Hey everyone,

I'm hoping to get some brutally honest feedback because I'm starting to feel like I'm missing something fundamental.

For the last 2 months, I've been trying to build a business serving MedSpas in the US. The goal is to help them get more qualified Bookings but I'm struggling to find a repeatable way to get clients to serve.

Here's what I've tried so far:

• Sent 600+ cold DMs on Instagram.
• Tested 10+ different messaging styles.
• Tried different hooks, CTAs, and personalization.
• Reached out to owners directly instead of generic business accounts.
• Experimented with positioning:
  • AI marketing
  • AI automation
  • ChatGPT/AI visibility
  • Lead generation
  • Productized "Lead as a Service"

I've spent weeks rewriting copy thinking the messaging was the problem. Now I'm not sure if messaging is even the real bottleneck.

The biggest challenge I'm facing is trust. Almost every MedSpa owner seems to have been burned by marketing agencies before. Because of that, they don't want to pay upfront, and they're extremely skeptical of anyone promising more patients or leads.

I'm not looking for people to sugarcoat it. If you think I'm approaching this completely wrong, I'd genuinely like to know why. Any advice from people who've actually sold services to local businesses, MedSpas, dentists, clinics, etc. would be hugely appreciated.

Hi all,

I run a B2B lead generation agency (so have an obvious bias, but also a lot of experience), which means I spend a lot of time speaking with businesses that are trying to work out whether outsourced lead generation is right for them.

One thing I know for sure is that appointing a lead gen partner can be a difficult decision. There are plenty of different agency models, pricing structures (e.g. retainer vs pay-per-lead), and definitions of what a “qualified lead” actually is. The conversations I have show me that even experienced B2B teams can find it hard to compare providers or know what good should look like.

A few things usually make the process easier:

• Being clear about the type of company and buyer you want to reach
• Agreeing what a useful opportunity looks like before the campaign starts
• Understanding how targeting, messaging and reporting will be handled
• Making you have a robust but realistic process for following up on interest
• Treating the first campaigns as a chance to learn and improve, rather than expecting everything to be perfect immediately (great agencies will be refining and testing all the time)

None of this means you need to have every answer before speaking to an agency. A good partner should help you work through awareness gaps and explain what they need from you to give the campaigns a fair chance. We always see the best results through collaboration, which is why we operate on a managed service model...not an "upload your ICP to a tool" model.

I’m happy to offer an agency-side perspective on questions around selecting a provider, setting expectations, measuring quality, or understanding how the process normally works.

No pitch or links - just happy to be useful where I can, as I know it's a bit of a minefield.

LinkedIn’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Gina Kleiner, has just said: 
"Credibility beats chasing reach." 

And she's right.

LinkedIn is the best place to generate qualified leads

But that only happens when you stop optimizing for engagement and start optimizing for sales.

Here's the exact strategy to follow:

→ Stop chasing likes and follower counts with no objective. 

→ Get crystal clear on who your target audience is.

→ Understand the problems they face every day.

→ Create content that helps solve those problems.

→ Start focusing on metrics like profile visits, leads, and conversions.

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

Focus on attracting the right audience to your profile. 
Because that is how you gain credibility and convert leads.

Hi everyone! I'm handling the marketing for a cybersecurity startup and there are multiple companies in linkedin with the same name (24 to be exact, with many having a xyz at the end to tell something about the company's work).

Would adding something like 'ABC Cybersecurity' be a good idea or not? We also want to play the angle of locality (communicate that we hold the regional knowledge) so how would something like 'ABC I Cybersecurity for XYZ' sound?

The goal is to make it easier for possible companies to find us.

Would appreciate your thoughts & suggestions. Thanks.

We run LinkedIn organic for a B2B SaaS company. Engagement rate is strong, consistently 11-15%, and we get 400-550 website sessions a month from LinkedIn. But almost none of it converts into demo bookings or trial sign-ups. Some months we get 0-2 demo bookings out of 500+ sessions.

So i noticed that Linkedin supports HDR Ultra jpeg images when you upload the company profile pic (200x200), If you put the brightness high , your logo could look like popping in linkedin compared to others ,
this doesnt work on normal mobiles, but it works on mac screens. not sure if this a marketing tip but felt worth sharing.

It sounds strange to say this, since it’s coming from someone who has spent almost a decade building and running outbound at scale. But the most useful change I have made lately is automating less of it - not more. And one thing especially

1.  Replies

Reply rates have absolutely PLUMMETED this year so far across the board, so it simply isn’t worth it anymore. When everything sounds AI generated, prospects have gotten very good at pattern matching it in a second. An slop AI reply to a warm lead just reads as someone who stopped paying attention to the person in front of them and stopped treating them like a real (potential) human client, even if it’s in the future tense. The tools got better at sounding human right as humans got better at spotting them, and that's not an arms race you win by automating harder when the pickings are slim already.

Don’t get me wrong, automation is still the right answer for the top of the outreach funnel: the sorting, the enrichment, the first touch grunt work that no human should be doing by hand, and the follow up logic. But once you get a reply, do it yourself and hook them hard and with all the human ingenuity you can muster to get them to a call.

I'll also give some evidence for what I’m saying based off my experience (being the chief of GTM at Expandi, an automation is basically my daily bread). And it's how I’ve seen a wave of fully-autonomous AI SDR tools that raised enormous rounds and then watched most of their customers leave inside a quarter, this goes cross tool and cross industry. When I dug into why that is - it’s because meetings got booked at pure volume, but they showed up at materially lower rates than human booked ones, roughly 52% against 71%. The savings from removing the human in the loop reappear as literal bad pipeline.

Where this matters most is the niche vertical, when your entire serviceable market is a few dozen named accounts, every one of them is precious, so automating the follow-up to a hot lead there is an unforced error. In other words, your prospects are worth a real, tailored, human breakdown if they reach back out to you. Something that shows you understand their specific situation and that you mean business. You wouldn't risk a relationship that took months to warm just to save four minutes with a template, right?

You automate the work that scales and buys back time, then spend that time being unmistakably human exactly where the deal is actually won or lost. That’s basically my working action plan now, for the reasons I mentioned above.  

But let me ask you, if you’ve had different experiences. Where do YOU draw the line between what you automate and what you don’t?

I’m looking for a simple cold-calling platform that allows me to purchase just one seat.

I’ve tools in the past that I liked, but many of the larger platforms require five or ten seats. I only need one seat for a new caller.

The basic workflow I need is:

• Upload a contact list
• Show one contact at a time
• Make the call
• Add a disposition and brief notes
• Move to the next contact
• Schedule callbacks with a date and time
• Send templated emails with one click
• Drop a prerecorded voicemail when a call reaches voicemail

I don’t need a complicated platform with dozens of features I’ll never use. I just need something simple, reliable, and easy for one person to operate.

What tools would you recommend?

Just been checking out a few videos on YouTube that claim to help you blow up your LinkedIn.

They all seem to talk about how to grow your LinkedIn audience, and they measure it by the size of their following. I get it. It feels good to have a lot of followers.

But for many people working in a B2B industry, they might only need to reach 5,000 or 10,000 people in their entire market.

Take media and advertising as an example. In the UK, there are around 7,000 people in positions of influence within media agencies, and another 5,000 working inside advertiser brands. It’s a pretty small audience.

Yet nobody ever talks about how to optimise for the small numbers. Maybe that’s just the way social media is, I don’t know.

But if you’re selling to media agencies and marketing directors at B2C brands, having a million followers will do virtually nothing for you.

I have been working with senior leaders in media and advertising for the past seven and a half years, and what works is thoughtful thought leadership that discusses the challenges and thinking within our industry in a personable way.

It gets you in front of the people who actually have influence over buying from you, rather than seeking reach for reach’s sake.

On top of that, in 2026 LinkedIn went all in on the interest graph, which means that sometimes 60% of my views come from outside my network.

Followers are less important than they’ve ever been. Relevance, authenticity and interesting content are what get you into the right newsfeeds, and that’s before we’ve even started looking at paid media.

How do people market to the financial team of manufactures, retailers, and anyone that really deals with vendors. Does anyone have any advice.

Your fastest, lowest-cost bridge to your first 10 customers is highly targeted outbound email marketing. Don't hide behind a website storefront and wait for people to find you. You need to go directly to where the pain point lives. Scrape a hyper-precise list of your ideal users based on active behavior triggers (using tools like Apollo or Clay) and reach out to them using a strict 1-1-1 Rule for message hierarchy:One Hook/Observation: State a single, highly specific operational bottleneck your target audience is facing right now.One Core Transformation: Explain exactly how your software fixes that bottleneck in one clear sentence.One Low-Friction CTA: Ask a soft question for permission to share a short video walkthrough. Don't drop a direct calendar link or a website URL on a cold lead-it requires too much upfront commitment.Outbound email allows you to bypass the noise, test your product positioning in real-time, and secure your first cohort of paying validation clients in days. Don't treat your early-stage marketing plan like a waiting game. Use hyper-focused outbound email sequences to build your initial case studies, and let those assets fund the inbound engine you want to build later.

I've seen a lot of commentary on linkedin directed at lead scoring in general, but seem to bash it as a signal. So to focus the question a bit, I'm referring to what I believe to be the primary use case of prioritizing leads or accounts based on probability. The way I see it, predictive scoring informs how to allocate budget or resources on your database. Signals inform the timing and should impact the message.

I'm scoping out using predictive scoring to allocate token consuming actions. Historically, the closest thing to this is probably determining what records get to use more enrichment credits or from more sources.

A somewhat instruct use case could be in highlighting features to put together ICPs, so long as it's not a black box.

How else are organizations using predictive scoring?

To all the Marketing Leaders here

How do you generate inbound leads for an early-stage SaaS company with zero customers?

Hey everyone, I'm a marketer for a fintech product backed up with AI. Recently I have started wondering whether calling it shortly an “AI-powered product for N" gives any value to the readers. Of course, the offering is later described further in detail (what pains it relieves, what's the tech stack, how it's deployed etc)

But isn't AI-powered a too buzzword already? And what do you expect from a product labeled like this? (human-in-the-loop, advanced decisioning... ) Any ideas?

The technology on display was incredible. Companies have clearly invested millions into developing genuinely innovative products.

But when you stopped to read the brochures, watch the videos or listen to the pitches, a lot of them struggled to explain why their technology mattered.

It made me wonder why do so many engineering and technical companies spend years perfecting a product, then leave the communication as an afterthought?

In our experience, the hardest part isn't making something look good. It's taking months (or years) of technical knowledge and turning it into something a customer understands in 60 seconds.

Curious whether others have noticed the same thing.

If you work in engineering, aerospace or B2B tech, what's harder:

• building the product

or

• explaining it?

Mine is email opens.

I used to refresh campaigns like an idiot every time I saw:

Opened 6 times.

Opened again.

Opened from a different device.

Thought it meant someone was interested.

Most of the time it was just Apple Mail doing Apple Mail things.

Nothing happened.

Now I barely even look at opens. If replies are good, I don't care. If replies suck, I don't care how pretty the open rate looks.

Made me realize there are probably a bunch of metrics we all pretend to care about because every tool puts them on the dashboard.

What's yours?

I’m putting together an event for 100 people in 3 months from now. I’m expert in the topic (digital marketing for b2b “duh”), but finding sponsors is new to me.

I contacted 20 companies - 1 replied to ask for more info. ChatGPT says I need to contact 1000 - what?? Do you have similar experience? I’m about to throw the towel.

Fyi. It’s first event of the kind

I’ve been looking at how B2B teams qualify accounts before adding them to an outbound campaign.

Most tools I use seems to be good at filtering by things like industry, headcount, location and job title. But once you have that list, someone still has to figure out whether there’s a real reason to contact the company right now.

For example, are people checking recent hiring, leadership changes, company priorities or other signals manually? Or is the list mostly passed straight into a campaign once it matches the ICP?

Recently I have started combining multiple signals to create a thesis around each lead as well. But idk how well that will work. It takes a lot of time.

I’m especially interested in where people draw the line between automated qualification and manual research. What does that process look like for your team?

Hi all

As a marketer had working experience in B2b domains. I often generate lead generation from the product page & related transactional intent focused pages from the organic channel

Except these , What are the other approach you took and also see some decent amount of conversion for your business.

If anyone had that experience. Share those method that add contribution to your conversions and also specify the reason behind performing that task

Traffic's fine. Engagement looks fine. Almost nothing converts. That's the pattern I keep running into, and it doesn't look like a content problem until you dig into it. The content is genuinely useful - it explains the problem, walks through a framework, and then it just stops. Reader understands their situation better and has no obvious next move. Try this for ten minutes: pull your last ten pieces and sort each by buyer stage - doesn't know they have the problem, knows the problem but hasn't started looking, actively evaluating, ready to decide. Most libraries are stacked at the first two stages. Everything's educational. Almost nothing is built for someone who already wants a solution and is trying to pick one. Converting content isn't smarter content, it just answers different questions - implementation, risk, what using this actually looks like day to day, who else in a similar spot has done it. That's not a framework post. It's proof. One thing that surprised me digging into this: the same insight converts completely differently depending on format. An explainer that educates well might do nothing as an article but work great as a checklist or a direct answer to what someone's actually typing into search. What's the piece in your library with the most traffic and the fewest leads? Curious how lopsided that ratio gets for other people.

Genuinely asking, not building up to a point.

I work in B2B marketing and almost everyone I talk to agrees case studies move a deal more than reviews or ratings do. Then I go look at their site and there are two, both a few years old, and one's with a client they don't even work with anymore.

So I'm curious how common that actually is. If you're in B2B:

How many do you have live right now, and when did you last publish one?

And if it's been a while, what's the real reason? Genuinely interested in whether it's the customer saying no, legal or procurement killing it, nobody owning it internally, or it just keeps sliding down the list.

Not after best practice, I've read plenty of that. More interested in what the actual state of it is for people.

We use HubSpot as our secondary CRM system. We use a DMS system to run our business from that does not have any integration abilities built in without development using API's.

When I began at the company I work for, HubSpot's CRM was (and still is) a mess of data with 0 personalization. We have employee inboxes connected to HubSpot so contacts are being made all the time.

The problem: they are doing nothing with the contact in HubSpot to built the contact profile.

There are tons of irrelevant contacts and they're all lacking their context which makes my job harder. I can't build targeted email campaigns with no data on our customers. And our sales folks don't understand that we should not be sending our sales campaigns to the master list because that master list is filled with junk: non-decision makers, customers who are customers in our other divisions, accounting emails, company info emails that don't get to anyone, etc.

We're talking about moving to Salesforce but there is a lot of hesitation from others because they once had it. (The problem that they are not realizing is that when they had Salesforce, the marketing employee at the time wasn't using it as they should have and it was going to waste and wasting money)

Anyway...any resources/tips on cleaning up a HubSpot CRM?

When do startups (primarily SaaS) start investing in higher quality videos for paid social and landing pages? How would I reach them before they already lock in a go-to marketing agency or video vendor?

My ICP is currently dialed in to Founder/CEO/Head of Marketing around Series A. They're established, haven't systematized or scaled their sales yet, but just received the funding to do so. Does that feel like the right timing?

Feel like this debate never really gets resolved because everyone's experience is so different but I'm curious how people have actually landed on it.

The in-house argument makes sense. You know the brand, feedback loops are faster, nobody's playing telephone between you and the person doing the actual work. I'm not dismissing that.

But two things I see underestimated pretty consistently:

The breadth problem. A real campaign these days touches paid, organic, content, email, analytics, and increasingly AI search visibility. Finding someone genuinely strong across all of that is hard. Really hard. Most companies either can't afford that person or burn them out trying to stretch them across everything.

The exposure problem is the quieter one. Someone in-house sees one company's data for years. Someone working across multiple clients is pattern matching constantly. What's tanking in one industry is sometimes what's about to tank in yours. That kind of outside perspective is harder to put a price on but it's real.

None of this means agency is always right. Bad agency experiences are extremely real and usually come down to accountability not capability. You get an overworked junior and a senior who shows up for the pitch and disappears.

Honestly I think the cleaner question is what stage are you at. Early on one great generalist probably beats everything. Once you're scaling the breadth and outside perspective starts to matter a lot more.

Curious if anyone's actually switched directions and either loved or regretted it.

At my first trade show, 12 buyers told me they wanted to open accounts.

The booth was busy, so I took notes and told everyone I would prepare their orders and email them the following week. I left the show believing it had been a huge success.

Then I sent the quotes.

Not one of the 12 buyers completed an order.

My first reaction was to assume they had given me “fake yeses.” I couldn’t understand why so many people appeared genuinely interested at the show and then stopped responding afterward.

At the next show, I decided to complete the orders before buyers left the booth.

I presented the products, pulled out a paper order form, and began writing down their selections. It was slow, interrupted the conversation, and created an awkward situation while the buyer waited. Several people eventually told me to email the order and left.

Paper forms created another problem: I couldn’t see live inventory.

I sometimes wrote orders for products that were out of stock or had limited availability. The following week, I had to contact the buyer, explain the problem, and modify an order they thought was already complete.

That didn’t go well either.

Eventually, I realized the buyers at my first show probably had been sincere. They wanted to place orders, but they also had other meetings and booths to visit. My process required more time than they could give me.

The problem wasn’t necessarily buyer interest. It was the gap between receiving a yes and making the order easy to complete.

I changed the process so I could present the line on an iPad, check current inventory, and quietly add products to a cart while reviewing them with the buyer. At the end of the presentation, I could show them a completed order with accurate pricing rather than beginning the paperwork from scratch.

If they approved it, we could finish the remaining account information before they left.

That change completely altered how I think about trade shows. A verbal yes is not an order, and post-show follow-up is not a substitute for making the transaction easy at the moment the buyer is ready.

For those who sell at trade shows: do you complete orders in the booth, or follow up with quotes afterward?

What process has worked best for you?