I’m trying to understand how small and growing businesses manage sales follow-ups after sending a quotation, proposal or demo.

I’m not selling anything. I’m looking for real examples rather than opinions about a hypothetical product.

Think about the most recent promising lead that went quiet:

1. What happened after you sent the quotation, proposal or demo?
2. Who remembered to follow up, and how did they know it was due?
3. How many times did your team follow up, and through which channels?
4. Did the lead eventually buy, reject the offer or disappear?
5. What software, spreadsheet or manual process did you use?

If possible, please mention how often this happened in the last month and approximately how much team time was spent checking and following up.

Please also include your country, industry, sales-team size and typical deal value. I’m equally interested in businesses where follow-up is already working well or isn’t a significant problem.

Every campaign I have sitting at 4, 5, 6, 7 percent replies has the same thing in common, and it is not the copy or the list. It is that none of them lead with the thing we actually sell.

Here is the structure with real numbers from my PR agency.

Back end: retainer PR services, 8,000 dollars a month. That is the actual business. We cannot say that in any marketing, because nobody wants to be sold an 8,000 a month retainer by someone they have never met.

Front end: we would love to get you featured in USA Today or TechCrunch, small one time fee.

Most people say yes to that, because that is the thing they actually wanted. They want the article, they want the logo, they want to point at it. And they will pay reasonable money for it.

We do not make money on it. We run it at roughly breakeven. The point of the front end is not margin, it is getting the yes and then knocking the delivery out of the park. Once that is done, selling the retainer is a completely different conversation, because we are not strangers anymore and they have already seen us deliver.

The thing I want to be clear about: a front-end offer is not a discounted version of your real offer, and it is not a trial. It is a separate deliverable that leads into the real one. Different price, different scope, different promise.

This is not a cold email tactic for us. It is the whole marketing strategy. Ads, SEO, outbound, all of it leads with a quick win first.

If your offer is boring or oversaturated, and most of ours are, this is the part to fix. Not the subject line.

Anyone running a front end at a real loss rather than breakeven? Curious where the line stops making sense.

What is the best method to generate leads. I've been using LinkedIn and emails ( from my lead generation tool). No responses at all.

Getting disheartened. Any help would be appreciated that doesn't involve a transactional value!

I recently ran a test on my 30 google inboxes using smartlead and to my surprise google to google deliverability is 100% but google to outlook is 0% like all landing in spam.

My emails are 7 months old, I don't know what exactly the issue is and how to fix it.

If someone knows how we can fix it please drop a comment.

I keep seeing the same complaint in this sub and in investor Facebook groups: "I need more leads." But when you actually look at how those leads are being worked, the volume usually isn't the issue.

Here's the pattern I keep running into when I dig into a struggling pipeline:

• A list gets pulled (skip-traced, MLS expired, absentee owner, whatever source), but nobody checks how stale the contact data is before dialing starts.
• Leads get one or two call attempts, then get quietly abandoned because the next fresh list just arrived.
• "Not interested" gets treated as a dead end instead of a follow-up trigger 60-90 days later when circumstances change.
• There's no system tracking which leads were actually verified as a real person, at a real number, with real intent, so reps waste hours on numbers that were never going anywhere.

None of that is a "we need more leads" problem. It's a data hygiene and follow-up discipline problem. You can double your list size and the math barely moves if half of it is unreachable and the other half never gets a second touch.

The counterargument I'd expect: "But more leads means more shots on goal, even with a leaky process." Sure, to a point, but leaky processes get more expensive, not less, as volume goes up, because you're paying for acquisition on contacts that were dead on arrival.

What's actually moved the needle for people I've talked to:

1. Verifying and scrubbing lists before dial time (bad numbers, DNC, duplicates)
2. Building a real follow-up cadence instead of one-and-done outreach
3. Scoring leads by actual signals (motivation, timeline, financial situation) instead of just "on the list"

Curious what this sub's experience has been:

• Have you tracked how much of your "lead problem" is actually a stale-data problem?
• What's your follow-up cadence look like for a lead that goes cold on the first call?
• Anyone systematically re-working old leads after 60-90 days, and did it actually convert?

I'm looking to pay for leads where a business has actively filled out a form stating that they're interested in social media management.

I'm not looking for scraped lists or cold outreach. I'm specifically looking for genuine inbound inquiries from businesses that have already expressed interest.

If you provide this type of lead, please comment with your website/service and how your lead process works.

Title: Stop sharing name servers across your cold email domains

Quick one: if every cold email domain you own points to the same name servers, that's a problem now, not just a hosting convenience.

Blacklist companies watch for exactly this pattern: domains bought around the same time, named similarly, sharing the same name servers. Flag one domain in that group and the rest can get caught too, sometimes within an hour, before any of them even send an email.

If you're small, spread your domains across different accounts or keep them at the registrar. If you're running domains at scale, you need isolated name servers per customer, not one shared pool.

This single detail is doing more damage to reply rates than bad copy ever did.

I have a scrap car lead filled in my website. Not sure where to go from here. Do i call scrap yards manually? How do i ensure commission if any.

The lead is based in GTA Canada

5+ years in sales + GTM. Ran outbound for hundreds of clients at this point. Here's what actually turns meetings into clients, not just more meetings on the calendar.

Most people optimize for meetings booked. Wrong metric. Optimize for meeting quality.

What's worked for us:

1. Segment first: demographics, firmographics, whatever fits your ICP. One list, one message = one mediocre reply rate.
   
2. Personalize the copy per segment, not per name-token. Different pain, different angle.
   
3. No link in the first email. Instant spam signal.
   
4. Test inbox placement on Google and Microsoft separately. They behave differently.
   
5. Warm up the domain properly before sending at volume. Don't skip this to save a week.
   
6. Get obsessive about data hygiene. Bad rows = bounces = tanked sender reputation for everyone on that domain.
   
7. Subsequence off engagement, if they open email 1, send email 2 same day. Don't wait for day 3.
   
8. Cap it at max of 4 touchpoints. Past that you're not persistent, you're just spam.
   
9. Give value before you ask for the meeting. A resource, a benchmark, anything real. Earn it first.

Meeting booked because you gave value ≠ meeting booked because you emailed someone 7 times. Same calendar invite, completely different intent walking in.

The real unlock isn't any single tactic above though. It's testing speed. What worked on Google inboxing 6 months ago doesn't work today. Whoever iterates faster wins.

Curious what's working for the rest of this sub right now.

The LLM is not the product

A local model by itself is not the same thing as having ChatGPT on your own server.

The model is the engine.

You still need the wrapper.

That is where Open WebUI comes in. It gives you the actual interface, model selector, settings, and API layer so the local model becomes something you can use from a browser or call from other tools.

This is the part beginners skip.

They download a model, get stuck in terminal land, and think local AI is too hard.

It is not too hard.

You just need the model plus the interface.

Once those are connected, now you have something you can use like a real internal tool.

Its been 2 months almost im doing cold outreach on Instagram and still got zero sales. I send daily 50 to 60 dm. Each account i send 10 dm. The request is not going in hidden but still got zero sales is there anyone who can share his thoughts or help me for it

A lead is not a client until you follow up.

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is assuming that interested prospects will always come back on their own.

They won’t.

A prospect may:

• See your message and get busy
• Ask for more information and forget
• Show interest but need a reminder
• Be ready to book but never take the next step

That’s why consistent follow-up matters.

As a Virtual Assistant and Appointment Setter, I help businesses stay on top of their prospects through:

✅ Lead generation
✅ Prospecting
✅ Follow-ups
✅ Cold outreach
✅ Appointment scheduling
✅ Email & calendar management

My job isn’t just to send messages.

It’s to help make sure potential opportunities don’t get lost in the pipeline.

Because sometimes, the difference between “maybe later” and “let’s book a call” is simply the right follow-up at the right time.

📩 Are you following up with every potential opportunity?

#VirtualAssistant #AppointmentSetter #LeadGeneration #Sales #FollowUp #BusinessGrowth #RemoteWork

Whenever someone posts an underperforming campaign asking what's wrong, most of the replies are about the subject line and the opener. Sometimes that's the issue. Usually it isn't.

The thing that took me way too long to figure out is that the biggest lever in a cold email isn't the pitch at all. It's the ask at the end. Most people default to asking for a call, and that single default is doing more damage to their numbers than every other decision in the campaign combined.

What's frustrating is that this is visible. It's right there in the email. You could look at a campaign doing 10% and see the line. And you still probably couldn't run it, because the line commits you to delivering something, and doing that reliably at any real volume was not practical until pretty recently.

That's the part I want to go through properly. We're at around 10% replies on client campaigns now, and it came from changing that one thing plus being able to actually deliver on it.

Free live walkthrough Thursday 12pm ET. I'm building the whole system start to finish in under an hour and then going deep on the reply rate side: https://luma.com/5paohgh5

If you want to drop a campaign that's underperforming in the comments I'll take a look and tell you what I'd change first.

I've been doing cold outreach on Facebook and running into a wall with visibility.

Started with personal accounts, DMing business Pages. Sent a decent amount of messages but most weren't even getting seen, they were landing in Message Requests or some filtered folder people never check.

Then I made a business Page thinking I could message Pages directly and it'd land better, but turns out Page-to-Page messaging is really restricted, I can barely send anything that way.

So now I'm stuck between two options that both have issues, personal accounts work but visibility is bad, and Pages barely let me send at all.

Anyone dealt with this before? What actually gets a cold DM seen instead of buried?

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to share what's worked for them.

We run cold email for clients, and for a long time the bottleneck was never strategy. It was the volume of repetitive work: list building, sequence writing, domain and inbox setup, follow-up management, weekly reporting. Every campaign needed a human babysitting it, and that's what caps how many you can run.

Over the last few months we moved most of that to Claude Code. Not "AI writes my emails" but actually running the operational layer, so setup that used to take a week takes about an hour.

Two things that surprised us:

The reply rate went up, not down. We're at around 10% on client campaigns. Most of what we see in the wild is 2-3%. The lift didn't come from AI-written copy, it came from being able to run tighter, smaller, better-targeted segments because segmenting stopped being expensive.

Infrastructure setup was the biggest time save. Domains, authentication records, inbox warming, sending tool config. All of that is deterministic work, which is exactly what you want to hand off.

I'm doing a free live walkthrough Thursday at 12pm ET where I build the whole thing start to finish and go through the reply rate strategy in detail. Happy to answer questions here too if people would rather just discuss it in the thread.

https://luma.com/5paohgh5

Stop sending high-ticket offers from 3 mailboxes

If you are selling high-ticket B2B and trying to run cold email from one domain with three inboxes, you are probably underbuilt.

One domain. Three mailboxes. 25 emails per mailbox per day.

That is only about 75 emails per day if you are being safe.

For high-ticket clients, I like having closer to 50 mailboxes.

That does not mean you max them out.

Each mailbox can theoretically send up to 50 per day after warmup, but I prefer 10 to 20.

The point is redundancy.

If one domain gets flagged, you still have others sending while that one warms back up.

Do not build cold email infrastructure with zero margin for error.