bad first step to send them a message with what is a essentially a fake profile.

For the most part, all of the vendors who sell these rented profiles seem a bit sketchy as it is. I did talk to one a while back that seemed more legit than the others but I'm hesitant to try this a 3rd time for all the above reasons.

Has anyone actually had success with renting linkedin profiles? And if so, through what vendor?

Warning for anyone automating Shopping campaigns through the Google Ads API: starting August 31, trying to disable Local Inventory Ads won't throw an error. It'll just be ignored.

👀 Google confirmed it this week on the official Google Ads Developer Blog.

What's changing: every Shopping campaign will have Local Inventory Ads turned on by default. No exceptions.

Until now, control lived in the enable_local field, inside the campaign's ShoppingSetting. Set it to false, Google respected it.

After August 31, that field stops working for Shopping campaigns.

On API v25.1 and later, setting enable_local to false returns ContextError.OPERATION_NOT_PERMITTED_FOR_CONTEXT. On earlier versions, the value just gets treated as true, even if you sent false.

👉 What to do before August 31, in practice:

First, stop trying to disable Local Inventory Ads through enable_local. That path is going away.

Second, use CampaignCriterionService to create a listing scope with product_channel set to ONLINE. This formally separates online-only products from local inventory, right at the campaign structure level.

Third, if you want control without rewriting automation, use the Inventory filter directly in the Google Ads campaign settings, and split budget between online and local products from there.

Neither route is a boolean flip. Both require reviewing campaign structure, not just code.

(Worth doing now, before August 31, not after local inventory has already been showing up where it shouldn't.)

This change lines Shopping campaigns up with the same behavior Performance Max for Retail has had from the start. It's not isolated: Google keeps shrinking the number of fields advertisers control directly, and pushing more toward the platform's own automation.

The practical lesson here: when an API field controls critical campaign behavior, that field has an expiration date. Worth testing the API's real behavior instead of trusting old documentation.

Hey folks, so I launched a B2B software a few months ago, and now we're finally getting decent traffic to our SourceForge page. The problem is, people check out our listing, see zero reviews, and bounce before downloading.

I've tried emailing existing users to leave feedback, but getting busy managers to actually do it is tough. Has anyone else run into this? Did you end up buying reviews to get things moving, or did you find another way to get clients to leave feedback?

I started in a new job 3 months ago, feel like im in a losing battle. The site isn't SEO optimised and requires a lot of technical support, there's no events, no budget. We have ABM cold email outreach which I'd like to pair with physical marketing sent to addresses for highly engaged clicks but I feel so lost with the huge amount on me. Any advice?

Trying to decide the name of our platform that connects companies with vetted freelance teams for custom projects, not a marketplace like Upwork.

• flinkr
• 2match
• La Freelancería

Made a form to make the voting easier: https://forms.gle/zCnrSoBxGxrgmM736

Which one sounds more professional/trustworthy for a B2B service like this? And first word or feeling that comes to mind when you read each one?

Appreciate any honest takes 🙏