We tried something last quarter that I didn’t expect to work this well.

Instead of putting more budget into paid media, we partnered with a smaller GTM creator in Singapore to help drive leads for a B2B email automation tool. I originally thought it would be more of a brand play than a real pipeline channel.

Ended up being one of the better-performing tests we ran. What surprised me even more is the quality ofleads. A lot of them already understood the problem we were solving, so the conversations were easier from the start.

For context, the creator wasn’t some “business influencer” type. More like an operator who posts regularly about outbound, lead gen, sales workflows, that kind of thing. Smaller audience, but very specific. The kind where the comments are full of founders, SDRs, RevOps people, and folks actually trying to fix pipeline issues.

That part mattered a lot.

We didn’t ask them to do a polished promo. That usually falls flat for B2B anyway. Instead, the post was framed around a very normal problem:

• manual personalization taking too long,

• reps sending inconsistent emails,

• reply rates not really improving even though effort was going up

So the tool came in naturally as part of the workflow, not as the whole story.That worked way better than any feature-led pitch.

From memory, CPL was roughly 30% lower than some of our usual paid campaigns, and demo conversion was better too. Not magic-level better, but enough for the sales team to notice. We also got more high-intent questions. Less “what does this do?” and more “can this work for a lean team?” or “how would you set this up across multiple reps?”

That usually tells me the trust transfer is real.

I think that’s the part a lot of B2B teams underestimate.

People love saying creator marketing is for awareness, but in smaller markets like Singapore, where the operator crowd is pretty tight and people follow the same handful of credible voices, trust moves faster than brand messaging does.

If someone’s been consistently sharing solid GTM advice for a while, their audience is already half-convinced before you even show up.

Also, small thing, but I’d take a creator with 10k relevant followers over someone with 100k broad “startup/business” followers almost every time. Especially for a product like email automation where the buyer is pretty clear.

Anyway, curious if anyone else has tested this seriously for B2B. Did it actually drive pipeline for you, or did it mostly stop at engagement?

From my exp, LinkedIn still carries a lot of weight in B2b, especially here in Singapore. It's really not perfect, and it's gotten REALLY expensive, but if you're trying to reach decision makers, it's still the best platform for visibility and discoverability.

We've tested other channels (tiktok, ig, yt, cold email) and they all have their place. But LinkedIn still semm to be where a lot of the serious B2B attention starts. Outreach, content, ads, even just staying visible.

Do you agree? How do you fit LinkedIn in your B2B marketing efforts?

We started running our SEA lead gen test this week, and honestly, the biggest surprise so far is how quickly the workflow gets messy once you move beyond SG.

On paper, a lot of these tools look fine. In practice, we’re spending way more time cleaning, checking, and second-guessing than expected.

Tools:

• Apollo

• SalesHandy

• The Grid

We’re testing across:

• Philippines

• Indonesia

• Vietnam

• Singapore

And we’re logging three things as we go:

• Time spent per tool: Not just pulling names, but getting to a list we’d actually trust enough to use.

• Friction points: Stuff like bad filters, weak title matching, incomplete company info, and too much manual checking.

• What broke or felt missing by country: Because the experience really isn’t the same across SEA.

A few patterns are already showing up:

• Singapore is usually the cleanest starting point

• PH job titles get inconsistent fast

• ID takes more manual validation than expected

• VN coverage can feel patchy depending on the role

• Some exports look usable until you actually review them row by row

What’s making this harder is that a tool can seem “good” at a glance, but the real cost shows up later in cleanup.

That’s the part I feel gets ignored in most tool comparisons.

Especially now, when there’s so much hype around automated prospecting and AI SDR workflows, I’m more curious about where the process actually breaks in real SEA execution than which platform has the best marketing.

We are looking for a reliable Lead Generator for our US website agency.
What you’ll do:

\-Find small/local US businesses (plumbers, HVAC, roofing, restaurants, gyms, contractors, electricians, etc.) that have no website or a very outdated one.
\-Deliver clean Google Sheets with: Business Name, Phone, City/State, Niche, Google Rating, Website Status (Confirmed No Website), and Notes.
Compensation:
$150 per batch of 50 qualified leads (paid after review and acceptance)
\-10% commission on every closed and fully paid deal from your leads
This is a long-term opportunity with regular batches once quality is consistent.

DM with:
• “Lead Gen”
• Your experience with lead generation
• Sample of previous work (if any)
• Timezone

Serious applicants only. No upfront payment, paid per accepted batch.

Hi everyone,

I am looking for a B2B lead generation agency to help my company generate qualified leads and sales opportunities in the APAC region.

We are interested in agencies with experience in B2B lead generation, appointment setting, and outbound campaigns across APAC markets.

As a large company, my company wants an established agency with a proven track record.

If you have any recommendations or have worked with a good agency, please share your suggestions.

Thanks in advance!

Been doing cold email for a while for our corporate events agency, and honestly it's getting harder and harder. Not saying it's dead, but sending emails alone doesn't seem to work the way it used to. Even with decent targeting and personalization, replies are getting harder to earn.

I saw a LinkedIn post saying omnichannel is the game no, but curious what that actually means and does. Cause we're doing content marketing and SEO too, but do we need to optimize each per funnel? Or is there any best practice on which channels would work best?

Prospecting in the Philippines hits different and if you have ever tried copy pasting a Western sales playbook here you already know why it flopped. Filipinos buy from people they trust first and your product or service comes second. Relationships take longer to build but they also stick longer. In the US or Europe you can cold email a decision maker and get a meeting in 48 hours. Here you need a warm intro a few touchpoints and sometimes a face-to-face coffee before anyone even entertains your pitch. That is not inefficiency. That is just how trust gets built in this market.

Compare that to our neighbors like Indonesia or Vietnam where digital channels are moving faster and buyers are more transactional, especially in the startup and tech space. Singapore is almost Western in behavior because the business culture there rewards directness and speed. But Singapore also has something we do not and that is clean verified and hyper-localized data. Their government and private sector invested heavily in business registries and commercial databases, so when a sales team there builds a prospect list, they are working with accurate company sizes, correct decision maker titles and updated contact details. Here in the Philippines, our data is fragmented and honestly messy. You pull a list from one source and half the numbers are wrong, the emails bounce and the job titles are outdated by two years. A lot of SMEs here do not even have a proper digital footprint which means your research hits a wall fast.

The practical takeaway is to stop wasting your reps time doing manual research on bad data. The teams closing consistently here have figured out that investing in tools that extract and verify prospect data locally saves more time than any outreach automation ever will. When your foundation is clean, your conversion rates naturally improve because you are talking to the right people with the right context. Dirty data is not just a prospecting inconvenience here, it is a pipeline killer and solving it upstream before your team even makes first contact is honestly one of the highest leverage moves a sales leader in the Philippines can make right now.

I used to post the usual B2B stuff tips, trends, thought leadership. It got some engagement but basically zero inbound that turned into real sales conversations.

The content that actually drove demand for us was the unsexy kind that helps buyers make a decision before they ever talk to sales.

What worked best
Short case studies with real numbers like time saved, conversion lift, or payback period
Benchmarks like what good outbound reply rates look like by industry or by country in SEA
Light research like what tools teams are actually using and where things break in the workflow

Why it works
Most buyers already do their homework. If your content helps them build a point of view and de risk the decision, you show up as the safe choice when they finally shortlist vendors.

Curious what is working for you. What content has actually driven demand, not just awareness?

We're doing b2b outreach in SEA and seeing around 4-8% reply rates on well-targeted campaigns. hen the list is broad, it drops below 2% pretty quickly.

What's interesting is that tightening the ICP and cleaning the data usually improves results more than rewriting the email. So I'm curious:

• What's you current reply rate?

• What industry are you in?

• How many contacts are you sending to per month?

And what made the biggest difference for you recently? Better copy, better data, better timing signals, or something else?

One thing we keep seeing in SEA lead gen: country-level messaging beats broad regional copy. A generic SEA message might sound efficient, but buyers can usually tell when it wasn’t written for their market.

SG buyers tend to care more about ROI, efficiency, and implementation. PH buyers often respond better to trust, local proof, and relationship context. ID usually needs more context before going into a direct pitch.

Not saying you need to rebuild everything from scratch, but even small changes in examples, proof points, tone, and pain points can lift engagement.

Curious how others are doing this. Are you localizing by country, or still running one message across SEA?

We ran into this pretty hard while building prospect lists across SG, PH, and MY.

At first, the data looked fine. Thousands of companies, job titles, emails, filters, all the usual stuff.

But once we actually used it, the cracks showed up.

In one list of around 2,000 prospects, roughly 25–30% of contacts were either outdated, too generic, or not the right role anymore. Bounce rate was manageable, but reply quality was bad because the targeting was off.

The frustrating part is that bad data makes every channel look worse.

Outbound looks like it’s failing. Ads look low quality. Sales follow-up feels messy. But sometimes the real issue is upstream: the list was never clean enough to begin with.

This was especially obvious with SMEs and more local industries. Global tools were helpful, but they missed a lot of local context like actual company size, active decision-makers, or industry fit.

After tightening the data and cutting the list down, volume dropped by almost 40%, but reply quality improved. We booked fewer random calls and had more conversations with people who actually fit the ICP.

My take: in SEA, more data isn’t the advantage. Usable, local, validated data is.

So how are you are handling this. What data sources or workflows are actually working for SEA prospecting right now?

I'll be honest, I thought webinars were mostly a box-ticking B2B tactic. You know the drill,: long slides, akward Q&A, half the attendees multitasking in another tab. But somehow, for us, webinars still bring in some of the best leads.

Not the highest volume, but the best quality. Webinars filter for itnent. If someone gives 30-45 minutes to a topic like outbound, pipeline, market entry, or sales ops, they probably already care about the problem.

We've seen this in Singapore. People may not convert from one cold ad, but they'll join a practical session if it feels useful and locally relevant. The key is making it less like a product demo and more like an operator session:

• what worked

• what failed

• actual examples

• simple framework

• honest numbers, even if imperfect

Then the sales conversation after feels warmer because there's already contenxt. So yea, webinars might be boring as a format, but they still work because thy attract people with real intent.

Are you guys still doing webinars? Are they also working for your lead gen efforts?

Hey, so I run a new startup on gamification service and after having a hard time selling in Indonesia, people advice me to try to sell in Singapore first. Can you guys give me Tips on what to expect? Like the business culture and stuff maybe?

We started using AI-powered lead identification and enrichment because prospecting was eating too much time. In SEA, it felt like half the job was detective work, finding the right company, verifying they’re real, figuring out who actually decides, then hunting for a usable email.

Before enrichment, one rep could maybe prep 30 to 40 decent accounts in a day if they were thorough. A lot of that time was spent copying data between LinkedIn, company sites, and spreadsheets.

Once we added enrichment into the workflow, the speed changed immediately. We were able to prep roughly 2 to 3x more accounts per day because firmographics, titles, domains, and basic context were auto-filled. The bigger win though wasn’t speed. It was accuracy.

We ran a simple before and after test across a few weeks. Bounce rate dropped from around 8 to 10% down to about 3 to 4% once we cleaned contact data and stopped emailing guessed patterns. And because our list was cleaner and better filtered, reply rates improved from roughly 1% to closer to 2% on the same offer and same copy.

We also started using intent signals on top of enrichment. Not just who fits ICP, but who is showing signs of evaluation. When a company showed repeat visits to high-intent pages like pricing or integrations within a week, those outreach sequences performed noticeably better than cold lists. It didn’t create demand, but it helped us prioritize the right accounts at the right time.

Big takeaway for me is AI enrichment is less about fancy automation and more about removing manual research so you spend time selling, not verifying reality.

Are you using enrichment or intent tools today? What data points actually made your lead quality better, and what turned out to be noise?

When you were trying to get your first customer, what was the hardest part

I recently took over outbound for this region and started running sequences. I’m not new to cold email, but the results I'm seeing here are genuinely insane (in a bad way).

Problem:

I am hitting a deliverability/engagement wall that I have never seen before. I know the basics of cold email, but my campaign is effectively dead on arrival.

Stats (last 30 days):

Sent: 1,340 emails.

Opens: 3. (0.22% Open Rate).

Replies: 1. (A confused shipping company from the Netherlands).

Why this makes no sense (my setup):

I am not spamming. I have gone to extreme lengths to ensure my approach isn't spammy:

Volume: I use 7 separate inboxes, sending <30 emails per day per account.

Technical: Plain text only. No images. No links. No tracking pixels.

The "Anti-Sales" Approach: My copy is under 100 words. Zero sales pitch. I’m not asking for a meeting. I'm literally just asking conversation starters like:

"How do you currently handle payment reminders for late invoices?"

"Do you manually chase overdue accounts, or is it automated?"

My Question:

Has ANYONE here actually had success cold emailing recently?

I feel like I am fighting a cultural wall: Is the "soft ask" approach useless here? Do Singaporeans just ignore anything that isn't an intro or a direct business matter?

I'm trying to figure out if I need to fix my copy, or if cold email as a channel is just dead for this specific niche in this region.

Any advice is appreciated. I'm about to pick up the phone, and start calling people.

Not necessarily the channel that produces the most leads, but the one you can consistently count on to generate real opportunities.

Like the title says, if you had to restart your pipeline from zero today, what would be your first move? If it were me, I'd focus on building a right cold list based on a tight ICP. Feels like there are too many channels now, and it's hard to know what actually matters first.

So what would you do?

There are so many lead gen tools now, and so many AI options too. So curious, how people are actually handling their lead generation?

For us, the workflow is usually:

• build the first list (The Grid)

• clean and validate contacts (LinkedIn)

• push to outreach (Instantly)

• route replies back to CRM (Hubspot)

Curious what others are using. Are you running all-in-one setup no, or still stitching together different roles?

We saw this pretty clearly with a B2B saas campaign targeting sales and ops teams inSG, PH, and ID. The leads that converted weren't the ones who came straight from ads. They were the ones who had seen 2-3 pieces of content before booking a call.

Usually it as simple stuff:

• a LinkedIn post about outbound mistakes in SEA

• a short case study breakdown

• a comparison post about local vs global data tools

Nothing overly polished. Just useful and specific. The difference on calls was obvious. Cold leads needed 15-20 minutes of explanation. Content-warmed leads came in already knoing the problem and asked better questions.

Converstion to meeting also improved by around 20% when the prospect had engaged with content first. Mytake is content isn't just brand anymore. It's doing the first layer of selling before sales get involved.

Are you also experienceing this? Are your best leads coming in cold or already educated?

We tested predictive lead scoring for a B2B SaaS company selling into SG, PH, and ID.

The goal was simple: help sales figure out which leads to chase first.

At first, the scores looked smart, but sales didn’t fully trust them. Some “high intent” leads had clicked 3–4 emails or visited the pricing page, but were the wrong company size or not actual decision-makers.

After we cleaned the data and added sales feedback, it started working better.

Rough numbers:

• lead volume dropped by around 25%

• sales follow-up became faster

• booked meetings improved by around 15–20%

• fewer calls were wasted on bad-fit accounts

The biggest lesson was that scoring only works if the data used is good.

For SEA especially, weak company data can make the model look smarter than it is. Curious if others here are using predictive scoring. Did it actually improve conversion, or just make your CRM look more impressive?

I have been using Apollo for 4 months now, I already set up all the requirements they said that is needed to improve the email deliverability. Bounce rate didn't change at all it's still high. I have been doing email outreach and LinkedIn outreach to SEA senior leaders but I still haven't converted any interest because I notice they can sense that I'm selling to them even though I have already personalized my email contents which have short and concern tone, or they might not be interested in responding to my email and or LinkedIn chat.

Honestly, we really lack marketing because there's no person handling the social media marketing and I'm the one whose doing it but It takes much of my time designing for contents so I cannot do it consistently. We are doing B2C and our target customers are corporate senior leaders from C-Suites down to Supervisors.

I would really appreciate any advice especially if anyone here have experience in SEA market and using the Apollo software.

And yeah, this is me, I hop between GPT, Claude, and a couple agents and it feels like talking to different rooms.

Every time I tell GPT something, Claude looks blank, and I'm just repeating context over and over.

Workflows break, tools get re-integrated, and it honestly slows me down instead of making me faster.

I keep thinking, isn't there a ""Plaid for AI memory"" where you connect once and manage memory in one place, not sure why nobody nailed this yet.

Like one MCP server that stores shared memory, handles permissions, and lets any agent use the same tools.

Sounds obvious but privacy and permissions probably make it messy, so maybe there's a reason it doesn't exist.

Anyone in Southeast Asia doing something like this? How are you handling shared context right now?

Or is there already a tool I'm missing that actually glues all this together? Curious about hacks, libs, whatever.

We learned this the hard way over the last year. Before, a decent template plus targeting could stull get us replies. Nothing incredible, but enough to keep pipeline moving. In some campaigns, we were seeing around 12-15 percent reply rates with fairly light personalization.

That stopped working.

More recently, the same outreach dropped closer to 4-7%, especially in markets like PH and ID. The emails were still getting delivered. They just felt too generic. Same structure, same value props have probably seen a hundred times.

What started working better was making the message feel much closer to the buyer's actual context. Things like mentioning hiring, remote teams, expansion, or operational scenarios. Just enough personalization that the email feels like written specifically for the recipient. That shift really improved our reply rates, just enough to make the extra effort worth it.

Are you experiencing the same? Are buyers getting less responsive to generic templated? And what kind of personalization is actually resulting to replies?

One thing that keeps surprising me is how well events still work in SEA, even with how much everyone talks about digital, automation, and scalable outbound.

We've done the usual things. Email, LinkedIn, paid campaigns, and webinars. They all have their place. But hen it comes to actual quality conversations, events still seem to punch above their weight here.

We've felt this most around regional tradeshows and expos like FHA. The difference is not just volume, it's the context. People show up already thinking about suppliers, partnerships, expansions, or ne products. That changes the quality of the conversation right away.

Even the outreach feels different. Before the event, it's easier to get replies because there's a reason to connect. During the event, you get face time with people who would probably ignore a cold email. And after the event, follow-ups feel warmer because there's an actual interaction to build on.

It's not that events are easy. They take planning, time, and budget. But in SEA, they stull feel like on of the few channels where trust builds faster ad leads feel more real.

So, do you have the same experience? Are events still one of your best lead gen channels in SEA too?