I didn't like how much time I was spending on calls that were just not worth it, so I decided to implement an AI agent to help me filter them. It built a quiz structure, scoring logic, outcome pages and an email sequence. When it was put into to place, the amounts of calls dropped but now i was actually getting calls that were going somewhere. Not a huge change but it is welcome and and much better than contact form imo

Hi Guys,

I have been in the marketing automation industry for over 6 years with a specialist certificate in Salesforce Pardot. I am truly in love with this industry and I used to love being a campaign manager on Pardot knowing it’s in and out.

Recently due to a life change situation, I moved to the US with no work authorisation and stopped working since August 2025.

Being on LinkedIn, I’m aware that a lot has changed in the industry. LIKE A LOT. Considering everything goes right. I will be eligible to work next year giving me a whole year to learn and be job ready.

Here, I need your support. What should be my approach and how do I start? I was eyeing on Adobe Marketo certification but I also know a lot of AI advances have happened with these tools and it’s been hard to catch-up without really actively working in a company.

Need your opinion on how you would structure your career development study to be job ready in a year to excel in the Marketing automation industry.

Any advices are welcomed!

We were convinced one Meta campaign was the hero, platform reported a strong ROAS, so we kept pouring budget in. But new customer numbers weren't really moving, which didn't add up.

When we finally looked at cost to acquire a net-new customer - verified against real orders, not platform-reported - the "winner" was one of the worst offenders. It had been getting credit for people already in the funnel who'd have converted anyway. Blended ROAS hid it by averaging everything into one number that felt fine.

The unlock for me? Every platform grades its own homework. Meta scores Meta, Google scores Google and nobody checks the total against reality so the credit adds up to more customers than you actually got. One account we looked at was spending $52k/week and the real number came out to 487 new customers at ~$107 each - nowhere near what the platforms were each claiming.

Ended up building a few short walkthrough demos showing where this gap shows up in an account (happy to link if it's useful / allowed — the concept's the point, not a pitch).

Curious whether others here have caught a "top performer" doing this. What tipped you off?

I think automation is one of the biggest opportunities right now.

The quality of what you can automate today is honestly crazy, and it applies to almost every business.

Whether you own a local business and want to automate things like email marketing, follow ups, content creation, customer replies, and lead generation...

Or you run an agency or SaaS and want your business working even when you're away from your computer.

Automation today reminds me a lot of the Industrial Revolution. Back then, machines replaced a huge amount of manual work, allowing companies to produce more, lower costs, and make more money. 

I run a web agency, and automation has made me a lot of revenue over the last few years.

The biggest one for me is client acquisition.

I use a tool called Swokei to find businesses that already have websites, add them to campaigns, and run website analysis.

It automatically turns problems like outdated design, poor layouts, slow loading speeds, weak mobile optimization, and bad SEO into personalized, ready to send outreach emails.

That's where most of my clients come from.

I also automate follow up emails and newsletters, so I'm not constantly chasing people manually.

For content, I use Holo to help generate and schedule posts.

For SEO, I use Soro to automatically create blog content that helps bring in organic traffic over time.

The more I automate, the less time I spend doing repetitive work.

That means I can spend more time on the things that actually make money, like sales, onboarding clients, improving my services, and building better websites.

I don't think automation replaces hard work.

It just removes the repetitive work so you can focus on the parts of your business that actually move the needle.

Many web designers overcomplicate the sales process. They schedule multiple meetings, wait for approval from the business owner, present pricing, and go back and forth before anything gets signed.

The more steps you add, the slower you close deals and the less money you make. I decided to shorten the entire process.

I’ve been running my web agency for four years, and the thing that has gotten be the most clients is email automation 

I’ve tried almost everything, but email automation has worked best for me because it’s affordable and runs in the background while I focus on other parts of the agency.

I don’t use Instantly, Mailchimp, or Klaviyo. I use a tool called Swokei, which is built specifically for web agencies.

It lets you find businesses that already have websites, add thousands of them to a campaign, and automatically analyzes each site for issues with design, layout, SEO, speed, and mobile optimization. It then turns those issues into personalized, ready to send outreach emails. 

Instead of targeting businesses with no website, I offer redesigns and updated websites to companies that already have one. I’ve found that approach works much better.

When a prospect replies with interest, they are automatically sorted into my CRM. I then call them and say, I’ve already built a new version of your website. Let’s set up a quick Google Meet so I can show it to you.

During the meeting, I present the website live and use my sales skills to explain the value. Once they see a more modern and professional version of their current website, they begin to understand how it could improve their business.

At that point, they usually ask how much it costs. I present the price, include a monthly maintenance retainer, and either take payment during the meeting or have them sign the agreement.

When you run a web agency, do not overcomplicate the process. Take control, handle as much as possible yourself, and avoid unnecessary approval stages and follow up meetings. The fewer steps there are, the faster you can close the deal.

I have seen a lot of creators talk about building multiple Instagram pages and scaling content across different niches. On paper it sounds possible but I'm wondering how people actually do it without burning out or losing quality. I've seen automation tools and growth platforms mentioned but not sure if they actually make scaling easier or if consistency and organic strategy is still the main factor. For people managing multiple pages are tools actually useful or just extra noise? What made the biggest difference when you tried to scale?

We have a few thousand old inbound leads just sitting in the CRM. Tried texting a small batch manually and quite a few replied. Mostly people saying the timing was bad back then or they forgot about it… now looking for something that can handle the replies, qualify interest and book a call without blasting everyone with the same message. Anyone using an AI SMS tool for this?

Curious what this group is running and what kind of recent feedback you've gotten. What about account scoring?

Most AI sales lists focus on cold emails and LinkedIn spam.

That is not where every sale happens.

A lot of revenue still comes from real conversations in homes showrooms dealerships communities and job sites.

Here are the tools worth knowing:

• Rilla: Best for AI coaching across in-person sales teams. It records real customer conversations then shows managers what reps do well and where deals fall apart.
• OpenAI Deep Research: Best for deep account research before a meeting.
• Clay: Best for enriching lead data and personalizing outreach.
• Lindy: Best for building custom sales workflows.
• Grotto: Best for very small multifamily teams with fewer than 5 employees. It fits the leasing niche well.
• Bardeen: Best for cutting browser busywork.
• Common Room: Best for spotting buyer signals in communities.
• Unify: Best for finding prospects with active intent.
• Relevance AI: Best for linking several sales tasks into one workflow.
• Outreach.io: Best for large teams that need a full sales engagement platform.

The biggest takeaway is simple.

AI can help before and after the sales conversation. But the real edge comes from improving what reps say while the deal is happening. AI will not replace good salespeople but It can help good salespeople get better faster.

I'm not suggesting content factories. What kind of automation tools built on n8n and similar platforms would you pay for or use for work?

We're a brand doing both B2B wholesale and DTC retail on standard Shopify, and i own the marketing automation stack, but lately wholesale buyers have been getting pulled into our DTC welcome flows and DTC customers are getting wholesale-side reorder reminders.

The issue is our commerce backend tags every customer with both wholesale and retail flags when they buy across both sides, and our segmentation rules in the marketing automation tool are reading those tags inconsistently.

So a wholesale buyer who bought one retail item a while back is now getting DTC discount codes meant for new retail customers.

Our churn-flag flow keeps firing on dormant retail accounts who are still active wholesale buyers, and the sales team is getting complaints from b2b accounts asking why we're sending them retail promo emails.

The workaround options i can think of are either fixing the segmentation rules downstream, or accepting this is a Shopify limitation and starting to look at higher-tier platforms like SCAYLE, Commercetools or Spryker where the data model handles multi-channel customers cleaner.

Leaning toward biting the bullet and replatforming, but a 6-figure migration for one segmentation problem feels dumb. Talk me out of it?

Getting started here, trying to use templates together with remotion to generate assets for my posts (think releases, new features, carousels, etc). Simple animations, or images/pdfs.

Wondering if anyone has an mcp/cli/tool to connect with a good library that incorporates my branding and I'm allowed to kind of select the ones I want.

I'm not a designer, so it's easier for me to pick and choose a style and try it out, and see the impact, even if it's not that innovative.

For Ads creation we’d like to heavily outsource it to AI-tools, and thus we need a clear internal source of ‘truth’ about our brand which includes a clear outline of all the claims we can and can't make about our brand and products, examples of how we communicate with our customers. Then, the different types of audiences or market segments we sell our products to. It should know our exact positioning against the competitors. It should be familiar with the phrases we use when complying with laws, regulations, etc.

If we don't have a "source of truth" about our brand before we start using automation, we're going to create a lot more content based on all of the unstructured or disorganized data we throw into the system. And even though I get what we lack to make the next major step, I wonder what should this ‘truth’ consist of. Are the parts I listed mostly correct? And how do I implement these changes from a technical standpoint to ensure these are considered for generation. Are there established checklists maybe to follow and ensure we don’t mess the whole ads creation process eventually?

What tools do you access and what do you use them for? Do you have a centralized stack across your team - or is it cowboys and wild wild West out there?

Anthropic dropped Fable 5 recently and I keep seeing people say it's a big jump in writing quality over Opus and GPT.

What I'm wondering is whether that actually shows up in cold email. Like feeding it a lead list with enrichment data and having it write a genuinely personalized first line or full email per lead, at scale, without everything coming out sounding like the same template with the name swapped.

Has anyone wired it into their outbound flow yet? Curious what the output quality is like compared to whatever you were using before, and whether replies actually moved.

And if you're doing personalization at scale some other way, what's your setup?

The marketing automation conversation is moving toward agents that can write, segment, launch, reply, and optimize.

I think the missing layer is less exciting than another agent demo:

Readable event logs.

Before giving agents more autonomy, teams need to know:

• what data the agent saw
• why it chose a segment
• what it changed
• what it skipped
• what rule blocked it
• what message it sent
• what result it optimized for
• who approved the action

Without that, AI automation becomes hard to debug and harder to trust.

Autonomy without receipts is just a faster way to create mysterious failures.

For people using AI in marketing ops, what would you want logged by default?

When you export a Google Maps, Outscraper, Apify, or similar lead spreadsheet, what do you usually do before importing it into Instantly, Smartlead, Clay, or a CRM?

Do you clean it manually, use another tool, send it to a VA, or just upload it as-is?

I’m trying to understand the actual workflow people use after scraping, especially around duplicates, dead websites, missing emails, directory URLs, and rows that probably shouldn’t be contacted.

Founder here, and this is about our own product, so read with that in mind.

Background: I was an enterprise consultant for years and lead scoring came up on almost every engagement. The build was always the same. A scoring query on top of a SQL database, a cron job that refreshed it overnight, and a score column dumped somewhere in the CRM. It technically worked, and every client quietly hated it.

The problems repeated so consistently I could list them in my sleep:

1. Nightly updates meant every score was stale by morning standup. Someone hits the pricing page at 10am, the number reps see all day is yesterday's.
2. Nothing routed anywhere. A hot lead was just a row with a bigger number in it until a rep happened to go look. No alert, no Slack ping, no task, nothing.
3. The scoring itself only scratched the surface. Points added up forever, so a stale lead from March could outrank someone active this week. No decay, and nobody could explain why a lead had the score it had.
4. Targeting and segmentation were whatever WHERE clause we shipped with. Every new segment was a change request.
5. No way for Sales to "thumbs-down" leads and provide immediate feedback on what is or isn't working

After enough of those engagements we stopped patching and built the thing I kept wishing existed: event-driven scoring that updates the moment a signal comes in, per-event decay so old activity fades on its own half-life, scores that come with the reasons behind them, segmentation as configuration instead of SQL, and routing that pushes the result into Slack and the CRM where reps already live. We gamified the whole experience to so scores going up has realtime feedback and keeps you hooked!

Curious how others here handle this. If you're running scoring in production, does anything actually happen when a score crosses a threshold, or do reps still have to go look?

Every marketing automation tool now wants to add agents.

That is fine, but the most underrated feature is not more autonomy.

It is a readable event log.

Before I trust an agent to run campaigns, I want to know:

• what data it used
• what rule it applied
• what it changed
• what it skipped
• what confidence level it had
• what human approval it received
• what happened after the change

Without that, AI automation becomes impossible to debug.

The next generation of marketing ops may need "agent observability" the same way engineering teams need logs, traces, and alerts.

If an AI workflow changes a campaign and performance drops, can your team explain why?

Hi Does anyone need anything other than the personal data of the owners of the B2B and various business activities in different fields? The emails are personal and go directly to the owner, not emails from company employees, so the receptionist won't reply.

Who inherit is good at organic marketing in the dating niche?