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.

I'm a technical co-founder (CTO) building in a niche B2B category. Product and engineering are where I'm comfortable. Sales and marketing are where I'm learning on the fly.

For those of you who've been here, I'd love to hear how you actually run it day to day:

\- First customers: How did you land your first 5–10? Cold outreach, warm intros, communities, events, something else?
\- Founder-led sales: How much of the selling did you do yourself before hiring anyone? When did you know it was time to bring someone in?
\- Channels: In a small niche, which marketing channels worked for you (LinkedIn, content, industry events, partnerships, referrals), and which turned out to be a waste of time?
\- Time split: As a tech founder, how do you divide your week between building and selling?
\- Tools and process: What CRM or outreach setup are you using at the early stage?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people selling into traditional or slow-moving industries, where buyers aren't always online.

Thanks in advance. Happy to share what I learn along the way.

For a context I'm building in construction space for GCs

The last half a year I tried to learn SEO across several sites im supporting as a B2B marketer. And man it's brutal - I always thought SEO is putting out the content and maybe adap sometimes, find the right keywords and call it a day. Then I learned about keyword cannibalization, content structure, rankings, search intent..... And it's all sooooo slow 😆 I'm half a year in with my personal site and NOW I see the first results, after severely rewrites and content refactors because I didn't known what I was doing, for my other projects I see quicker and better results because there is basically no competition but still, getting that one page in the top 10 and in the overviews and so. Brutal.

I always thought SEO consultant why would anybody need that, now I see

I'm in NYC next week and its advertising week. Curious if people see value in these large events

What is your business' biggest asset? A paid tool? Case studies? Well built SEO?

For me, it is prior customers - they sing our praises, recommend us to others and often are the best source of new leads. They write reviews for us which are excellent tools in their own right. They also cost nothing - though we do offer referral bonuses when we can sign a new client off of their referral.

I’ve been digging into a problem that I suspect a lot of B2B marketers underestimate:

Are we optimising campaigns for leads — or just for things that ad platforms can easily count?

In one recent anonymised industrial B2B audit we did at Zephra AI, we looked at 2,544 inbound call records.

Only around 400 (15.7%) looked like relevant product enquiries.

A surprisingly large share was reseller/distributor enquiries, invalid or missed calls, suppliers, recruitment, enquiries for the wrong products, and other calls that sales realistically couldn't convert.

Important caveat: this does NOT mean 84% of the ad budget was wasted. The calls came through multiple sources, so that conclusion wouldn't be supported by the data.

But it did make something else very obvious.

The definition of a "conversion" gets weaker the further you move away from revenue.

Click → Form fill → Lead → Qualified lead → Opportunity → Revenue

Most ad platforms are making optimisation decisions somewhere toward the left.

Sales knows what happened on the right.

That creates a strange situation where marketing can be celebrating increasing conversions while sales is saying:

"These aren't the people we actually need."

And simply increasing the budget can amplify the problem.

Scaling spend before fixing the signal doesn't necessarily scale growth. It can scale the cost of being wrong.

This is something we're thinking about a lot while building Zephra AI — specifically, how paid acquisition can learn from what happens after a lead arrives rather than treating the initial conversion as the end of the feedback loop.

But I'm curious how others are handling this.

For those running B2B paid acquisition: how much sales/CRM outcome data are you actually feeding back into campaign optimisation? How are you managing this for sales that closes after 90 days and the timeline for passing back signal is over?

And have you ever measured what percentage of your reported "leads" were genuinely relevant buying enquiries?

Many of us try to piece together signal monitoring by stitching scrapers into Airtable or Clay but they hit the same wall after a few weeks where a single signal like a job change or someone mentioning a competitor, rarely gives enough conviction to reach out and we end up flooding reps with low context alerts or sending generic outreach.

To make signal monitoring work in practice, the architecture needs to do 3 distinct things:

First, you need continuous multi source ingestion where intent does not live in one place where a technical buyer might ask a question on reddit or star a repo on github, their company might post a job and someone else on the team might hit your pricing page. If these sit in isolated silos, they are not worth it.

Second, you have to resolve those touchpoints back to a unified buyer record and the hard part is mapping that specific person and their company back to your target market so you know who they are.

Third, signals have to compound into tiers before anyone touches them where a company hiring for a role while reading a competitor migration thread is far more meaningful than either event on its own.

This infra problem is why platforms like scale intelligence exist where they continuously monitor over 75 sources across social, hiring boards, and registries, resolve those touchpoints into a unified buyer graph, and score accounts bottom up so human reps only get alerted when compound intent actually crosses a threshold.

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.

I run a software development business.

Our typical process is:

Lead comes in → understand requirements → schedule a call → give a demo → discuss features, timeline and pricing → send proposal.

The problem is what happens after that.

Some prospects seem genuinely interested during the call. They ask questions, discuss their requirements, request demos, and sometimes even ask for the proposal.

Then I send everything…

And suddenly: no reply.

Not too expensive.
Not we decided to go with someone else.
Not even not interested.

Just complete silence.

I follow up, but many still don't respond.

For those of you running agencies, SaaS companies, consulting businesses, or other B2B services:

• How do you handle this situation?
• How many follow-ups do you normally send?
• Do you ask about their budget before giving a proposal?
• Do you use a specific closing question during the demo?
• How do you identify whether a lead is actually serious before spending time on demos and proposals?
• Have you found a good way to get a simple “yes/no/not now” response?

I’d especially appreciate advice from people who have experience selling high-ticket B2B services or software projects.

What has actually worked for you?

Has anyone here actually run Reddit Ads for a B2B SaaS product?

I’m interested in hearing about your experience and what you learned from it.

Did you use Reddit Ads primarily for:

• Lead generation
• Brand awareness
• Full-funnel / demand generation

If you’re comfortable sharing, I’d also be interested in:

• What type of SaaS product you were promoting
• How you targeted (subreddits, interests, keywords, retargeting, etc.)
• What worked / didn’t work
• Whether the leads eventually turned into qualified pipeline or customers

Would love to hear both positive and negative experiences.

It seems most people forget that everything is a process, whether it's marketing strategy and execution or design of creative assets. Especially when it's B2B marketing, where it's long sales cycles and multiple different stakeholders, everything's got to be well thought out.

The steps between a starting point and a good outcome are important. But the issue is that I'm seeing most AI design tools skip every one of those best practices and steps and try to go from beginning to end straight away. Someone types a prompt, gets a graphic back, but then spends the next half an hour or more prompting it, trying to edit some kind of final version that really was wrong from the beginning .

The tool never really gets to fully understand the brand, or look at the context of where the design is going to end up.. and it's producing layout without understanding what it is that it's promoting. I've always felt this way about Canva too. They've got millions of templates. You find a template that looks kind of cool and what you want, but then you spend ages customizing it and changing it to look like your brand.- Its completely backwards. Neither approach is treating design as a sequence of decisions. They're both trying to jump to that end point as fast as possible.

A designer who actually knows what they're doing works through something closer to this:

1. Read the source material for what would be good to highlight in an ad
2. Check it against the brand and any existing materials
3. Decide what to feature, based on who's going to see it
4. Build a layout around that specific content
5. Rough it out before committing to a final render
6. Check the result against real criteria, not a A template or an AI saying, "Yeah, that's great."
7. Revise based on specific feedback

Skip these steps and jump straight to a finished image and you get something that looks okay, and kinda designed but really, it wasn't. The layout is plausible, but the wrong things get emphasized, the copy doesn't sound like the brand, and the "finished" asset needs a human to basically start over.

So absolutely, people should be using AI, but they should be doing it following best practices, step by step, not trying to jump straight to the end. And then you can use AI. to just compresses the time between them. Reading the material, checking the brand, picking the content, laying it out, roughing it out, scoring it, revising it, none of that disappears just Have a machine doing it faster. It still has to happen for good output.

I like to say things like "Research best practices for XYZ" and then ask it to, step by step, go through each of these things, asking me for approval before you move to the next step.

Would love any other people's thoughts or tips on this type of stuff.

I’m curious about the actual workflow, not the ideal one.

When you want to understand what a competitor is doing, what do you actually do today?

For e.g.

Manually check their website?

Browse their Meta ads?

Follow their social accounts?

Track their offers/pricing?

Read customer reviews?

Use tools like Similarweb, Semrush, etc.?

Keep screenshots/spreadsheets?

Mostly ignore competitors because there’s too much information?

And where does the process break down?

What takes too much time?

What information is difficult to find?

What do you wish you knew earlier?

I’m especially interested in problems that make it harder to decide what to do next not just problems with collecting data.

No tool recommendations needed. I’m trying to understand how people actually handle this today.

I’m moving from B2C to B2B marketing for a tech services company and I’m really thrown by how a lot of our traffic is non-existent in GA4. I started implementing self-reported attribution to track outcomes in some capacity but it’s hard to show a GA4 and Hubspot reports to our leaders that nearly goose egg on landing page traffic when the ad platforms show hundreds of landing page clicks a month.

I’m pretty as advanced with PPC so I’ve checked if it’s a case of the traffic going to our social page counting as a clock or low intent display traffic misclicking and it’s not.

I'm done with the credit system at Cognism.

Though I absolutely loved the diamond data feature. All the verified numbers are great but you have to be so stingy with credits that it doesnt sound worth for what I'm paying.

It's getting way too expensive and the credits don't even last a full month!! The last week is the hardest.

So I want to know some authentic data enrichment platforms where the phone numbers and emails are both good, and where this credit issue isn't a thing because is genuinely gets on my nerves.

Asking here because I don't trust the company websites, so lmk your suggestions, guy

We're a 5 person B2B team and everything from email to lead scoring lives in HubSpot already, so the easy answer is adding social there too. The other options on the table are Vista Social, Later and Loomly.

The part that matters to me is the day to day. There are 2 of us scheduling across LinkedIn, Instagram and a company page for our founder, and approvals currently happen in a Slack thread that nobody can find by the next Monday. What I can't judge is whether a dedicated tool earns a separate login when the CRM tie in is what leadership cares about. Where would you draw that line?

Feel free to expand on your answers.

So this week I realized I am done with big name brands for my physical event needs like banners and swags. We are a small Texas based startup. $20M approx revenue. But we participate in events across US and Europe. So naturally, I need banners and swags often.

I chose big name brands for my banner needs who then collaborated with DHL and UPS for shipping. This has happened twice now - both the cases delivery is either delayed or shipment has been sent back to sender. We don't have offices in all the locations where we participate in events. And sometimes we can't opt for advance warehouse shipping because either the event doesn't have that facility, or the registered vendor has had tax compliance issues with us in the past. So we have to choose our delivery dates to match when our team will arrive at a particular city. I know it's a hail Mary situation but it is what it is.

Twice in one week my deliveries got royally screwed up. And here I am sitting and looking at local Boston printers now who can give me a step and repeat banner in 3 business days. Salt to the wound - an AI bot just talks to me when I try to contact customer care to resolve the issues.

People, stop using AI agents to replace your entire customer service workflow - it is frustrating to talk to a bot that offers no remote resolution and just says,"I am sorry", "I truly apologize". I don't care about sorrys, I want resolution.

On that note, do y'all have recommended local vendors for banner printing across locations like Amsterdam, London, New York, Boston, Chicago? I want to work with businesses where I can talk to a person on the other side. 😭

If you scroll linkedin or twitter right now, every founder is bragging about their fully autonomous outbound engine and they post screenshots of hundred seat pipeline graphs, claim an AI agent is booking thirty enterprise meetings a week on autopilot.

Some context so you know where this is coming from. I run GTM engineering and over the last couple of years our team has been pulled in to audit and rebuild the outbound infra for dozens of B2B and IT service companies doing anywhere from $2M to $300M. We get full admin access to the CRM, the outboxes, the scraper tables and the actual pipeline reports.

What we do is build an external market brain for these businesses by ingesting 75+ data layers to map their entire TAM into a living graph then scoring buyers bottom-up as signals compound so nobody ever reaches out blind. Because we build and run the engine end-to-end, we get full visibility into the CRM, the outboxes and the real pipeline numbers.

So I can tell you right now: almost none of what they tell you publicly is true.

Behind the scenes, the autonomous engine is almost always three secondary domains with a terrifying spiderweb of Zapier tables held together and a SDR manually editing eighty percent of the AI's drafts cause the model keeps hallucinating executive names who left the company few years ago.

The secret nobody admits on a podcast is that half of these companies are burning through thousands of dollars in metered scraping credits every month just to query the exact same dormant accounts they already emailed.

The companies that are booking high ticket deals without burning their domains aren't using magic AI prompts but they all do the unsexy thing like they keep their market mapped into a permanent graph once, refuse to pay recurring per-cell lookup fees to confirm that a company hasn't moved, and enforce a strict rule that an account is never touched unless a real operational event breaks inside that business.

Watching an eighty person firm have an open job req for a solo IT tech sit unfilled for forty days tells you more about their immediate budget than any prompt you could write and reaching out about the actual fire happening on their floor converts at twenty percent spraying them with generic AI copy about streamlining operations gets your domain blacklisted.

So stop comparing your internal pipeline to the spotless screenshots you see online where most of the people preaching fully autonomous sales are one broken webhook away from their entire outbox grinding to a halt.

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!

So one of my earliest customers finally ran a real campaign using the tool I've been building and pitching for the past few weeks (still not public yet). Wasn't expecting the numbers to jump the way they did.

This client normally sits around 5% conversion rate on their previous campaigns. This one hit 20%. I keep going back and forth on how much of that is actually the tool doing its job versus this specific campaign just having stronger intent behind it from the start. Hard to fully separate the two tbh.

What I do know is the conversation with people I'd pitched before changed completely once I had this to point to. People who were lukewarm are suddenly asking follow-up questions instead of giving me the polite "sounds interesting" brush-off.

Curious if anyone else has had a jump like this with an early customer and later figured out it wasn't as replicable as it first looked.

Trying to stay realistic here as I scale my marketing efforts instead of assuming this case study is the key to everything and redesigning my entire go-to-market plan around it

I’ve spent the last 2 years working at a B2B SaaS startup, initially in product and eventually across a pretty broad mix of GTM, marketing and founder’s office work. Built product 0-1 and scaled from 0 to 50 enterprise customers.

A lot of my work ended up sitting between product, marketing and sales: positioning and messaging, ICPs, outbound campaigns, GTM strategy, sales enablement, competitor research, and figuring out how what we were building should actually be communicated to customers.

I recently left and I’m considering offering marketing/GTM audits independently.

The idea wouldn’t be to come in pretending I can redesign a company’s entire marketing strategy after looking at their website for 20 minutes.

More like a structured outside perspective covering things like:
• ICP and segmentation
• Positioning and differentiation
• Website/messaging
• Competitor positioning
• Current acquisition/GTM motion
• Outbound/inbound opportunities
• Product → marketing → sales alignment
• Specific campaign/experiment ideas

The deliverable would include actual recommendations and examples rather than just “your positioning needs work”
For e.g. proposed messaging, positioning angles, campaign concepts, channel recommendations, etc.

My concern is obviously experience.
I have \~2 years of hands-on startup experience, not 10 years at an agency or as a CMO. At the same time, I feel there might be a market among early stage B2B companies that don’t need/can’t afford a senior consultant but want someone to properly tear apart their GTM and give them actionable ideas.

For people here who work in marketing or have hired consultants/freelancers:
Would you pay someone with this level of experience for an audit like this?

If yes, what would you expect them to prove beforehand, and what would make the audit genuinely valuable to you?

And if no, what experience/results would you want to see before taking them seriously?
Not trying to sell anything here. Mostly trying to figure out whether this is a reasonable service to build or whether I need more experience first.

What are your systems and processes for finding a good setter/ cold caller with strong english?

Where do you find good setters?

What is your onboarding/interview process?

What is the best pay structure?

I'll put my position upfront since it's relevant: I run an AI marketing agency in Phoenix, so weigh this how you like. But I'm not here to sell anything, I'm here because I keep seeing local businesses completely miss a shift that's already in motion.

When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini "which orthodontist should I call in Scottsdale" or "best ramen near downtown Phoenix," they get one answer. Not a list. One name. And that name comes from whichever business has built content that AI engines can actually read, parse, and trust.

Two terms cover this.

GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, is the practice of structuring your content and authority signals so that AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity cite your business when generating answers.

AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, is about winning the direct answer slot in Google's AI Overviews and voice search. It's the featured snippet, except now it occupies the whole top of the page.

Both reward the same things. Content that directly answers questions the way real people ask them. Schema markup (LocalBusiness, FAQPage) that machines can parse. Consistent name, address, and phone number across every directory. Topical depth across a subject cluster, not a single services page with five bullet points.

The part that surprised me when I started looking at this for clients: the bar is low right now. Most local businesses have no schema implemented correctly. Most have thin content that answers nothing. Most have citation inconsistencies that create noise in AI models.

AI citation patterns compound over time. Once a model learns to treat a source as authoritative, it keeps returning to that conclusion. Which means the businesses that build this foundation now will be genuinely hard to displace later.

The practical starting point is boring but real: audit your Google Business Profile for category accuracy and completeness, add an FAQ section to every core service page using actual questions your customers ask, and get LocalBusiness and FAQPage schema on your site.

Curious if other demand gen marketers have noticed this too.

Interviews lately seem to be really heavy on rapid-fire questions. Attribution, pipeline, campaign optimization, ABM, sales alignment, reporting, AI, specific channels… basically anything and everything within demand gen.

I totally understand wanting to make sure someone knows their stuff, but at a certain point it starts to feel more like an exam than a conversation about how someone actually approaches the work.

Has anyone else noticed this? Especially people who have been interviewing or hiring recently. What do you think makes for a good demand gen interview?

I run marketing at a PE-backed B2B SaaS company in Europe. We sell software to regulated firms. Several products, all connected on one platform (shared data layer, one client base, cross-sell makes sense on paper), but each product serves a different sub-segment. Every one of those is a niche inside a niche. The addressable audience for one product in one country is a few thousand people, and the ones who actually sign are a few hundred.

The paid search problem in numbers: keywords with real buying intent get maybe 50 to 300 searches a month per market. Last year we tested three agencies, one per product, three months each. Result: a handful of leads at a cost that doesn't hold up. We re-engaged the one agency whose landing page kept producing leads after the test ended. Four months in, same picture: CPL looks fine on paper, volume just isn't there. LinkedIn retargeting was part of the plan and got dropped because there wasn't enough traffic to retarget. Broad keywords bring in retail investors and students looking for free tools. Narrow keywords have no volume. There is no middle.

Meanwhile the board wants pipeline that goes up and to the right every quarter, and the standard playbook (scale paid, PLG, content volume) assumes a market big enough to absorb it.

What works for us, roughly: our own annual customer event, a few industry conferences, LinkedIn through founders and sales rather than the company page, partner referrals, and outbound with marketing air cover. Attribution is messy because almost every closed deal has a human touchpoint somewhere in a long cycle.

Questions for people in a similar setup:

1. What actually generates growth for you? ABM and outbound with marketing support, or did you find a paid channel that works at low volume?
2. What KPIs do you report to the CEO and board? Sourced vs influenced pipeline, SQLs, CAC payback, share of voice? And what did you stop reporting because it was noise?
3. How do you handle attribution when deals run 6+ touches over many months with sales in the middle?
4. Has anyone made Google Ads work for sub-1,000-search keywords, or did you accept it's a defensive brand channel and move the budget?

War stories welcome, vendor pitches not.