r/b2b_sales

I’ve been in b2b recruitment sales for ten years. I’ve burned out a few times but managed to make a success and high billing relative to my field and peers.
I quit last month and I’m building a course for sales entrepreneurs specially adhd or AuDHD. Because of my executive function struggles I sometimes have huge struggles with sales and business development so I have to find creative ways of making things work and structuring my day. Leaning into my weirdness and being a bit messy does work overall even when I’m working with senior partners, I think it’s because I don’t have the vibe of I AM IV SALES
Of course I know many neurotypical sales recruiters who are fantastic as well
I am going to be focusing on US recruitment soon (I’m in the UK)
Is anyone else neurodivergent in sales here and think it gives them an edge as well as different challenges?
I’d love to hear what your experiences are
I’m in my own little bubble and I’d like to know how other adhd or AuDHD people utilise strategies that work for them
Thank you in advance for you do comment I hope I am doing this right I don’t post on Reddit much or really so it’s a stab in the dark :)

Tested a few autonomous AI SDR tools over the past couple months.

Honest result: the messages were fine. Not terrible. Not great. Just slightly off in a way that is hard to articulate but immediately obvious to anyone on the receiving end.

The bigger problem was I had no visibility into what was going out or why.

What I actually want is much simpler.

Less manual research. I do not want to spend 20 minutes reading someone's LinkedIn before deciding whether it is even worth reaching out.

Better timing. Surface who to reach out to today based on signals, not who is next in my sequence.

Faster first drafts. Give me a starting point based on their recent activity, not a generic template.

But I still want to approve messages before they send. That part is non negotiable.

The approval step is not friction. It is the part that keeps the outreach feeling human.

Is anyone else running a human in the loop setup for LinkedIn? Or has everyone gone fully autonomous and I am just being paranoid?

Hey. Just figured out what is cold emailing. But the question is, what I can offer to business, I have no idea what to sale. Any help

Hey redditors, curious if anyone is running CRO services in the B2B wholesale / service space.

How did you get your first few clients?

What was the average conversion impact you got, and in what timeframe?

Did they retain for ongoing CRO optimization? If not, what upsells did you provide?

I am starting a revenue optimization service where we help them optimize all the key customer journeys to maximize revenue.

Starting with the conversion engine i.e CRO as an entry point to show results, and then introducing other engines.

First few weeks? Amazing. You're writing faster, sending more, actually testing stuff. Replies start coming in. You think you figured it out.

Then slowly it stops working and you're like... huh.

Here's the thing though, the tool didn't get worse. Your offer was just bad the whole time. AI was just helping you send it to more people faster lol.

"Save time." "Improve efficiency." "Grow pipeline."

Bro nobody cares. That's every cold email ever.

The actual solution is using AI to actually research why a specific person should give a damn right now. Segmentation. Context. Actual relevance.

Also can we stop measuring success by emails sent per day? That metric is cooked.

Positive reply rate. Reply-to-meeting rate. That's it. That's the whole game.

using this tool changed my outreach for the better recently, all running on autopilot and replying the leads manually is no longer necessary. sick!

just this week booked 9 demo calls and it’s only tuesday

I’m a solo founder building an AI-powered phone assistant for businesses such as restaurants, dealerships, and service companies.

The system answers calls, handles common questions, and helps businesses capture opportunities they might otherwise miss.

One of the biggest advantages is that I built the core architecture myself rather than relying entirely on third-party platforms. This gives me more control over performance and allows me to offer significantly more competitive pricing.

The product is fully functional, and I’ve been conducting demos and early outreach. I also have an investor who is evaluating the opportunity.

My main challenge right now is distribution.

I’m trying to determine what actually works at the earliest stage for acquiring the first real customers.

Specifically:

• Which channels worked best for you (cold calling, email, LinkedIn, partnerships, direct visits, etc.)?
• Did you handle sales yourself at first, or bring in someone with sales experience?
• At what point does it make sense to offer equity to someone focused on distribution?
• What would you do differently if you were starting from zero again?

I’m less interested in theory and more interested in practical experiences from founders who have sold to SMBs.

Any honest advice would be greatly appreciated.

I'm just getting started in B2B sales. I've read a lot about discovery calls, objection handling, but I'd love to hear from people who've actually been in the trenches. Bonus points if it's something you wish you'd learned sooner.

Conference season got me thinking about how much prep time goes in versus how little of it transfers into the actual conversations.

The research part I've figured out. What I can't solve: in the middle of a busy day with 10 different conversations, switching between people, I lose track of what I already know about each person. The notes exist. I can't access them fast enough between conversations.

For anyone doing high-volume relationship work: how do you make the context you've built actually available in the moment? Not at your desk with 30 minutes, literally in the gap between one conversation ending and the next one starting.

We run a small AI studio in Surat helping factories with automation. Realized from recent outreach that "AI for factories" is way too vague to land with anyone.

So trying to narrow it down to 2 or 3 things Indian manufacturers will actually open their wallet for.

Is it WhatsApp order management? Invoice and document automation? Production reporting? Customer service bots? Something else entirely?

If you've sold to or worked with Indian factory owners, drop a comment with what actually got them to sign. Not what sounded cool in the pitch.... what moved real money.

Will share what I learn back here.

testing a LinkedIn outreach tool for lead gen + automated campaigns. no Sales Nav or Apollo integration needed.

free trial during 2 weeks.

DM if interested.

Howdy! This post is NOT written with AI, so pardon for being human and any mistakes.

I'm looking for a partner, who can bring clients to me, I'm a top rated individual freelancer (software developer) on upwork, with shit ton of experience. I have been in this field since 2017. I'm your technical CTO.

If interested, I'm also looking for a CEO partner, I will be their technical partner in india. The partner can advertise their own business, in UK, get good projects and I'll build them. We'll split the revenue, or if you prefer, you don't need to disclose the revenue to me, I'll just tell my fees, and you can keep the markup. I can jump on video calls and also provide emergency services (quick availability over call all the time).

Things that I can do which you can sell:

- AWS/Google/Azure cloud, cost cutting, I can analyze the codebase and infrastructure of the client and reduce their cost wherever necessary. In the past, I have reduced AWS cost from 3500$ to 800$ for a client. One can quote that we'll take 20% of the reduction of cost for lifetime and offer this service for free.

- Performance optimization and security, I can review their codebase and tell all of their bottlenecks and remove them. You will be surprised to know about how many people are paying so much extra just because their software/website is not optimized.

- Moving away from US infrastructure, the demand for this has skyrocketed since trump. I can do a migration from US infra to EU alternatives.

- AI features to website/software. (Self explanatory)

- Building complex internal software for companies, usually high paying.

- Any other software/website feature you have in mind, if you have seen it somewhere, I can build it.

- I can also develop mobile apps in flutter and react native.

If you can bring client and handle business side of things, I can easily handle technical side of things.

Why I'm looking? I have clients already, but I usually keep 1 main client, and its been a few years with them, and I want to change clients now to upgrade and expand my business. I have had 2 clients in UK in the past and I can provide testimonials from them, to prove the quality of work I provide.

If you're interested, please DM me.

I've been in b2b sales for 11 years now, the last 4 running my own thing selling into mid market companies in the $50M to $500M revenue range, and I have to say the gap between what actually works and what gets posted on linkedin every day has never been wider than it is right now in 2026.

I closed $2.1M last year as a solo operator, no SDR, no marketing team, no inbound, just me and a list and a calendar, and almost every single thing I did to hit that number is something the sales influencer crowd would tell you is wrong or outdated or unscalable, so I figured I'd write up what's actually working before someone tries to sell you a course on it.

The first thing is that I stopped doing discovery calls entirely about 18 months ago and my close rate went from somewhere around 22% to just over 40% in the following two quarters, which still kind of blows my mind when I think about it. The reason discovery calls don't work anymore is that buyers have already done the discovery on themselves before they ever get on a call with you, they've watched the demos, they've read the g2 reviews, they've talked to three of your competitors, and when you sit there and ask them about their current process and their pain points and their goals you are literally wasting the only resource they actually care about which is their time. What I do instead is I show up to the first call having already done my own research on their company and I open with a hypothesis, something like "based on what I'm seeing from the outside it looks like you're probably dealing with X and Y and the reason I asked for this call is I think we can fix Y in under 60 days, am I reading this right," and the energy of the call completely changes because now you're a peer who did their homework instead of a vendor running a script.

The second thing I want to talk about is follow up because everyone gets this wrong and it's costing them seven figures a year easily. The standard advice is to follow up 7 to 12 times with a mix of value adds and check ins and that whole playbook is dead, it stopped working maybe two years ago and nobody updated the script. What works in 2026 is what I call the 3 and done approach, which is you send a real follow up 48 hours after the initial conversation summarizing what you discussed and proposing a concrete next step with a specific date and time on it, then if they don't respond you send one more 5 days later that's just a single sentence saying you're going to assume the timing isn't right and you'll circle back next quarter, and then you actually do that, you don't send 4 more emails pretending you have a new insight to share. The reason this works is that prospects in 2026 are drowning in follow up, they get 40 of them a week, and the person who respects their inbox by not adding to the pile is the person who gets remembered when the timing is actually right.

The third thing and this one is going to get me yelled at in the comments is that I stopped using a crm for the first 8 months of my agency and I genuinely think it's part of why I grew as fast as I did. When you have a crm you spend 90 minutes a day updating it and pretending that's sales work, when the truth is the only thing that matters is whether you spoke to a qualified prospect today and whether you're speaking to one tomorrow, and you can track that on a single sheet of paper. I eventually moved to a proper crm at around the 80 customer mark because I had to, but I genuinely believe most solo operators and 2 person teams would close more deals if they deleted their crm tomorrow and just kept a list of who they talked to this week and who they're talking to next week.

The fourth and probably most controversial thing I'll say is that I don't qualify on budget anymore and haven't for about two years. The whole BANT framework that gets pushed in every sales book was designed for an era where buyers had budgets allocated in advance and procurement was a real gate, and that's just not how mid market companies operate now, budgets get found when the pain is real enough and the roi is clear enough, and asking someone in the second call whether they have budget allocated for this is a great way to lose a deal that would have closed if you'd just kept selling the outcome. I qualify on pain and timeline and decision making authority but I leave budget completely out of the conversation until we're actually negotiating the contract, and my close rate on supposedly "unqualified" deals is something like 35% which tells you everything you need to know about whether budget qualification was ever real.

The fifth thing I'll mention because I think it gets overlooked constantly is that the highest leverage activity in b2b sales in 2026 is not prospecting or follow up or closing, it's writing, specifically writing the proposal and the follow up summary and the contract redlines in a way that makes the buyer's internal champion look brilliant when they forward it to their boss. About 70% of my deals are won or lost based on what the champion shows their cfo or ceo on a friday afternoon when I'm not in the room, and the agencies and reps who understand this are spending 3 hours on a proposal while everyone else is spending 20 minutes copy pasting their template, and that gap is where the deals get won.

Anyway that's what's actually working for me right now. Happy to get into any of these in the comments if people want, and I'm genuinely curious whether anyone else is seeing the discovery call thing because every time I bring it up at events people look at me like I've lost it, but my pipeline says otherwise.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been building a cloud dialer, and after talking to some sales folks, the consensus was clear: nobody wants an overpriced "all-in-one" platform packed with enterprise features they’ll never touch.

Most small teams, agencies, and recruiters just want something fast and reliable. So, I stripped out the noise and focused entirely on the essentials:

• Instant CSV Uploads: Front and center. No messy data mapping, just upload your leads and start calling.
• Inbound/Outbound + IVR: Smooth routing for when prospects actually call you back.
• Clean Compliance Settings: Built-in tools to keep your numbers clean without a complex backend setup.
• No Enterprise Bloat: Designed intentionally to be lightweight and highly cost-effective for smaller, agile teams.

If you're a small sales team, agency founder, or recruiter running heavy phone outreach and feeling restricted by your current setup, I’d love to get your eyes on it.

Hey guys,

Just looking for some honest opinions from people actually cold calling into the US right now because I’m getting really mixed signals online.

For context, I’m 23 and I currently run a UK cold calling company. We do somewhere around £300-400k/year and the model itself works pretty well over here. UK mobiles are fairly easy to get, pickup rates are decent, and you can still have proper conversations with people.

The issue is more that UK businesses just don’t seem to have the same budgets as US companies, so I’ve been seriously looking at moving more towards the US market.

But honestly the deeper I look into it, the more it feels like a completely different world.

I keep hearing people say cold calling in the US is getting smashed by spam filters, AI screeners, Apple call screening, horrible pickup rates etc. Then other people are saying it still works insanely well if you know what you’re doing.

I’ve also struggled finding clear answers on stuff like: good data providers good dialers what pickup rates are actually realistic now whether direct dials are still reliable whether people even answer their phones anymore

The niche I was planning to target was US events companies, but before I go all in on building this properly, I just wanted to hear from people actually doing it day to day.

Is US cold calling still genuinely working right now or has it become way harder than it was a few years ago?

Would appreciate any advice.

I run a small web development business and we have worked with around 45 clients so far. The funny thing is that building the websites is not the hardest part anymore. We can handle the work, revisions, delivery, and client communication. The part I am still trying to figure out is how to get new clients in a consistent and predictable way.

Until now, most clients came through referrals, friends of clients, local contacts, or people who saw our previous work. That has worked well, but it is not stable. Some months are full and some months I am wondering where the next few projects will come from. I do not want to spam people with cold messages or keep posting the usual “we build websites” content everywhere, because I know that usually turns people off.

I want to understand how people actually grow this kind of service business. Should I niche down into one type of client, like clinics, restaurants, coaches, construction companies, or local service businesses? Should I create content around website mistakes and case studies? Should I do cold email with free website audits? Or are partnerships and referrals still the best way?

For anyone who has grown a freelance or agency business, what would you do at this stage? And for business owners, what would make you trust a web developer enough to work with them?

I've been cold calling to generate clients for my business for over a year, but I often struggle to get started with doing it some days.

Working from home, I'm not physically around other people that are making calls, and I think that makes it harder to get started and keep going.

I wondered if there are other business owners that are in a similar situation. Maybe entrepreneurs that are lacking accountability to do sales activity.

If you have suggestions on what you've found helpful for generating sales from cold calls, then it would be great to hear about them.

One thing I've tried recently is doing online coworking sessions with other people when I'm attempting to make calls. It's sometimes called body doubling, and I find it helps me to focus.

Essentially it's two people on a Zoom / Google Meet, where you're both on camera, but the microphones are muted.

You have a quick chat at the start of the session to set intentions / goals, and then focus on your work for about 50 minutes, before having a second chat to give feedback on how you got on.

This has been helpful, but I feel it could be better. Most of the people I do these sessions with are not actually making calls during the session (they just find it helpful for focusing on their work projects, which is why they do them).

I think doing these sessions with other business owners, where both people are making calls at the same time, could make these sessions work better.

I think having a cold calling buddy could make it feel like a power hour that helps get my motivation to call a lot higher, and help generate more sales.

I'm curious if other business owners have tried this and if you've found it effective?

Saw a thread the other day where people were talking about pulling attendee lists before events and somehow ended up reading about conference prep for the rest of the week.

Didn't realize how many people are doing outreach before the event even starts. Always figured most teams just showed up, worked the floor and crossed their fingers but it makes sense. Every time I've gone in cold it just felt random. The people getting real value out of these always seem to have their week already booked before they even land.

Is this something most people are doing now or more of an enterprise sales thing?

we've been into helping factory & industry owners by automating their internal processes, by provding them whatsApp AI, dashboards, document automation, customer service bots, and more. We've been reaching out via cold calling, but the meeting conversion ratio is very low around 2%...what could be a better approach for such businesses? Our AI studio is based in Surat, and we've mostly been calling Surat industry owners (citing local trust as an advantage which we havent got). Any suggestions on what's working for others??

I am trying to understand if there is an actual pain behind that: Do you spend a lot of time manually qualifying each lead?

I ask that because I’m testing a small Lead scoring app for marketing agencies and outbound teams.

Mainly looking for honest feedback:

Would a tool like this actually save you time before outreach?
Would you trust this type of scoring?
What would make the output useful enough to pay for?