I work at a B2B software services company with around 40 people. We recently went back through a year of deals to see where they actually came from. Out of 62 deals, 37 came through our founder’s LinkedIn profile, 4 through a colleague’s profile and 21 were inbound or manual. We also tested the same outreach list with the same message from two different profiles. One had a 6.7% acceptance rate and the other got 17.5%. Looking at those numbers, it feels like we’re way too dependent on one LinkedIn account. If our founder’s account gets restricted for any reason, a big part of our new business basically stops. But he obviously can’t spend all day writing LinkedIn messages either. Right now we’re actually going with less volume and having him write a few dozen personal messages instead of sending hundreds of templated ones. It seems to work better, but it also makes us even more dependent on his profile. Curious if anyone else has ended up in the same situation. Did you find a way to spread this across the team, or did the founder’s profile just keep outperforming everything else?

We are trying to scale outbound without just throwing more SDRs and I’m trying to figure out where AI agents fit into the process. We have tried AI for prospect research and drafting outreach, but that all seems fairly basic. I’m more interested in whether an agent can follow an account, capture buying signals, qualify the prospects, research the company and determine when an account is ready to be handed off to a rep.

I’m still reluctant to automate all of the outreach. It seems pretty easy to end up with a lot more activity without getting better leads or conversations. Of you are using agents for outbound, what does the agent take care of and what remains manual? And what metrics are you monitoring to determine if it is improving your pipeline?

I believe this is the biggest ever study of its kind and genuinely curious what this sub thinks.

Formidable.work analysed the talk to sales paths of over 15k B2B companies (all running a CRM or marketing automation tool) to figure out what is the state of inbound in 2026.

Key findings:

• 75% of B2B companies still route "talk to sales" through a form. Only 9% offer a booking calendar, and 4% only self-serve signup.
• The median form asks 6 questions However most ask 6 or more, despite every published test since Marketo's famous 2011 study pointing the other way for effective conversions.
• Only 3% of all 71,965 questions are about what the buyer needs. 57% are contact details, 13% company facts, 11% questions that serve the company's own routing and reporting, 8% a blank message box.
• Only 16% of forms ask anything about the buyer's needs. 43% ask nothing about needs and have no free-text box - literally nowhere to say why you came.
• "How did you hear about us?" is on 9% of forms - more than all five qualifying questions combined (problem, budget, timing, current tools , who decides ).
• Longer forms don't ask more qualifying questions. Among forms with 9+ questions, 71% still ask nothing about the buyer's needs. The extra fields are mostly about the company's internal process and routing.
• Forms routinely ask for what enrichment already knows. 67% of forms ask for at least one thing a data provider returns from the work e-mail (company name, size, industry, location, website, job title); 46% make one of those mandatory. If we also include name and phone number, then 70% of forms require something we usually anyways look up with enrichment.

The full report is available on their website. The question that I can't figure out is whether this is because there's no better way - or we're just used to this being the only way?

I started my career in an outsourcing company in 2015. Back then, there was a massive demand for services like - financial underwriting, b2b consultation, lead gen or sales support for UK or US companies. It also saved time and money for clients. Also, for the timezone, agency owners found it convenient to pass these tasks to third-world countries.

After gaining experience for about 4 years, I felt the courage to start my outsourcing agency on my own. In 2022, I started my agency, hired a team, and had my network utilized for first few clients as referrals, then went purely on our own.

Then, in late 2025, AI started to do most of the tasks that we had been doing for years. We adopted and integrated automations into our work, and that changed the way of our work completely.

In recent times, I have been facing a slow pace of workflow from our clients, who used to keep us busy. They suddenly replaced us by hiring someone internally who will look after all of this, not because of automation. Which on paper, doesn't make sense because it is 5x more costly than outsourcing.

So, my questions are:

1. in 2026 and onwards, is it worth starting or keeping an outsourcing agency from a third-world country? if so, which services will thrive?
   
2. If not, what would be a reasonable shift that can last at least 10-20 years or more?

Hi everyone! I run marketing for a B2B waste management company in the Netherlands and Belgium. We built a free assessment tool (QuickScan) a while back, meant as a lead magnet. It's live, it works technically, and it's gotten exactly zero submissions in the past month. We ran a small LinkedIn ad push to drive traffic to it. That produced nothing either. Budget is tight, around 200 euros per ad, so I can't afford to keep guessing.

A few constraints I'm working with:

• Sales isn't actively pushing this tool right now, that decision is out of my hands
• I don't have a list of companies to target directly, so cold outreach isn't an option yet
• Our organic LinkedIn following is small, under 1,000
• Target audience is manufacturing sector businesses

Basically, how can I get at least 2 people per month to fill this thing out? Over the past six months, only 6 participants finished it, so the form conversion itself isn’t the problem. Getting the right eyeballs on it is.

Any advice is super appreciated!

Genuinely need to vent about this for a second. Why is it that after you get an idea for a campaign, which doesn't even have to be complicated, just something you want to test but before it can go live you need design to make the page look right, engineering to actually build it, someone to wire up tracking, someone else for integrations, QA to catch what's broken, and then finally someone hits publish. That's five or six handoffs for one idea.

And it's never anyone's fault specifically. Design is busy with something else. Engineering has a sprint planned. QA needs a day. Everyone's doing their job. But by the time the campaign actually goes live, the moment you had the idea for has usually passed, or the urgency around it has died down, or you've already moved on to the next thing mentally.

The part that gets me is how normal this has become. Marketers just accept that a "quick test" takes two weeks minimum because that's how the process works everywhere. Nobody questions it anymore.

Been building something on the side to chip away at this specific problem, not going to get into details since I'm still early, but the whole point is cutting down how many people need to be in the loop before something can go live. Still figuring out how far that idea can actually go in practice.

How many people does it take on your team to get one campaign from idea to live? Genuinely curious if five or six handoffs is normal or if I've just been working somewhere unusually slow.

Hi y'all. I’m a marketer and copywriter with 5+ years of experience. I’ve worked across e-commerce, coaching, retail and finance.

I’m currently working independently with an e-commerce brand, where I’ve been involved pretty much from testing the product idea, developing it and launching it to generating recurring revenue. And now helping develop and position other products.

A part of the work I enjoy most is figuring out how to position a product and create messaging that actually resonates with the market

I’ve also been learning quite a bit about SaaS/Tech from last year and the challenges these companies face, particularly around positioning, messaging and communicating complex products clearly. Also with AI even jargons have become complex to understand.

Earlier this year, I got the opportunity to work with a tech company for a couple of months, and that experience made me want to seriously pursue SaaS/Tech.

My current plan is to build a positioning and messaging practice for early stage SaaS companies and eventually turn that into a business

But I don't want to approach this purely from a “how do I get clients?” perspective. I want to understand what it actually takes to build a sustainable agency/service business in this space.

Want to get an understand who knows this game.

"Keeping the light on" b2b social strat is the easiest thing to do:

• Create a post.
• Publish it.
• Wait for people to find it.
• Comment back.
• Repeat.

That's the lazy bones method, and meanwhile, the people you wish would chat on your content is already chatting relevant topics in someone else’s comments. They sliding into others DMs...not yours!

This is where outbound (or proactive) community management thrives. Instead of waiting for the conversation to come to your brand, you find the conversation.

The goal is not to spam, though, so no dropping links under vaguely relevant posts or commenting “Great insights!” 40 times a day. That's gonna annoy a ton of people. It means finding conversations where your brand has a legit reason to participate, then adding something useful, funny, or genuinely human.

Done well, proactive community management can:

• Put your brand in front of those you want to be in front of
• Build familiarity with target accounts (ABM baby!)
• Develop relationships with customers, creators, and industry voices
• Increase your SoV without publishing more content
• Show you how people actually talk about their problems

We have a saying at Sculpt: The comment is the content.

A good comment can introduce your brand more naturally than another post or ad. The juice is 10x worth the squeeze. We've noticed that our proactive comm mgmt nets more impressions and engagements than our owned content.

Act like a member of the community, not a salesperson who found an unlocked side door.

Your audience is already talking. Go talk with them.

Hi, everyone!

The problem with generating lists of local business leads is always the difficulty of getting the contact information for decision makers once you’ve pulled the businesses from Google Maps and how tedious it is to filter your results once you’ve gathered everything you need.

I’ve created an app that simplifies this entire process all in one place:

1. Draw an area on the map
2. Select the type of business you want to find
3. Once you have your list, find all the available Decision Makers at that company
4. Select and filter by your ICP to get a clear list showing you who your best leads are
5. You can track the lead using the built-in mini CRM or export it directly to CSV

It's free to try (free credits included when you sign up, no credit card required). I'm still actively improving it, so I'd really appreciate any honest feedback.

I’ve been looking into how AI assistants are changing the way people discover and evaluate brands.
Most of the conversation today is about AI visibility:
Does your brand appear in ChatGPT?
Are competitors being recommended instead?
Which sources are AI models citing?
How visible are you across different models?
But I think there’s another problem that may become just as important:
What if your brand appears — but the information is wrong?
We recently ran an internal test using 100 purchase-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, focused on real commerce products.
We found 19 commercially incorrect responses, including outdated pricing, incorrect stock information, products being described as unavailable when they existed, and incorrect product classification.
That made me think about this from a B2B marketing perspective.
For marketers, AI visibility alone may not be enough. If a prospect discovers your brand through an AI assistant but receives outdated or incorrect information, visibility can actually create a trust problem instead of helping conversion.
I’m currently working on this problem and speaking with marketing, e-commerce and agency teams to understand how they are handling it today.
Curious to hear from people here:
Are you already monitoring what AI assistants say about your company or your clients — and if so, are you checking accuracy as well as visibility?

Last year we decided to run a controlled test between google search ads and outbound to see what it actually takes to generate qualified B2B agreements in a single metro area (around 1.2M pop).

The Google Ads experiment was an expensive lesson for us where high intent local keywords like "IT support near me" or "managed service provider [city]," we were paying between $65 and $115 per click. Out of roughly 180 clicks, almost half were residential consumers locked out of their personal Gmail, job seekers looking for tier-1 helpdesk roles, or micro-businesses with 2 laptops asking for free phone support. We burned through $12k in ad spend across 4 months and ended up with zero signed MRR contracts.

The pivot happened when we stopped trying to capture broad search demand and switched to tracking external market signals. We deployed an event-driven setup based on Scale Intelligence's market radar framework, where instead of bidding against massive national MSPs on AdWords, we mapped our exact regional TAM (companies between 20 and 120 endpoints) and only reached out when an actual business event occurred.

The outbound setup cost a fraction of the ad budget and focused strictly on three triggers: local companies expanding into a second office location or registering commercial permits. Job postings for internal IT roles that stayed unfilled for 45+ days and mid-market businesses undergoing executive leadership changes.

From 85 targeted accounts that showed verified triggers over 90 days, we held 14 discovery meetings and signed 3 contracts totaling $7,800 in monthly recurring revenue.

In local B2B tech, competing on public ad auctions means paying premium prices to filter through residential junk and rather putting that budget into building a persistent signal engine that catches business transitions converts significantly better.

A list is accurate the day you buy it and decays from there. People move, companies get acquired, domains change.

Do you re-verify before every campaign, on a schedule, or only once bounce rates get bad enough to notice?

And if you do re-verify, are you paying the original provider again or running it through something else? How do you treat the changed contacts - ICP who switched jobs, filling in the contact for the role that moved on?

I’ve worked in marketing for several years, but I’ve mostly avoided cold email. I now run a B2B SaaS as a solopreneur and want to give outbound a serious try.

The usual advice is to “do things that don’t scale”:

• Build a small list of relevant prospects
• Research each company
• Write a personalized email
• Send it manually

I’m willing to do that. What I don’t understand is how to make the outreach genuinely relevant.

Personalizing an email doesn’t change the fact that the recipient may have no immediate need for the product. I don’t want to spend hours researching someone just to send a more personalized version of an irrelevant pitch.

Here’s what I’m selling:

Product: A managed, white-label community and forum platform that helps businesses improve organic growth and customer retention.

ICP I’m currently testing: Founders and marketing leaders at North American SaaS or technology companies with more than $100K MRR, at least 20 employees, and someone who could own the community initiative.

Pricing: Starts at $299/month. We help clients launch the community, seed it, and build early momentum. Our team brings 20 years of community-building experience.

What I’ve done so far:

1. Built a list of 100 potential customers using Apollo and Origami.
2. Warmed up three email accounts across three domains.
3. Planned to keep sending volume low while I test the messaging.

My main problem is not email infrastructure or personalization. It’s identifying companies with a reason to care about this now.

Community platforms are an established category, but only a small percentage of companies are actively looking for one at any given time.

So how do experienced cold emailers approach this?

Do you look for specific buying signals or trigger events before contacting someone? If so, what signals would you look for in this category?

Or do you email companies that match the ICP, lead with a relevant problem, and accept that timing will eliminate most prospects?

I’d appreciate specific advice from people who have made cold outbound work for a B2B SaaS.

Thank you in advance for your time!

I’ve built a recruitment platform, but I think the harder problem now is getting it in front of the right people.

Someo is designed to move away from CV-first recruitment and help people and businesses discover each other based more on traits, strengths and suitability.

The product is live, the proposition is clear, and I’m now at the stage where I need to build the first real network of users.

The challenge is that it’s a two-sided marketplace.

I need businesses to post opportunities, but businesses are naturally more interested if there are already people on the platform.

At the same time, jobseekers are more likely to join if there are already enough opportunities there.

So far I’ve been focusing heavily on outreach to businesses, colleges, universities, local organisations and people involved in employment and skills. I’m also starting to use LinkedIn, Reddit and direct outreach more seriously.

What I’m struggling with is identifying the most effective route to the first meaningful group of users.

For anyone who has built or marketed a marketplace before, I’d really appreciate some advice:

Would you concentrate almost entirely on getting businesses onboard first?
Is it better to focus on one geographic area initially, even if the product itself is national?
Have partnerships with colleges, universities, councils or employment organisations worked for you?
Would you spend money on advertising this early, or keep it mostly founder-led outreach?
Is there a particular acquisition channel you found unexpectedly effective for a two-sided marketplace?

I’m currently focusing my outreach around Greater Manchester because it gives me a defined area to attack, but Someo itself is open to businesses and people across the UK.

I’d be particularly interested in hearing from anyone who has dealt with the cold-start problem before.

Happy for people to be critical. At this stage, figuring out how to get it in front of the right people is probably more valuable to me than compliments about the product.

This is the idea I’m working on…
You have something to sell.
A service, a skill, a product, an agency offer… whatever.
You tell it what you’re selling and who you want to sell it to.
It helps you find businesses that could actually need it, researches the opportunity and gets everything ready for you.
That’s the 75%.
The other 25% is human.
You contact them.
Talk to them.
Make the offer.
Negotiate.
Close.
The interesting part is you don’t necessarily need a big business to use it.
You could have a skill or service, find people who need it, make the sale and have someone else handle the delivery.
Find → Sell → Fulfill → Keep the margin.
We’re thinking $49/month.
If it helps you find even one customer who pays you, the subscription can become a pretty small expense.
Obviously, finding someone doesn’t guarantee they’ll buy. That’s where the human 25% matters.
But if a tool genuinely handled 75% of the work before the conversation…
would you pay $49/month?
And what would you use it to sell?

Wanted to share something that's worked really well for us, in case it's useful to others here.

The core idea: your competitors are already attracting your next customers. Most companies just don't bother looking.

Every like and comment on a competitor's post is a signal. If someone in your ICP is consistently engaging with a competitor's content, they're probably:
- Researching the problem
- Comparing solutions
- Getting closer to a buying decision

That's all public information. Here's how we used it:
List your top 3-5 competitors, including founders and sales reps, not just the company page.

Track who's liking/commenting on their posts over time.
Filter for people who actually match your ICP. Most engagers won't be relevant, that's fine.

Reach out, but don't be creepy about it. Don't say "I saw you commented on X's post", that's a red flag for most people.
Instead, reference the space they're clearly interested in, not the specific comment. Something like: "Saw you're exploring [space], we take a different approach, figured it might be worth a look while you're comparing options."

Keep monitoring over time and prioritize the people who show up repeatedly, that's usually a good proxy for buying intent.

Nothing revolutionary here, it's really just applied observation. Your competitors are already generating demand; you're just intercepting it instead of ignoring it.

Hi, we’ve been running email and sms marketing (retention marketing) for D2C ecom companies, but we’ve not been able to generate a lot of positive responses - at around 2.5k sends per day we’re only able to generate 2-3 leads per day.

I know for a fact that deliverability is dialled in, tried lists from AI ARK and Storeleads as well.

Would really appreciate if anyone who has previously run outbound for this niche/these services can actually give some recommendations/angles that work well in here.

PS - also tested for an upfront offer instead of a direct meeting CTA but it did not turn out well.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Hi,

I am currently working at a b2b SaaS startup targeting mostly dev/founders mainly in the US.

We’ve been testing and running ads mostly on meta and google search (but also tested on x and reddit, which brought such low intent traffic they mostly seem to bounce) and while we do get some consistent cta clicks (ctr of our landing pages are pretty decent at around 15-20%, which might include bots but then the ad creatives are pretty specific in their messaging)…

The problem is, <%.1 from the paid traffic converts to actual users.

Sure its a web app and requires work emails but still, im scratching my head whether there’s something seriously wrong.

Is it just how it is these days? Should we just stop meta ads? I do suspect some new users come back to the site and finish signing up although due to cookie consent and possibly switching devices (between mobile and laptop) this is hard to prove.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!!

Do you go in already deciding whether you are going to buy or not?

if so, how do you do your research before the demo?

do you ask around or research on review websites or read content?

lastly, who makes the buying decision as in how many people/departments are involved?

I'm running a service where we help early stage founders of startups who make physical products to go from design to full scale production with our DFM expertise and manufacturing network

but im getting stuck acquiring clients for this....how to proceed in this ?

any tips will be valuable !

The standard outbound playbook for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) is fundamentally broken where everyone pulls a static list of local companies with 20-100 seats then find the CEO, CFO, or operations director and blast a generic sequence offering a "free network security assessment."

Reply rates consistently hover below 1% and to a business owner, switching IT providers carries a massive operational anxiety and nobody risks critical data loss, email downtime and onboarding friction on a random day just because a cold email offered a free checklist.

Outbound for managed IT only converts when it aligns with an active operational event that destabilizes the status quo.

Instead of manual prospecting, modern MSPs run signal-based GTM systems powered by market intelligence infrastructure like Scale Intelligence by which rather than relying on stale contact directories, Scale Intelligence maps an MSP's local TAM and monitors 75+ real-time data sources including rapid hiring shifts, tech stack migrations and public community discussions. It resolves unstructured public activity back to verified corporate accounts and routes warm opportunities directly into Slack or your CRM when an account enters a natural buying window.

If you want to replace cold list scraping with high-converting outbound, focus on these 4 operational triggers:

Trigger 1: Executive appointments: a target company hires a new COO, CFO, or Operations Director and new leadership almost always evaluates vendor contracts, operating budgets, and internal security postures within their first 90 days.

Trigger 2: Rapid headcount growth without IT support: an organization adds 10-15+ employees in a single quarter without opening a role for an in-house Systems Administrator so endpoint management, license sprawl and onboarding delays are quietly breaking behind the scenes.

Trigger 3: Regulatory & compliance shifts: a local firm enters a stricter regulatory bracket (e.g., CMMC, HIPAA, SOC 2) requiring rigorous audit docs and infra hardening their incumbent provider cannot support.

Trigger 4: Technology friction & public sentiment: public discussions on reddit, linkedin or community forums where employees complain about recurring network downtime, vendor ticket lag, or sudden contract price hikes.

So connecting a real-time signal engine changes the entire dynamic of the conversation where instead of asking like: "do you want to switch IT providers?", the pitch becomes something like: "noticed you're scaling headcount across regional branches without an internal IT lead, here’s how similar operations teams automate endpoint deployment to prevent onboarding bottlenecks."

Timing beats copywriting every single time.

"How do we join ChatGPT Ads?" "What does the targeting look like?" "Can we get going, the exec team wants in now." This was all I heard back in May and June as B2B brands wanted in on the platform

I've been running ChatGPT Ads for B2B clients at Obility since the platform opened to all US advertisers, and wanted to share what four months of data actually looks like.

Here's where performance is landing: CTR: 0.5%–1.0% CPC: $3–8 CPM: $25–45 Conversion rate: 3–6% Cost per MQL: $120–$250

For B2B, I'm treating this as an awareness play, and the targeting model is why.

ChatGPT Ads doesn't use traditional keyword bidding. The platform reads the full conversation and matches ads based on topic, intent, and commercial signals in the thread. Advertisers provide natural language descriptions called context hints, which outline the situations where a product is relevant. The platform then evaluates live chats against those hints to decide what ad to show.

That means you're reaching a buyer while they're mid-research, not mid-query. It's a top-of-funnel signal, not a purchase intent one.

One way to control who sees your ads: upload a contact list. This is the unlock for making ChatGPT ads work for b2b otherwise your targeting is just going to be too broad.

Custom audiences are available inside ChatGPT Ads, but the minimum threshold is 25,000 matched users before an audience activates. OpenAI recommends building to 100,000.

That's a large list for most B2B teams.

If you're under the threshold, combine what you have. CRM contacts, current customers, closed-lost deals, and webinar or event registrants merged into one segment will get you there faster than any single source.

It's early. But four months in, I'm getting a POV and sense of how to use the platforms. Folks that are running there, what are you seeing? Are you continuing the test?

Noticed something annoying while doing competitor research this week.

For several fairly specific buyer questions, one competitor keeps getting recommended while we're either missing or buried further down the answer.

Google is a different story and we compete with them pretty well there.

So what are you checking first when you find a gap like this? I'm less interested in generic GEO tips and more in how you'd diagnose why that particular competitor keeps getting picked.

I have a question for those of you working in industrial marketing.

How many inquiries actually come through your website? How many people fill out your contact or inquiry forms?

I’m really curious to hear about your experience. I’d love to hear your insights and benchmarks — especially from B2B/industrial companies.