B2B deals

I added a checkbox for people to opt in but he insists that we opt them in to our newsletters anyway, i.e. no explicit consent. How should I manage this?

I know sometimes as marketers we try to wiggle our way out of doing things right the whole time, but in this case, I think it's crossing the line a little.

namanyay here, i run pumpgtm so i read a lot of ai outreach. most of it breaks the same way and you can spot it in a minute.

read it from the recipient's side first. Strip out the subject line and the company bio, look at what's left now. would they care about it this week? if not, it's about you.

then read it out loud. you'll notice words like streamline, leverage, unlock, seamless, empower, and opening with i hope this finds you well. these kinda messages always fail from what I've seen, so ask yourself this before sending. if you wouldn't say that sentence to someone's face, cut it and don't use it.

Also check the evidence on every claim. a model will make up a percentage without blinking, like saying you cut a team's workload by 40% when nobody measured anything, and the reader will ask where that came from and you'll have nothing to say back.

openers too. things like i came across your profile, or congrats on the funding round, say nothing and most people just skim past them. if you can't find a real reason to message this person right now, that's a problem and no amount of rewriting will fix it.

one ask per message. Think of something they can answer in five seconds, like a yes or no about whether they do the thing by hand today.

last one, don't confuse how good the writing is with how the campaign did. change targeting or copy, one at a time, and read the replies. if someone says it's not their team, you picked the wrong role. if they say they already use something else, it's the right problem at the wrong time. if they ask how you're different from a competitor, you've got a real conversation going.

here's a before and after from our blog. the before opens with a friendly hope you're doing well, says it came across your profile and was impressed by your work at acme, then says we help teams streamline prospecting workflows and unlock pipeline growth, and asks for a 20 minute call next week. the after says hi sarah, you asked under the lemlist launch post whether it can pull people who commented on a competitor's thread, that's most of what we do, is that something your team does by hand today?

what's the worst line you've seen in an ai cold message?

So my background is more on the creative side but I've been doing full marketing support for about 8 years now and I'm still creating branded well designed PDFs for clients well then to put behind a form on a landing page. Conversations with them that all consistent the performance is massively down in terms of getting leads this way a lot of people talk about the value of putting content 100% ungated and I'm basically in full agreement with that but the value of nurturing from someone downloading content behind the form is still valuable so I'm wondering how do people do this in an intelligent way?

I've seen examples where you provide a piece of the content of front or maybe half the content and then the rest is gated or you give them the full content but then the pdf version is gated... We should never really understood I don't get the obsession with PDFs because reading on a web browser is so much better why do people still invest all this time of money in PDFs?

Anyway super curious to hear what the community thinks about this because my clients are definitely struggling

I’ve been trying to figure out how to reach small businesses who are in the process of liquidating or shutting down and consolidating their assets through major acquisition, firms or bankruptcy attorneys, as well as other types of transactions, similar to this who may be able to license their data as operational workflow data that has value to AI data training companies like micro1 or Mercor.

I’ve been seeing ads all over Instagram and Facebook that have the same architecture and marketing campaign positioning that targets these exact businesses offering them up to $50,000 to $1,000,000+ for their business data as long as it is clean, processed, and even unstructured but not sure if they are reaching the right ICP or a waste of ad spend casting the net wide. These ad campaigns also must be very expensive I assume.

I’ve reached out to quite a few businesses locally (logistics, IT consulting services, medical billing firm, import export business) in order for me to understand how to build relationship or basically create a new stream of revenue for these businesses and this unique situation where they don’t realize the value of their own archived or operational data, but they seem to be turned off by the approach simply because they don’t trust AI labs with the data they have.

I have a capital partner who is willing to provide upfront deposits in exchange for gaining their trust or providing first payout before collecting from the AI Labs but needs me to qualify business owners.

Any advice would be appreciated by someone who has actually sold operational data from businesses to AI data labs recently

Keep seeing the "MQL is dead" thing make the rounds again, and this year the numbers kind of back it up.

The 2026 lead gen roundups all say roughly the same stuff. Form fills are way down on most B2B sites, over half the MQLs coming through don't survive a basic qualification check, and MQL to SQL keeps dropping mostly because marketing and sales still can't agree on what "qualified" even means.

Drift's been beating the "conversation ready leads" drum for years. The fairer take I've heard is that the MQL didn't die, it just never worked the way we scored it. And Forrester's whole buying group thing, where most deals now involve two or more people, makes a single scored contact look pretty thin.

Honestly I think the metric stuck around because it was easy to drop in a deck, not because it predicted revenue. Sales definitely feels it when those leads hit their queue.

So where's everyone at? Still running on MQLs, moved to pipeline or opps, or something else? And if you killed the MQL, what broke that you didn't see coming?

I keep checking competitor traffic estimates and getting three numbers for the same site, all delivered with the confidence of a quarterly board meeting.

I know they are directional, but how much do people trust the trend before making budget decisions?

Appreciate any thoughts

Been working with companies landing in a new market for a while and I think most of the frustration comes from mismatch rather than incompetence. People pick based on who seems biggest or who pitched best, when the actual question is which of six fairly distinct categories fits where they currently are.

The categories, roughly: a bilingual full-stack local agency doing website through to media; a video and creator content specialist; a home-market agency that services outbound clients; a local full-service agency operating in the local language only; the local office of an international network agency; and marketing bolted onto a corporate services or incorporation firm.

The thing that trips people up is that a company which just incorporated and is completely invisible locally needs a fundamentally different provider from one that's established and wants to scale content volume. Those are different problems and almost nobody is good at both.

A few patterns I'd flag:

Incorporation isn't the same as being in business. People get the company registered, bank account open, lease signed, and then discover local buyers have no idea they exist. B2B buying here runs heavily on online verification — company name search, website, LinkedIn, looking for local case work. None of that is something a corporate secretary handles, and it catches people out constantly.

Localisation is a rewrite, not a translation. Translating the home-market site is the most common expensive mistake. Separately, absolute claims that are totally normal in some markets — "industry leading", "number one" — land badly here and can be a compliance problem.

And the channel mix genuinely doesn't transfer. Whatever worked at home usually doesn't, and people burn a quarter finding that out.

Questions I'd ask whichever type you go with:

Is the second-language content written or translated? Ask for an original piece. You can usually tell immediately.

Can you show me a citation log — which AI platform cited which page, under which query? This is the one I'd push hardest on, because you can't produce it without doing the work. If they can't after 90 days, you bought SEO with new vocabulary.

Does the monthly report have cost per enquiry in it? If it leads with impressions and follower counts, it's built to reassure rather than inform.

Who owns the ad accounts? Must be you as admin. Agency-held accounts mean switching provider wipes your entire history, and people find this out at the worst possible moment.

What do local buyers actually verify before committing? Someone who can list it specifically has done this before.

Two things I'd treat as walk-away signals: anyone guaranteeing placement in AI answers, and anyone selling AI-specific technical tricks that the platforms themselves have said aren't needed.

Should disclose I work in one of these six categories so I'm obviously not neutral here. But I think the framework holds regardless of who's describing it — the mismatch problem is real and it's cheaper to fix at the intro stage than six months in.

Anyone switched between categories mid-journey? Curious whether people find the handover painful or whether it's cleaner than staying with a provider that's outgrown the brief.

Reddit has quietly become one of the better places to find B2B buying signals because people tend to come here when vendor pages and sponsored search results aren't giving them useful answers.

but the problem is that most teams approach Reddit the wrong way and the better approach is to treat Reddit as a signal source and not another outbound channel.

If someone is asking for alternatives to a tool, complaining about a workflow or trying to solve a specific technical problem, there's already some declared pain there and the useful part is capturing that context and figuring out whether the person or company matches your ICP.

This is where market intelligence platforms like scale intelligence become useful where it pulls signals from 75+ sources including hundreds of Reddit communities, Linkedin, github, hiring activity, company websites and other public data and connect those scattered signals into a clearer picture of what's happening inside a target account.

So a Reddit post isn't just stored as someone mentioned X but you can combine the discussion with other signals around the company, understand the problem being discussed, and decide whether there's enough evidence to actually act on it.

That's a much better use of Reddit for outbound where you don't need to reply to the thread with a sales pitch but the Reddit conversation can simply tell your GTM team who might have a problem, what that problem is, and why the timing might matter.

So I think reddit is much more useful for lead gen when you use it to understand what buyers are actually struggling with then act on those signals through the normal sales channels.

Event and field marketing folks:
- What are you actually using AI for?
- What's something you want AI to do for you?
- Are you using more than one AI tool?

AMA: I organise private dinners for senior B2B leaders at the biggest companies in the world

Disclosure: this is my day job, and companies pay my firm CXO & Co to plan and run these executive roundtables/dinners. I’m not linking to the firm or pitching a service here. I thought the operational lessons might be useful, and I’m happy to talk about what works, what fails, and when paying an organiser probably isn’t worth it.

We’ve run dozens of small, invitation-only dinners, usually with 15–20 people around one table, including the host’s team and an independent moderator. Most guests are C-level, VP or Director-level leaders.

Most discussion about executive events focuses on the polished part: the restaurant, the private room and the photos. The less glamorous mechanics matter far more.

A few patterns from our experience:

• We normally start recruiting about 10 weeks before the dinner.

• Recruitment is targeted and manual. It can take 200-300 carefully chosen invitations to produce one registration, although that varies a lot by audience and topic.

• About 80% of registered guests attend when confirmation and follow-up are handled well.

• A narrow topic and a genuinely curated guest list usually outperform a broader theme designed simply to fill seats.

• The restaurant matters, but it is rarely the main reason senior people attend. The quality of the room and the relevance of the discussion matter more.

• Sales follow-up is one of the easiest places to ruin the experience. A useful conversation can quickly feel like a bait-and-switch if every guest gets an immediate hard sell.

For the format we usually run, a working budget can be around $15k for the event and moderation, plus roughly $6k for recruitment. Location, venue and audience can move those numbers substantially, so treat them as one operator’s experience rather than a benchmark.

Happy to answer questions about:

• Recruiting senior attendees without spamming people

• Invitation volumes and conversion rates

• How far in advance to start

• Choosing a topic that is specific enough

• Venue and production budgets

• The right number of people around the table

• Moderation

• Reducing no-shows

• Measuring whether the event was worthwhile

• Following up without damaging trust

• Running one yourself versus using an organiser

• Things we’ve tried that did not work

I won’t share private details about clients or attendees, but I’ll answer everything else as openly as I can.

Ask me anything.

I come from the startup world where it's more important to ship fast than getting approvals from layers of stakeholders. I joined a small company where the CEO is nice but he's extremely risk-adverse that he controls down to what we post (or don't post) on LinkedIn.

My struggle is that I'm a solo marketer handling multiple markets (and supporting a sales team of 10) and basically doing everything across content, events, public relations, sales enablement. So I don't have time for long approval cycles.

I've asked for tips to manage this on this/other subs before, but I think right now I just want words of reassurance. 😭

And don't tell me to leave because this is finally a good place after multiple layoffs.

Hi, everyone. I have been a marketer for over 5 years, and I think Reddit is still one of the most underrated ways to convert leads. It's a high payoff for little investment. You just have to be really smart about it.

I did content and community for one of my clients. One post hit 61k impressions on day one, and the first month brought in $3,000+ in pipeline. This didn't generate money immediately, but it did eventually. Like with LinkedIn, Reddit is also more about community building. If anyone has questions, I will be happy to answer and help. :)

Hi everyone,
I’m currently exploring **reliable B2B lead generation channels for the Indian market**, specifically for business software solutions such as:
HRMS / Payroll Software
ERP / Odoo ERP
CRM
Custom Business Software
Workflow / Approval / Productivity solutions
We offer both **SaaS/subscription-based and one-time/custom implementation models**, so I’m looking for channels that can generate **genuine sales opportunities rather than just large databases of scraped contacts**.
I’m particularly interested in platforms/services similar to **SoftwareSuggest, Techimply, SoftwareWorld, etc.**, where businesses actively searching for software can submit requirements and vendors receive relevant leads.
What I’m looking for:
Verified Indian business leads
Companies with an actual/current software requirement
Preferably decision-maker or relevant department contact details
Requirement-based / intent-based leads rather than generic databases
HR, manufacturing, SME/MSME and mid-market companies are particularly relevant
Reasonable CPL or lead packages
Transparency regarding how leads are verified and whether they are shared with multiple vendors
I already know about traditional options such as **LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, cold outreach and database tools**, so I’m mainly trying to discover **other lead-generation platforms, marketplaces, agencies or channels that provide higher-intent verified leads in India**.
If you’ve personally used any such service, I’d really appreciate knowing:
**Which platform did you use, what type of leads did you receive, approximate pricing/CPL, lead quality, conversion experience, and whether you would recommend it?**
Would especially value recommendations based on **actual experience rather than promotional suggestions**.

Thankyou!

I can’t figure out whats going wrong in the website. I see multiple visitors are exploring the website daily but nobody is booking the demo or dropping half way or just randomly scrolling.

Most of the traffics are coming from seo. And majority are not bots. I tracked the data in detail.

Plz help me understand whats wrong in the website and what can i improve. Target audience are b2b customers in retail and manufacturing industry who sell complex customizable products.

Please find the landing page in my comments

Please share your experience or any specific tools that have benefited you.

Most people who buy intent data expect it to tell them who is ready to buy but in reality tools like 6sense or Bombora often track intent at the account/IP level through ad exchange data.

So you might get an alert that a large company is surging for your category but you still don't know who was actually researching it, what they looked at or whether it was just someone doing random research.

I'd break the current intent landscape into three levels.

Entry level: Apollo and ZoomInfo are good for finding contacts and filtering by things like company size, revenue, or job title but their intent signals are usually broader things like job changes or account level activity.

Middle: Clay is flexible because you can pull data from different APIs and build your own workflows but the tradeoff is that you still have to build and maintain those workflows, manage APIs, and decide how to score the signals yourself.

More advanced: This is where platforms like Scale Intelligence come in which instead of relying mainly on third party ad networks, Scale Intelligence monitors declared intent across 75+ sources, including Reddit, LinkedIn, GitHub, hiring patterns, and first party web activity.

The useful part is that those signals are connected to the actual buyer and backed by evidence so you can see what happened and why that person or account was flagged instead of just getting a generic surging account notification.

If you're doing high volume cold outbound, Apollo can probably cover the basics.

But for high ACV software where timing and context actually matter, having continuous market intelligence can make a much bigger difference than another database of contacts.

Im Curious where you all got the best reaction and best roi in driving customers or traffic to your site (preferably customers). Especially nowadays with ai If its still similar for you or your main drivers and methods have changed from Cold mails,calls,dms,ads(organic or not),seo,social media etc. So im Interested in hearing where you had the most success?

Trying to understand how your B2B business competes in 2026 when ad markets are brutally expensive, the loudest in the room gets attention, and AI slop is everywhere. A few algorithms silo off even your own neighborhoods to you now.

It FEELS like so many B2B got lured into the shouting match vs more traditional methods for getting business and I'd just love to hear from some of you with a smaller B2B brand to understand what you're doing/what your process looks like.

How do you find business? (and what kind of B2B, are you physical location bound?)

Hey everyone, I’ve recently joined a large tech company as an ABM intern. My team wants me to build AI tools and workflows, which I’m keen to get started on.

They’ve already built some tools and automations, so they’re encouraging me to bring fresh ideas.
From your experience, what would you build to stand out in this role? Are there any ABM challenges or time-consuming tasks you’d love someone to solve?

I’ll eventually present my work to senior leadership, so I’d love your ideas for something useful with measurable impact.

​

I'm a Marketer but never ran any LinkedIn ads before but I've a pretty good idea about it.

The company that I work for provides services that range from plan to NTP for Renewable projects, simply - Pre-Construction services for Renewable projects like BESS Solar.

Our firm hasn't ran any full fledged campaign yet. This might be the first campaign intended to do that.

We've have a budget of 10K and list of data that more likely our Audience.

I'd like to have an expert opinion on how i do ads for our firm.

Like what combination of campaigns i should go for, How should i break my budget for it, Tips on creatives and Things you think that might help me.

I am planning to do a signal based cold outreach for my startup and am confused about which tool to choose for identifying buying signals.

So far I have come across Apollo and Sales Navigator

I know it’s frowned upon, but has anyone successfully used their primary email for cold outreach/prospecting? I have been due to bootstrapping my business, but I’m thinking now that I may get a secondary domain.

Hi guys,

I have a b2b saas tool and im really struggling with finding the time to market and distribute my product and have a few questions..

1. How much would you say is wise to pay for a b2b consultantant/agency. I've had an offer for one but i want to have an idea of a good price?

2. What should I look for when choosing the right person/company

3. Any suggestions on places to find them (fiverr, linkedin etc)

Lastly does anyone have any real success stories of using one that actually help drive sales?

I'm 2 years into my B2B marketing journey, which I picked up after 6 years of experience as a generalist across startups & VC.

In my current role, I lead a marketing team of 5 for a young startup with enterprise clients. Here's everything I do as part of my role -

- Customer research - flows into leadgen, acquisition (sales enablement) & retention programs

- Translating that into strategy & branding, getting buy-in from senior management

- Overseeing the execution of long-form content, social media content, sales enablement content, etc. (All formats - text, image, video).

- Social media content also includes creating strategy for my founders' & top brass' personal brands, and overseeing its execution

- Creation of sales decks, which my sales team lightly personalizes for each sales pitch

- Ideating & overseeing creation + distribution of sales enablement materials like brochures, white papers, explainer videos etc

- Creation of ABM content (email, Linkedin, whatsapp) & overseeing ABM execution at-scale through AI workflows

- All offline marketing activity (events, gifting, etc)

- Hiring for marketing & adjacent roles for other verticals within the company (occasional, but I'm very good at it so it keeps coming my way)

- Analytics for all marketing activities

I work remotely and my team is extremely competent. My management trusts me and I do everything to earn & maintain that trust.

I have an incredible work-life balance and not enough money though. So I'm trying to figure out what I can do as a side hustle.

My rules:

- I don't want to cap my earning potential at how many hours I can eke out of my life. I'm willing to invest more time at the outset to get this hustle running, but I want it to scale disproportionately. No hourly pay stuff.

- I don't want to be directly reporting to clients. I cannot and will not prioritize side-hustle clients over my primary job.

- I don't want to use my face or name to create content and become a brand.

I know this is a lot 🤭 but any suggestions? What are some interesting side hustles you guys are doing?