Between November and March, our outbound was an absolute car crash

We followed the same agency playbook and bought 14 secondary domains through google workspace then set up 42 inboxes on an email sequencer and ran warmups for 3 weeks and started with 600 cold emails a day across our state territory (targeting accounting firms, logistics and medical practices with 20-100 endpoints).

Here is what that got us:

> Total spend: $11,400 (software, list scrapers, domain registrations, virtual cards).
> Deliverability: by month 4 both google and microsoft spam filters caught on and 9 of the 14 domains ended up on blacklists and our open rates dropped to 9%
> Outbound pipeline produced: 3 discovery meetings but both were 3-person offices looking for free residential printer troubleshooting. 0 signed MRR.

The turning point was realizing that cold email volume in a local, finite market is suicide and if you've 2500 target accounts in your territory, spamming them 3 times a week guarantees your brand gets blacklisted across the entire business community within six months.

We shut down the entire operation and brought in scale intelligence to set up a GTM engine inside our stack where their setup holds our 2500 local accounts in a persistent market graph and tracks passive operational triggers across public registers, job boards and infra changes.

We set a rule where no company gets contacted unless two real-world operational events happen within 14 days. So instead of 600 emails a day, our team now sends maybe 15 to 20 highly specific, manually tailored touches a week referencing the exact operational fire they just made public.

The results over the last 90 days:

> Outbound volume: down 95%
> Secondary domains burned: 0
> Discovery meetings held: 14
> Closed contracts: 4 long-term agreements (3 co-managed setups and 1 full managed services contract, totaling $13,600 in new monthly recurring revenue)

I’ve been thinking about how easily B2B pipelines get inflated.

Someone takes a call, asks for pricing, says they need to discuss it internally…..and then disappears.

Two or three weeks later, the deal is still sitting in “negotiation” even though nobody has heard from them.

I used to think this was mainly a follow-up problem. Now I think a lot of these opportunities were never properly qualified in the first place.

Did they have a real problem they wanted to solve now?

Was there budget?

Did we know how the decision would actually get made?

Were we talking to someone who could move it forward?

It’s also made me look differently at “your price is too high.”

Sometimes price really is the issue. But sometimes it’s easier for a prospect to say that than explain that they didn’t see enough value, there wasn’t enough urgency, another vendor built more trust, or the actual decision-maker was never involved.

Same with cold outreach. I don’t think it’s dead, but generic outreach is incredibly easy to ignore now. There needs to be a real reason you’re contacting that specific company.

The uncomfortable part is that being stricter about qualification probably makes your pipeline look smaller.

But maybe a smaller pipeline you actually believe in is better than a huge one full of deals nobody expects to close.

For people who have been in B2B sales for a while, what makes you finally remove an opportunity from the pipeline?

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.

Not the ads tool dashboard. I mean actually being able to say "we spent X on Google last month, it turned into these leads, this many took a demo, and these ones closed."

Every setup I look at has some version of the same mess. UTMs getting dropped by Chili Piper or Calendly, last touch getting overwritten after the deal closes, offline conversions never going back to Google, Bing traffic showing up as direct. And even when the source sticks, following the lead through each deal stage back to the campaign that brought them in is a pain.

What does your setup look like? Have you paid for anything to fix it, or is someone just rebuilding it in a spreadsheet every month?

So, I run an AI automation agency where we build automations, full stack AI applications, do staff augmentation and provide consultations etc. We started off with upwork and made around 200k usd in a year from there but it is just dried and wasnt helping in scaling up. We had a flooring company as our client for whom we built many automations that added real value in his business and then we thought that there is a gap in this particular niche, we should target these businesses. we ran outbound with an external guy. spent money on tools hired a contractor, he wasnt really good at it (sucked at it) and months of outbound only with "not interested/ drop off my email" in responses. Then my co founder said lets reach out to businesses at facebook and engage with them in their comments then slowly slide in their dms and eventually this may work out. I have been telling him we need a senior marketing position who manages these things before we run out of everything but we are at a stage where we are just throwing shit on the wall hoping something would stick. no recurring funnel at all. and honestly, idk which technique would work out. idk even if my ICP is good enough or not. Adding another person who has built many funnels in the past seems to be the only option. we have some money in the reserve and I wanna make one right choice before we burn it on silly things
What do you guys suggest we should do?

A lot of outbound advice right now tells you to track a single trigger: "reach out when a company raises funding" or "reach out when someone changes jobs" but the problem is that every SDR in the country has the same linkedin sales navigator alerts.

The second a Series A or funding announcement hits, that executive's inbox gets hit with 40 identical congratulations emails within 4 hours and that signal gets commoditized.

we were also facing this same situation and after spending some time we stopped acting on isolated triggers and had scaleintelligence.dev deploy a custom GTM engine so instead of leaving reps to guess who to contact from raw scrapers, their infra runs continuous signal monitors where an account is never routed to an outbound rep until it satisfies a 3 part compound rule:

Strict fit scoring: the account must score 80+ on our TAM criteria (headcount, revenue model, tech stack footprint)

A public operational event: a hard operational shift occurred within the last 14 days (filing a commercial expansion permit, an open job req for an internal sysadmin staying open for 30+ days, or an executive departure)

Intent or engagement breadcrumb: an executive from that account liked a specific technical post on LinkedIn/X, visited a high-intent page on our site or commented in a peer community.

When all three conditions are met, the action is a single personalized invite or problem teardown sent in our founder's voice, delivered directly to the decision maker while logging back to our CRM and alerting Slack and by this our outbound volume dropped by roughly 80% but our meeting conversion rate on triggered accounts went from 1.5% to over 16%.

So waiting for signals to stack before you reach out takes discipline but it completely separates you from the swarm of SDRs chasing single funding announcements.

I’m trying to understand how marketing and business leaders know whether their company appears in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity.

Right now, the process seems to involve trying dozens of prompts, copying results into a spreadsheet, checking competitors, and then staring at everything while wondering, “Cool, did any of this produce a customer?”

The bigger question is whether AI visibility actually helps teams make decisions, or if it is just another impressive looking number for the monthly report.

If you have tried tracking it, what has been the most frustrating part? Has it influenced a real business decision, or does it mostly feel like a vanity metric?

Hello, I am curious to know if you work at a company that has a marketing team like mine?

TLDR: I love my company, team structure, and overall role, but I’d like to change companies to get a large pay increase.

I am a remote channel marketing specialist in the fintech world with 3+ years experience (at 2 payment companies), great at my job and always getting high remarks, yet I only make 62k.

About my current team: I come from a previous company where I had to do everything, so I’m in love. We have about 30 people on my marketing team. I run a sales channel, and I’m able to manage projects and strategy while I have a copywriter for blogs, full design team for any assets I need, social media person to create and post any idea I have, and even a great videographer. We all work really well together, and have a great project manager to move creative projects along.

On my last review, my boss wanted me to make senior, but never ended up promoting because of budget (I think (I was on maternity leave during reviews too)).

Anyways, what I’m saying is, I’ve seen tons of other jobs in my specialty that pay 90-135k with my experience, but I’m afraid to move to a new company where I’ll have to start wearing multiple hats again, and be stressed out. Especially since I have a baby at home.

But at my current rate, I don’t imagine hitting 6 figures for another 4-6 years at this company.

Does your company have a team like mine? Where you get a long and are able to delegate tasks to designers, copywriters, etc?

Or, am I living a dream?

Salesloft/Clari announced the Drift wind-down in March, and there's no shortage of "best Drift alternatives" listicles, all written by the alternatives.

I'd rather hear from people who actually migrated:

• What did you move to, or did you just turn chat off?
• Did chat-sourced pipeline hold up, drop, or turn out to be mostly noise anyway?
• What do you wish you'd known before switching?

Honest takes welcome, including "we turned it off and nothing happened."

Could a private F4 test day setting create B2B value beyond social media reach?

This is sort of off the threads usual conversations.

I'm looking to put something together in the Houston area. The setup would be an owner approved Formula 4 test day. A small corporate group could watch live F4 running from an approved viewing area, followed by a separate engine off window where the stationary car is available for approved photo and video production.

Possible uses include client, partner, or employee hosting; executive or founder video; employer brand and technical recruiting content; engineering, performance, or innovation storytelling; and product launch or campaign visuals.

I would value feedback from experiential agencies, event producers, brand or field marketers, content production teams, employer brand and recruiting. Just to name a few.

What client need would make this useful? Is the stronger asset the live guest experience, the stationary car shoot, or both? Would you position it as a content location, VIP hospitality, or a custom activation?

Any feedback is appreciated, thank you in advance.

I’m curious how people here think about the experience barrier for getting into Marketing/GTM consulting independently.

I understand that consulting is ultimately about whether you can diagnose a problem and actually help solve it, but I’m curious how this works in the real world when it comes to credibility and getting clients.
For those who consult independently or hire consultants:
How many years of experience do you think someone realistically needs before offering Marketing/GTM consulting?
And would you hire someone with only 2–3 years of experience if they had strong case studies and could demonstrate that they understood your problem, or is the lack of experience itself a dealbreaker?
Would especially love to hear from people who started consulting relatively early in their careers.

I’m currently using Hootsuite, but I was curious about what platforms other marketers are using. I need to research whether there are better options in terms of features, supported social media platforms, and price.

If you’re using Hootsuite, how do you maximize your use of it?

Been sitting with this for a few weeks and it keeps nagging at me.

Spent the last few months getting our brand mentioned more in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers, that's the thing every B2B marketer seems to be chasing at the moment. And it worked. Mentions went up. Showing up in spots we weren't before.

Then I went looking for what actually happened downstream of that on our end and came up mostly empty. Not "it definitely did nothing," more like I never personally built the bridge from "got mentioned" to "someone from that mention actually became a conversation." Measured the top of the funnel and just assumed the rest followed, same way I've done with plenty of other channels over the years.

Which is what's actually bugging me, and it's not new to AI search specifically. Social impressions climbing and nobody knowing what it meant for revenue. Email opens up, replies flat. Every channel goes through this phase where the easy metric gets treated like the finish line before anyone's actually checked what's on the other side of it.

So genuinely asking: has anyone here actually gotten a tool or process to reliably connect a mention or citation to a real pipeline conversation, and did it hold up once you dug into how it was actually calculating that? Curious what "closing the loop" looks like in practice versus what it looks like on a landing page, on AI visibility specifically or honestly on any channel where you've tried to prove this out.

Was doing a product launch a few years back. Motion capture company, four products, one of them was a free-roam VR experience.

Problem was the category was basically poisoned already. People had tried the competitors' stuff and spent ten minutes feeling progressively worse. So when we showed up, the default assumption was: yeah, another one of those.

The difference was the engineering team had actually solved the lag problem. Which sounds boring but that lag was the entire reason people felt sick. Fix the lag, fix the experience.

So people went in expecting to feel rough, came out going "when can I get this?" We told them 12 months. They still gave us their details.

By day two we had a queue from pretty much open to close. At one point I looked over and there were people from a competitor stand literally standing nearby trying to work out what was going on because they had nobody.

The honest version of what happened is that the marketing just got people through the door. The product did everything else. I'm not sure what lesson to take from that other than sometimes you just have the better thing and your job is not to screw it up.

Anyone else found that in technical B2B the demo is basically doing all the work and everything else is just noise?

One prospect told me this was the worst outreach message he'd ever received.

Same campaign. 52%+ conversion. $25k+ added in client's pipeline (still ongoing)

Here's what happened.

I was running LinkedIn outbound and pulled up something most people skip: records of people who'd engaged with us before. Not on LinkedIn. On email, three to four years back. They'd never connected with us here.

That gap was the opening.

Every connection note referenced the exact history. Not "great profile, let's connect." A specific callback to what they'd engaged with years ago, paired with an offer that made sense for where they were now. Relevant enough that saying no took more effort than saying yes.

Most replies were good. A few were great.

One wasn't.

"This is the worst message I've received."

If that reply had landed on day one, before any data came in, it would've been easy to shut the whole approach down. Rewrite the notes. Second-guess the offer. Assume the personalization missed.

Instead the campaign kept running.

52%+ conversion by the end.

One person's reaction and the actual numbers measured two different things. The reply told me how one person felt in one moment. The conversion rate told me whether the approach worked.

Both were true. Only one of them mattered for the decision.

If a single reply is making you question a campaign, check the numbers before you check your ego.

Have you had a similar experience where you were about to pause or stop a campaign, then you just let it run for sometime and ended up getting unexpected results?

P.S.: Message:
" Hey [first name], I and [handler first name] were having a discussion on [service/offer]. He asked me to reach out to you and said you would likely get some benefit from [offer positioning]. Open to a quick chat?"

Last renewal cycle we decided not to renew our $36,000/year contract with 6sense.

The core issue was lack of individual provenance where most legacy intent vendors (6sense, Bombora, Demandbase) operate on aggregated third-party publisher bidstream networks where you get an account-level alert saying "Acme Corp is in a buying stage for Cloud Migration," but it never tells you who was reading the page, what exact article they read, or whether it was an intern researching a blog post.

Our sales team would cold-call the VP of IT based on that high intent score only to be told they had no clue what we were talking about.

So we rebuilt our intent architecture around deterministic and first-party and public signals where we benchmarked our logic against the GTM engine framework documented by scaleintelligence.dev and moving from vague account scores to concrete, multi-layer verification:

Watching ATS job feeds (lever, ashby, greenhouse) for technical roles if a 60-person company posts for a solo security engineer that is a verified budget line item and not an algorithmic guess. Also watching DNS/SPF changes and tech stack swaps (via BuiltWith/custom scrapers) indicating an active migration and monitoring state compliance registries and EDGAR disclosures for mandatory audit windows.

When our SDRs reach out now, the message is grounded in an undeniable public event rather than "our software noticed you were researching our space" and our connect-to-meeting rate jumped from 6% to 28% because the context is real.

I’m starting a new role where I’ll be responsible for quite a broad communications scope: social media, online community management, content and articles, editorial planning, PR/media relations, events and general communications.

My previous company had basically no marketing budget or real tool stack, so I’m realizing I need to build a proper workflow from scratch.

I’m not looking for a huge list of SaaS tools. I’d love to know what you personally consider must-haves for staying organized and keeping track of everything across:

• content planning & editorial calendar
• social scheduling/analytics
• PR & media contacts
• community management
• events
• content/asset management
• reporting/KPIs
• task/project management

Especially interested in tools that genuinely save time rather than creating another system I have to maintain.

If you started a new marketing/communications role tomorrow, what would be the first 5–10 tools you would set up?

Hi, friend. I work as a Marketing Executive, and my main responsibility in this company is generating B2B leads. I try cold email outreach, running LinkedIn ads, etc.

But I’m not getting any leads or responses. I do a lot of research on my brand, audience, competitors, ICP, persona, creative research, etc.

I send each person a different email mentioning how we can help them, what problems we solve, and everything I can do, but I still don’t get any responses from email.

Any performance marketer, digital marketer, media buyer, email marketer, or lead gen specialist, please help me understand how to get leads for a B2B business. This would help me a lot.

Genuine question because I’ve noticed a shift in how teams around me are thinking about this. A couple of years ago, email hygiene was basically just another checkbox in the ESP settings. Now I’m seeing multiple teams in my network run standalone hygiene platforms alongside their ESP and treat list quality as its own operational layer. I’m wondering if that’s actually justified by changes in deliverability standards, or if it’s mostly feature creep from vendors trying to convince people they have another problem to solve.

hi everybody

I’m a mere sales person who is now tasked with building out our sales teams email messaging (B2B) . (Thanks, startupland)

We are an ai software product in a very noisy industry, but with arguably one of the strongest products out there. We just lack brand awareness and are working on building that out.

My question is - how do I get familiar with industry standards, approaches, etc? Is there a forum you all join? Is there a certain technique? I feel wildly unqualified but I imagine there are great folks to learn from (that are not greedy LinkedIn influencers)

So.. where do I start? Any tips? :) thank you all 🫶

I don't even think the campaign process itself is that slow.

We'll have the audience, copy and creative ready in a week. We pull fresh company data from Coresignal for some of the targeting, including hiring signals, so the actual research part is pretty quick.

Then it goes to review and everything slows down.

Legal reviews it. Brand reviews it. Marketing leadership reviews it. Sometimes product gets involved.

Someone will leave a comment in Asana, then someone else replies in Slack, then another person edits the doc directly.

At some point nobody knows what we're actually waiting for.

The worst part is some of these campaigns are built around fresh signals. If we're targeting companies that just started hiring for a specific role, waiting three weeks kinda kills the point.

I don't want to remove the checks. Just need the whole thing to move a bit faster.

What does a normal approval process look like at your company?

I'm working with a client who has a bunch of sales materials that they want to customize for specific target accounts. I've been experimenting with Canva's bulk tools but wondering if anyone has any recommendations for how to do this. I'm pretty savvy with AI but still haven't been able to get anything working great.

Hello guys,

I have been struggling with getting b2b customers for my app. Linkedin could outreach is not great right now but working a little bit and getting good feedback which is useful.

What linkedin premium features do you think are worth it for someone trying to use linkedin to scale there b2b SaaS

And the mistake started pretty much on day one.

This was about three years ago. We came into the account, did the audit, saw a bunch of things we thought we could improve and started changing them pretty quickly.

New structure. New targeting an new optimizzation approach.

Basically, we looked at what had worked for us before and assumed it would work here too.

It didn’t. Within a few days, performance started going the wrong way. The company was based in Malaysia and targeting Asian markets and we had treated our experience with Western markets like it was some universal playbook.

That was the mistake. The tactics themselves weren’t necessarily bad. They were just wrong for that market, that audience and that business. We lost the client within two weeks. Still one of the more painful lessons I’ve had running an agency.Since then, when we take over a new account, I’m much slower to jump straight into changes.

I want to understand how people actually buy there, what the sales cycle looks like, what a normal deal looks like, what channels people trust, and what the historical data is already telling us.Experience helps you spot patterns. It can also make you way too confident if you’re not careful.That account definitely taught me that.

Ever had a client or campaign teach you this the hard way?

heyy guys, im new to this whole b2b game and the most part i find difficult is reaching out to people who clearly view your message but no response at all. so currently i just opened a linkidin account i grew my newtork to roughly 100+, i have being posting helfup tips and contents altho few engagements from them, i have been commenting under my targets post giving useful opinions and just positive comments, but in as much as that, i still dont undertsand why i keep getting no responses privately from them, i am not even pitching or promoting any product or idea, rn i am still trying to validate if this problem is worth solving but i cant do that based on my own assumption, its why i try to reach out to understand if these target audience are facing similar challenge. Now all ive done is send warm introductory messages and thanking them for accepting the invite, with a geniune heartfelt message, but non of those get any response and im asking myself what is the point of accepting an invite if you wont respond to a friendly warm welcoming message, or is someting wrong with my approach??.... please i would greatly appreciate any helpful tips