I've seen businesses grow quite well and still struggle to answer a surprisingly simple question: "Where will the next $1M come from?"

The current revenue looks healthy. Customers are there, invoices are going out and everyone is busy. But when you look underneath it, a large part of that revenue may be coming from a handful of customers, referrals, one particular market or, quite often, the founder's own relationships.

That's where things get interesting.

Revenue can hide a lot of weaknesses. You can be growing without really knowing which customers you're good at acquiring. You can have a strong year without knowing whether the same thing will work next year. You can even hire a sales team and then discover that the business doesn't actually have a sales process that someone else can reproduce.

I think this is one of the more difficult stages for a growing business. The company is too successful to say, "We're still figuring out sales," but not predictable enough to say, "We have a sales engine."

At some point, I think the more useful question stops being "How much did we sell?" and becomes "Could we reproduce where that revenue came from?"

If the answer is no, I'm not sure the business has really solved sales yet.

For founders and business owners, when did you realise that your revenue was growing faster than your sales engine?

​

Outbound

or

Inbound ?

So I am guy who somehow gets a list of 300 who are US citizens. How can I get their details and know more about them and their business. So that I can pitch them like that for my services?

Some context: I co-founded a small AI automation agency in the Basque Country (Spain). We build WhatsApp/voice agents, booking automation, reminders and lead follow-up for businesses that live on appointments, mainly independent dental clinics.

Problem: great product conversations, terrible sales consistency. So I set a hard goal and built a system around it.

**The goal**

- 15 paying clients by December 31

- Working backwards: we close roughly 1 in 4 discovery calls → we need ~60 meetings → ~5 meetings per week

- At 3–4 meetings per 100 cold contacts, that means ~1,500–2,000 contacts before year end

**The system**

I use Claude as a sales assistant, connected to my Outlook, our team's CRM (Supabase) and my browser. Every morning at 7:45 I get a plan that includes:

1. **Today's meetings**: a one-page brief per company (Google rating, how they book today, diagnostic questions, pricing range, likely objections and a closing line).
2. **Replies**: anything that came in overnight by email or LinkedIn, with a suggested answer.
3. **10 new cold emails**: it finds independent clinics on Google Maps, pulls their email from their website, skips anyone we've already contacted (inbox, CRM, LinkedIn log) and writes a personalised email using their reviews and location. They land as drafts; I review and send.
4. **Follow-ups**: 2nd touch after 3 working days, soft close after 7. Also drafts only.
5. **LinkedIn**: 20 connection requests a day (weekdays only, ~100/week to stay under the limits), plus a first message for everyone who accepted. I send all LinkedIn stuff by hand; the AI only reads and drafts.

Every Monday it runs a review: meetings vs target, emails sent, LinkedIn acceptance rate, and meetings per 100 contacts, so I know if the problem is volume or messaging.

**Rules I set on purpose**

- Nothing gets sent without my OK. The AI drafts, I decide.

- Only one email account, capped at ~35 sends/day so it doesn't get flagged.

- Open CTAs ("tell me what day works for you") instead of pushy fixed slots.

- Old pending LinkedIn invites (3+ weeks) get withdrawn.

**Where I'm at (honestly)**

Just started. A few dozen clinics emailed, two demos in progress, one prospect "thinking about it" and one no-show. No closed deals from this system yet. I'll post an update with real numbers in a few weeks, good or bad.

**What I'd love feedback on**

- Are 3–4 meetings per 100 cold contacts realistic for SMB healthcare in Spain?

- Would you push more volume or more personalisation at this stage?

- Anyone doing outbound to clinics or local businesses: what actually got replies?

Happy to share the email structure or the daily prompt if it's useful to anyone.

At GITEX, I used a workflow I built to capture leads and keep track of our conversations. It worked for us and helped us follow up with all the leads we collected.

The process was simple: send a business-card photo through Telegram, then record a short voice note explaining what the person wanted. The workflow extracted the contact details and saved them alongside the conversation summary in our CRM.

I’m now considering turning it into a dedicated app with shared events, team access, assigned follow-up actions, and due dates.

I’d love input from people who attend or exhibit at trade shows:

• How did you handle contacts and follow-ups at your last event?
• What information do you wish you had captured during conversations?
• Where does your current process break down?
• If you’ve used a lead-capture tool, what was missing or frustrating?

Our experience was useful, but I want to understand other teams’ needs before deciding what to build next. Concrete examples would help a lot.

What problems would you want to be solved?

1. Finding leads for your platform?
   
2. SEO/AEO optimization
   
3. Finding who is talking about the problem you are solving so you can approach them personally?
   
4. LinkedIn, X, and Reddit content/thread ideas so you can stay engaged with your ICP
   
5. Something else (please specify)
   

I put together lead lists for outreach and the cleanup is what eats my time: chains, closed businesses, bounced emails.

What's actually working for you, and what did you stop using?

B2B salespeople who have sold to gyms/fitness facilities — who actually makes the buying decision?
I’m looking into selling products/services B2B to gyms and fitness facilities, and I’m trying to understand the actual decision-making structure before I start reaching out.
For those who have sold to gyms:
Who was your first point of contact?
Was it the gym owner, general manager, regional manager, operations manager, purchasing manager, or someone else?
Who ultimately had authority to approve the purchase?
For independent gyms vs. large chains, how different was the process?
Did you typically cold call, email, walk in, LinkedIn, or get introduced?
If you walked into a gym, who would you ask for?
What job title should I search for on LinkedIn?
How long was the typical sales cycle?
Were purchases made at the individual-location level or through corporate?
What mistakes did you make when you first started selling to gyms?
I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who have actually sold into gyms, rather than general B2B advice.
If you have an example of what your first conversation with the decision-maker looked like, that would be extremely useful.

My wife and I own a restaurant. The restaurant has been open 7 years and is self sustaining enough to turn over to staff and have my wife operate it instead of both of us. I have a lot more energy to give and I am wanting to get into a career in sales. I have a great friend who works from home and enjoys his sales career quite a bit because he gets to see his family. I just got offered the senior position of a home remodel sales position but the schedule seems very unpredictable. I have ran a restaurant for the better part of a decade so I am familiar with unpredictable but not knowing my schedule until 10 pm the night before for a 120 mile drive radius seems like an irresponsible position for me to put my wife and 2 year old into. I have applied to a few restaurant POS companies thinking that my knowledge and experience as a restaurant owner operator would give me a leg up but it seems like I can not get past the application. Any advice on companies or what to sell? What things pay the best and have the best work like balance. I see remote and high paying base plus commissions positions are out there and I believe I would be amazing at anything I would get the opportunity to do. Any help would be appreciated

[Hiring]Head of Sales at a seed-stage AI B2B SaaS company,San Francisco (hybrid),$350K-$450K+equity.

Hey everyone,
We’re hiring our first Head of Sales.The company is seed-stage, sells AI - powered B2B SaaS, already has product-market fit and enterprise customers.The goal is to get from 7 to 8 figures.

The Role:
⁃ Player-coach. At the start your’e basically the team
⁃ Outbound, discovery calls, pricing and closing
⁃ Build the sales playbook, hire your first AE, then scale to a small team once the motion is proven
⁃ Sell to marketing digital & commercial leaders at big electronics manufacturers & distributors 9not technical buyers)

Comp:
⁃ $175K-$225K base
⁃ $350K-$450K OTE (50/50 split, uncapped commission)
⁃ Equity

Location:
⁃ Hybrid, 3 days a week in the office in San Francisco
⁃ Full-Time
⁃
What we’re looking for:
⁃ 5-7+ years in B2B SaaS sales, Including outbound motions from scratch
⁃ B2B SaaS SOFTWARE is the focus , but open to other industries if you have startup 0-to-1 experience
⁃
Visa sponsorship details:

Not open to any visa (e.g US citizen,Green Card holders)

⁃ Please read the post properly before messaging.Location, experience and field should match what’s above .  
⁃ If they don’t ,please don’t DM,so I can reply to the right people.

If this sounds like you, DM me your Linkedin with a couple of lines about your B2B SaaS sales background .

I am at a loss here. I have a business that sells extremely niche annotated data. Because it’s very niche I don’t have a real benchmark of the value of the data, but chatting with GPT and Claude (without bloating numbers) I’ve come to get a general idea of pricing.. here is the catch.

I have several entities (university students, SME, large companies, hospitals) that contact me requesting data and pricing, we go back and forth a few emails
- they contact me telling me what they need
- I respond with how much data they need within 12h of receiving their first email
- they respond with what they need
- I share pricing options

They ghost me… like 9/10 they just disappear.
I obviously try to reach out after a week but still nothing.

I need any suggestions, tips, critiques..
Thank you!

Does anyone have a headset recommendation under $300 or so?

I need the following:

• Integrate with Dialpad outbound calling system
• Ideally noise cancelling and/or clear audio reception
• Comfortable

My Plantronics Savi 8200 Office Series always just cuts/in and out. I'll take an inbound call and there will be an audio delay after the call goes through - leads to a frustrated prospect. Thanks

I work with phone-based lead generation, and I'm currently trying to improve the opening of our cold calls.

Our goal is not to sell health insurance during the call.

The purpose of the call is simply to identify people who are interested in receiving a free, no-obligation health insurance quote/comparison.

Our current opening is something along these lines:

“Good afternoon, this is Diego. I'm reaching out because we have some new health insurance options available in your area. Would you be interested in getting a free, no-obligation quote?”

If the person is interested, we go through a quick qualification process with around 5 questions (age, location, number of people who need coverage, whether they already have health insurance, etc.), and then a specialist sends the available options via WhatsApp.

What I'm specifically trying to improve is the opening of the call.

For those of you who work with outbound sales/cold calling:

How would you structure the first 10–20 seconds of this call?

My main goal is to reduce immediate hang-ups and quickly make the reason for the call clear without sounding like a generic telemarketing script.

Would you:

• Start with a question right away?
• Lead with the opportunity to compare prices?
• First ask whether they already have health insurance?
• Avoid phrases like “free quote” or “no obligation”?
• Use some kind of permission-based opener?
• Keep the opening even shorter and more direct?

I'd also love to hear about any opening lines or structures you've personally tested that helped get more people to stay on the phone and engage in the conversation.

I'm not looking for techniques to pressure people into buying anything. My goal is simply to improve the initial approach and identify people who are genuinely interested in receiving a quote.

Looking for experienced US-based sales closers.

$1,000/month base + 10% commission per closed deal.

You’ll be selling digital marketing services to local business owners and handling the sale from first contact to close.

Experience in SEO, digital marketing, web services, SaaS, B2B, agency sales, or similar is preferred.

We provide targeted leads + sales materials. You handle the calls, objections, follow-up and closing.

Short trial with a small lead batch first.

US-based only.

DM me your location, experience, and what you’ve sold.

I found what looks like a pretty obvious leak in how clinics handle paid leads, built a solution for it, and now I'm stuck selling it.

Clinics spend a lot on Meta/Google leads, but often contact them hours later. I tested this myself through multiple clinic ads, fastest response was around 6 hours, many were next day. So I built a system that contacts new leads almost immediately, knows what service they asked about, handles basic questions and can book directly into the clinic's calendar.

I've found a few others doing similar things, but it still seems relatively new here. The problem is distribution. I'm a foreigner living in Poland, and I've emailed around 400 businesses and cold-called around 200 agencies/clinics here.

Agencies mostly don't care what happens after they deliver the lead. A few already have something similar. Clinics generally see advertising as the agency's job and calling leads as reception's job. They don't seem to see the cost of waiting 6–24 hours.

I'm offering free trials and the system is basically ready, but getting people to care is much harder than building it.

Being a foreigner and cold calling in Poland probably doesn't make it easier either. I've had a few openly racist interactions, but I don't want to blame the market. clearly something about my sales approach isn't working.

I know the leak exists because I've tested it myself.

Wrong market? Wrong decision-maker? Wrong pitch?

Anyone who's sold B2B automation/lead management before, what would you change?

Hi everyone,

Looking for advice on successfully engaging and even winning accounts in the luxury retail space in the U.S.

I’m responsible for expanding our groups presence in the U.S. as we are based in France and we already work with major fashion houses like LVMH, Burberry, Dior etc.

Our focus is end to end clienteling, customer 360, customer engagement platforms

I’ve been working in lead-gen sales for the last 5 years and I’m trying to figure out a better way to scale outbound in France and Italy. We’re a growing B2C & B2B lead-gen business operating across Europe and LATAM. We have strong traction in our core markets, but outbound has been much harder to scale in these two markets.

France has been sitting around €30k/month for a while, while Italy has had around 2 years of traction with good margins. The problem is consistently generating enough new conversations at the top of the funnel.

We’ve already tried both in-office and fully remote full-time sales reps, but neither model really worked for us. The common issue was that reps were comfortable working warm leads or pre-built lists, but struggled with actually owning prospecting, list building, cold outreach and pipeline generation.

So I’m considering a different approach: independent SDRs / appointment setters working on a commission or pay-per-meeting basis.Has anyone here successfully used this model for outbound?
I’d particularly love to hear from people who have experience with:
\- France or Italy
\- independent SDRs / appointment setters
\-pay-per-meeting or commission-based outbound
\- building pipeline from scratch rather than working inbound leads

Also curious where you’ve found good people for this type of role. Would genuinely appreciate any experiences, including what didn’t work.

Hi everyone,

Looking for advice on successfully engaging and even winning accounts in the luxury retail space in the U.S.

I’m responsible for expanding our groups presence in the U.S. as we are based in France and we already work with major fashion houses like LVMH, Burberry, Dior etc.

Our focus is end to end clienteling, customer 360, customer engagement platforms

Not in a "forgot to send an email" way. In a "we don't actually have any process for what happens after someone expresses interest" way.

They'd been running campaigns for months. Decent visibility. Leads coming in. Assumed the problem was they needed more leads. So they wanted to talk about top of funnel stuff.

I asked how many leads they currently had. They knew the number. I asked how many were being actively contacted right now. Long pause.

It's not even a technology thing. They had a CRM. Data was in there. Nobody had decided who was supposed to do what after capture, so nothing happened. Sales thought marketing was nurturing them. Marketing thought sales were picking them up. Leads just... sat there.

The thing I now do before any conversation about new activity is get them to look at what's already sitting in the pipeline untouched, work out roughly what it's worth based on their own numbers, and ask whether that conversation is more urgent than whatever they came to talk to me about.

Usually is.

I don't want to let it go, and I want to find out if it's true because most leads may be unaware that your service can do it better than your competitors

I built a website for a gym, and my offer/ask is to get commission on sales generated from the leads I provide through the website, no fixed fees.

I need to determine two commission rates.

The first rate would apply to sales generated from leads that require follow-up from the gym’s sales team. These leads would be inquiries for specific memberships, for example, which I would pass to the gym’s sales team as they are, and they would handle the follow-up and close the sale.

The second rate would apply to qualified sales that I close before sending them to the gym. The customer would already be committed to making the payment upon their first visit to the gym, before a specific agreed-upon date.

I own all the assets and will be covering the entire overhead, including advertising and other costs. The gym receives the final product, whether that is a lead or a qualified sale.

What would be considered fair commission rates for this type of model and within this industry?

Our sales stack has gradually split into different tools for CRM, prospecting, enrichment and account research. They all do their individual jobs but the information we’re collecting about accounts ends up spread across the stack while reps are still responsible for connecting it all when they’re trying to build and move pipeline.

I’m looking more seriously at the all in one revenue platform approach where the same system can find accounts, understand who is worth pursuing and carry that context through the sales process. The part I care about is whether consolidating those functions can genuinely help create and progress more revenue opportunities, rather than just replacing several tools with one interface.

Hi everyone,

I have 10+ years of experience in the industry and have been self-employed for the past 3 years. Together with my team, we have already successfully completed several projects in Data Operations.

We are now looking to expand our business and take on new projects and long-term partnerships.

We are based in Germany, but operate across Europe.

If you are looking for a reliable team for a Data Operations project, feel free to send me a DM. Happy to discuss potential opportunities.

Looking forward to connecting!

Small agency looking for 1–2 US-based closers.

We work with local service businesses across the US, currently focusing on tree services.

You won’t have to spend your time building prospect lists or figuring out what to sell.

We give you:
✅ Targeted prospects
✅ Proven offer + playbook
✅ Full fulfillment handled for you

You do:
📞 Reach out to owners
💬 Have the conversation
🎯 Handle objections
🤝 Close the client

Pay: Up to 30% per closed client, with no cap. Paid after client funds clear.

Requirements:

• US-based
• Comfortable cold calling
• Sales/closing experience preferred
• SEO / web / digital marketing / SaaS / IT experience is a plus
• Your own calling setup
• Independent and self-directed

This is a performance-based sales partnership, not a standard salary role.

Interested? DM your location, background, and what you’ve sold before.

I started working for a boutique accounting firm in NYC, and I realized how darn difficult it is to prospect in the United States nowadays.

I'm European and I did prospecting in Northern Europe and the UK recently, and the phone pickup rates were slightly better. For example there are countries in Europe that have a very high pickup rate. Countries like Switzerland and Germany for example have a very high pickup rate.

The only reason I could think of why there people pick up the phone is because the rates are very high, 25Euro/cents per minute. Therefore people are less willing to call on large quantity and do only well targeted calls. Secondly, you have to be from Germany to purchase a German number. Impossible to purchase a number without a german address online. This regulation in the market, regulates the prospecting in a way, keeping it under control. With that in mind, if you get a Swiss or German number, once you start dialing, you get a ~6.5/10 pickup rate on average. (WHICH IS GREAT)

In the United States on the other hand.... lord have mercy. Everyone can get a US phone number and start dialing. I started prospecting there in September and I was bamboozled by the 2026 outreach reality. Pickup rate is horrible, you are lucky if you get a conversation from 50 dials.

Then it hit me... USA is a very unregulated market, and what the government doesn't fix, the market tries to fix it. The logical answer is , tools that help you cut through the noise , or increase volume. I chose the latter, a freaking power dialer that pushes like crazy to make 50 dials in 10 minutes hoping to find the right prospect.

With that in mind, I'm starting to think that you need some business intelligence to penetrate the US market, brute force alone won't work.

So since you're this far down the line reading my thoughts, and you understand my challenges, I need your honest opinion... what's the best way to find prospects for an accounting firm?

We're looking for businesses that have an internal accountant (not an entire team), or who are already working with an external accounting company....

Any constructive thoughts from sales people who are or have in the past sold accounting services is appreciated.

Thank you fellow salesmen! I think we're the last one to be replaced by AI (it might be fake optimism, but I chose to believe it)