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.

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 get it, being LinkedIn famous is very appealing.

High engagement and follower count motivates us.

But when your goal is to appeal to everyone, your posts become generic. 

It has:

- broad topics
- basic advice
- no clear CTA

Yes, it gets you followers and engagements. 

But those people only want to consume your content.
NOT buy from you.

Thus, leads = 0.

The solution is to create content for the right audience.

Here's the 4-step process I use:

1. Identify your target audience

→ Who can genuinely benefit from your product or service?

1. Research their problems

→ Go to Reddit and see what they're asking.
→ For example, if you're a founder coach, spend time in founder communities. Look for recurring struggles. That's your content.

1. Create posts solving those problems. 

→ Pick 1 problem at a time and create a post around it
→ Be sure to add your solution to it and a CTA at the end. 

1. Don’t instantly change your entire content

→ Add this content slowly to your posting schedule. 
→ Start once a week and then increase over time. 

The bottom line is, forget those vanity metrics like followers and likes. 

Focus on attracting the right audience to your profile. 
Because those are the people who convert.

I joined a b2b SaaS as head of growth,company was 13 months old sitting at $500K ARR and four months later it is at $4.3M.

a bit of context ,the product was already good when I got there so I optimized distribution for something that already converted and the founder is a close friend which is how I got the authority to gut a working channel in week three. A normal growth hire doesn't get to do that so copy accordingly

Weeks 1 to 2: I didnt do anything

I read docs, sat on sales calls and talked to customers about why they bought as I came from a completely different market and didnt know the buyer so I didnt touch anything for two weeks and the founder was visibly annoyed by day 10.

Cold email: cut volume 90%

They were sending 500 to 1,000 a day at anyone with a pulse and positive reply rate was under 1%. I dropped it to 100 a day.

Then a copy tournament with five variants, three heavily personalized and two templated. Winners get rewritten and run against each other, losers get cut, repeat.

A week in I checked deliverability and found most of our email was going to spam as domains had been hammered at 1k a day for months with no warming.

So that week of testing was worthless, i was reading reply rates from an inbox most prospects never opened. I threw it out, burned the domains and rebuilt with proper warming.

One week lost.

After the rebuild and ramping up mails a day again positive reply rate was around 4% . Meetings went from 7 to 8 a week to 25 to 30.

Stack was Clay and instantly,you probably dont need clay, build the scraping project properly and lead quality is comparable for a fraction of the cost. We already had the subscription so switching wasnt worth the hours.

Referrals, credits only

Product works so the clients were happy hence we built a referral program. we offered credits and the founder was firm on this (he was right). Cash kickbacks become a procurement problem at any company with a real finance team, one account told us flat out they couldnt accept money and credits went through every time.

Two things made it work,first every acc gets touched twice a week minimum whether they want to talk or not. And another that we ask right after someone says something good.

on a four month clock, referral revenue came from customers who signed before I arrived,I built the incentive and the cadence not the trust. If you are at month two of your own company, this channel isnt avl to you yet.

Instagram: killed it

They were spread across Instagram, X, and linkedIn doing all three badly. Instagram was there on the logic that ecom brands live on it, which is true but it eats budget and bandwidth for months before it returns anything.

Insta is a channel you buy once you already have money and cut it in week three.

X and LinkedIn, paid

Went hard on X, (paid ).The 5K to 30K accounts whose audience was exactly our buyer with mostly $50 to $300 a post.

after small trials, one did 150K views and drove 80 to 100 demos off a single placement. so basically you are buying lottery tickets and one hits.

Then we brought in a friend's agency for a proper launch across X and linkedIn. got like few million views and 800 demos.

Free credits at signup

Signup friction was killing us at the top,we offered 7 days of free credits with no card and demo request so that people touch the product before they talk to a human.

might be the reason the paid traffic converted. Sending 800 launch demos into a book a call wall would have wasted the spend.

Reply within 15 minutes

Biggest leak in the funnel was that reps were taking hours to reply, sometimes a full day and when the follow up went out, the case study attached was the same pdf everyone got. Identical document to a funded fintech and a 12 person agency, regardless of what the prospect said on the call twenty minutes earlier.

so we made two changes,first reply within 15 mins during working hours, coverage across two time zones so that's most of the day.

And the rep picks a case study that matches the prospect, then writes two lines connecting it to the specific thing that person raised. Same asset library, thirty seconds of work. Follow up response rate roughly doubled literally.

Founder at events

Everyone says events are not worth it at this stage but everyone also isn't accounting for a founder who is "genuinely" excellent in a room.

I pushed him into everything for four months helping us for real connections most of which will land over the next year rather than this quarter.

Personal brand

He built his, I built mine and the team also posted. We hired ghostwriters to hold volume.

Events and profiles fed each other, offline presence pushed people to the accounts, the accounts amplified the launch and the launch drove demos.

Slowest channel on this list and the one I started on day one.

What I would add if I started over: podcasts

Niche b2b podcasts are desperate for guests with real numbers who will say something specific in 45 minute ( warm audience that already trusts the host)

We started in month four and should have started in month one.

What's next

Cold email stays on permanently, referrals mostly run themselves now, more launches and personal brand keeps compounding.

And the one I am most excited about is our own subreddit. A real community around ai marketing where people talk shop,( not a promo channel coz those die)

Happy to answer questions.

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.

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.

Hey guys , I've seen lot of people go for signal/trigger based outbound systems like recent funding , job role hired, job role changes , techstack using, interacting on linkedin activity , expansion signals, headcount growth and many more. I just want to ask how the hell are you guys actually creating such system (technical side) to automate and scale and personalize every email. The idea is to time the warm outreach and lot of people do it very low volume like I saw one guy sending 12k emails in 5 months and got 88 opportunities (he had almost 20 years of b2b saas sales experience) . I just want to ask how do we build this technically and scale it and make it a system ? Do we have to actually manually reach out to people first to actually see whether outreach is working or not ? On one hand there are people saying just do the volume like 3k-5k emails per day and some say only be relevant to prospect so that they'll reply , im really confused ....

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?

B2B SaaS, launching in 3 weeks, ~$15k budget, no existing audience

Trying to figure out how startup launch videos actually get millions of views on X and LinkedIn. Is it the video itself, the timing, or coordinated reposts on launch day?

Specifically:

What's the best time to post a launch on X?

How many reposts in the first hour actually matter?

it worth paying for launch distribution, or does your own investor/advisor network cover it?

How much should a launch video cost at this budget?

Anyone who's run one,, hat actually moved the number?

Idk if this is the right sub for asking this question but anyways

I am starting my export firm related with leather bags who are my prospects are they trading firms or local vendors??? Like whom should i target??

Hello everyone,

To give you the context, i own a newly created company but i have a product that was already tested and replies to good use cases especially large companies.

At this stage i need to start selling with a good volume, at least having a pilot project with small and medium businesses.

My idea is i wanna pitch my product to help a specific type of businesses clients, for a very specific topic (i sell more the use case rather than the product)

I fixed my product pricing plan like this:

• One time licence price: 15 000 USD
• Time of implementation: 4 weeks
• Includes 4 months of support, first use case implementation
• Additional use cases has their own price depending on time and complexity

Im looking for a sales partner who can help for a commission basis payment, if we can get a pilot project at least, they get 20% which is 3000 USD, and can continue to have use cases commissions as well if they help on that.

NB: Im not looking for someone to just run email campaigns, but more of someone with potential relationships, has a good LinkedIn network, with the help of cold emails

My question is, does anyone have an idea where i can find these kind of partners? i tried LinkedIn and Upwork without success, anyone's suggestion will be appreciated

Thanks

Been noticing a pattern across B2B outreach conversations lately: teams that used to compete on list size and send volume are shifting toward "who's showing intent right now" as the actual differentiator. Feels like a genuine shift rather than a trend cycle — curious if others here are seeing the same thing or if it's specific to the corner of B2B I'm in.

A few things driving it, from what I've seen:

Reply rates on pure cold-list outreach have been trending down across the board as inboxes get more saturated

Buyers increasingly self-signal intent publicly (posts, comments, job changes, hiring pushes) before a sales team ever reaches out — the data's sitting in public view more than it used to be

Teams that used to treat "more volume" as the lever are shifting budget toward finding and acting on these signals faster, even if it means fewer total touches

Is this actually changing how outbound teams are prioritized and staffed, or is "intent-based" mostly still a buzzword layered on top of the same list-based process underneath? Curious what people who run outbound at scale are actually seeing internally.

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.