r/b2b_sales

hii everyone,

I'm a freelance automation developer specializing in AI voice agents for outbound cold calling.

I can help you:

\- Build AI voice callers for outbound campaigns

\- Qualify leads automatically

\- Book appointments

\- Connect with CRMs and other tools

\- Create custom call flows and scripts

Starting at $500 for a complete setup, depending on your requirements.

If you're looking to automate sales outreach or customer follow-ups, feel free to send me a DM. Happy to discuss your project and see if we're a good fit.

Hi guys, how to handle sales objections without sounding like a sales man chasing the prospect's money, and how to have better tone or not sound unsure? (I still don't have results on the niche i am working with)

My leads are warm from ads, i try to listen more, talk less and let silence do the work but when they give me objections or something i am not expecting i suddenly start talking differently like begging for their time.

I try to listen to all my calls and fix the issue, but once i am back on the phone everything vanishes from my mind.

Thanks.

I have a few female sales reps who are naturally quiet and introverted. They’re hardworking and genuinely want to succeed, but prospecting seems to drain them.

I ask them to reach out to around 100 contacts a day, but after a few rejections or being ignored, their confidence drops. The work is also repetitive, which makes staying consistent even harder.

I know great salespeople don’t have to be extroverts, so I’d love some advice. If you’ve coached quiet reps before, how did you help them handle rejection and stay motivated to keep prospecting every day?

I have been working in Ireland & uk for 4 years and I am planning on moving back to India in the next 6 months. I have been out of indian job market the whole time, so I request for a reality check from the experienced because I keep going back and forth on this.

Background:

• MSc from TCD. About 4 years experience.
• Currently on the founding team of a small B2B SaaS in ecom reg tech (£20 Mil Valuation), as product owner and product manager (small company, so the two blur).
• I own the backlog and roadmap, ship features, ran 5 country integrations, work with 2 dev teams daily, comfortable with sql & system design. A-CSPO and AWS Solutions Architect certified.
• I am also the point of contact for 5 enterprise clients plus around 30 SMBs. I run onboarding, understand their business, and upsell and cross sell, but with no sales quota. I brought in 4 partnerships and 2 are doing well.

I actually like product work. My hesitation is the Indian market. From the outside it looks like the strong product roles expect an iim or a proper tech degree, and I have neither.

I am torn between aiming for product (PO / PM) and account management, the farming kind, not cold hunting (I have zero experience chasing new logos). I do have equal liking and interest in Account Management.

To start, I need roughly 1.3L in hand per month atleast as am the sole earner in the family.

1. With this profile, would you qualify me to pivot to account management / customer success?
2. Honestly, any directional advise would be considered gold. Please slap me hard with any thoughts you have!

Has anyone else been using Apollo.io recently and no matter how long your inboxes warm up, the deliverability rate is terrible?

In the last 2 months, we’ve had 5 mailboxes in the warmup phase that continue to show unhealthy deliverability and an extremely high spam rate.

Is Apollo.io servers totally fried?

TL;DR - These are the lessons I learned:
* If you're an SDR, give the people you talk to the opportunity to tell you what they need - and let your employer know
* If you're employing a sales team, make sure you can learn from what people are telling them on the phone
* We showed people this big, great SaaS - they told us all they wanted was a micro SaaS subset of it
* LinkedIn hates automation, but they're fine with content consumption

A while ago, the startup I was working at tasked me with building a process automation / AI agents framework. They tried n8n, Zapier and the usual candidates but didn't like them.

They liked the framework I built and thought about turning it into a product. So they started cold calling people to validate demand. The problem with cold calling: Most of the people you call aren't looking for a solution at the exact time you're calling them.

But one theme kept coming up: "Can we use this to automate find and contact leads?"

So, we built agents scraping LinkedIn for conversations where people were looking for what they had to offer. And it worked.

As it turns out, LinkedIn hates automation (automated posting, DMs etc.) and they take various measures against scraping (e.g. limiting profile search result count), but they're totally fine with content consumption. You won't get banned for scrolling the feed all day long - and neither will your AI agent.

So I built agents that do just that - and finds "warm" leads in the process.

I demoed it to a few more people and demo call gave me an idea. When I tried to explain to the other person how it worked: "Our agents are like a swarm of puffins scanning the ocean for fish - only the fish are your next customers."

And I thought, "wouldn't puffins make a fun landing page?". So I built prospectpuffin. Not because I set out to build a lead scraper. But because people kept asking for it.

Co-founder at a value & pricing intelligence company. We spend a lot of time thinking about how B2B SaaS companies prove value in deals -- so I went through 30 vendor ROI calculators to see how they'd hold up when a CFO actually asks questions.

Built a taxonomy of what I found.

Six categories:

- Math in a Box -- you put in your numbers, it does arithmetic. No assumptions injected. Rare but honest.

- Vendor Benchmark Injector -- pre-loaded improvement rates from "industry data" the vendor owns. The most common type.

- Commissioned Research Tool -- built on Forrester or IDC TEI studies. The disclaimers are nearly identical across every vendor that uses them.

- Spend Estimator -- converts headcount and time into dollars. Feels grounded. Usually isn't.

- Honest Comparison Tool -- buyer controls the assumptions. The output is defensible because they built it.

The core problem: most calculators pre-load improvement rates from vendor-owned data. When finance asks "what's your basis for 15% productivity improvement?" -- nobody has a good answer because the vendor set that number, not the buyer.

I graded all 30 on one question: who controls the assumptions?

A few highlights:

- Several Forrester TEI calculators use near-identical disclaimer language across completely different vendors

- One HR software calculator has 8 buyer-controlled sliders -- one of the most honest I found

- One calculator looks generic on the surface but reveals a more transparent framing in a pop-up -- undersells itself

Has anyone else had a CFO challenge a number from one of these, or been on the other side trying to defend it?

Hey everyone,

For those who've done outreach to restaurant owners (chains, QSRs, multi-location) on behalf of an agency, what's actually working for you?

Specifically: - Which channel gets the best response (LinkedIn, cold email, cold call)? -

What angle/pain point opens the conversation? - How are you getting them to book a call?

Not looking for theory, just what's actually working in 2025/2026.

Appreciate any real experience.

Hi everyone,
I run an industrial services company based in Monterrey, Mexico. We specialize in heavy machinery moving, industrial rigging, forklift rentals, crane services, aerial work platforms, and specialized transportation.
I’m looking for advice from people with experience in B2B sales, industrial services, or manufacturing.
Right now, I’m using LinkedIn, cold calls, email outreach, WhatsApp, Facebook, and in-person visits to manufacturing plants, but I’d like to build a more consistent pipeline of customers.
What has actually worked for you when selling industrial services? How do you reach maintenance managers, production managers, plant engineers, or purchasing departments? Are there any channels, strategies, or outreach methods that consistently generate qualified leads?
I’d also appreciate any advice on building trust with companies, since these services are high-value and often involve critical equipment and operations.
Any insights, lessons learned, or even mistakes to avoid would be greatly appreciated. Industrial sales cycles can be long, so I’m always looking for ways to improve.
Thanks in advance!

Hola a todos.
Tengo una empresa en Monterrey enfocada en maniobras industriales, movimiento de maquinaria pesada, renta de montacargas, grúas, plataformas de elevación y transporte especializado. Durante los últimos meses hemos realizado trabajos para diferentes empresas, pero quiero encontrar una forma más constante de generar clientes.
Me gustaría pedirles consejo a quienes tengan experiencia en ventas B2B o en el sector industrial.
Actualmente hago prospección por LinkedIn, WhatsApp, llamadas, Facebook y visitas a empresas, pero siento que aún hay oportunidades que no estoy aprovechando.
¿Qué les ha funcionado para conseguir clientes industriales? ¿Cómo llegan a gerentes de mantenimiento, producción, compras o ingeniería? ¿Hay algún canal, estrategia o proceso que les haya dado resultados reales?
También agradecería recomendaciones sobre cómo generar confianza cuando se trata de servicios de alto valor, como maniobras de maquinaria, renta de equipos o proyectos industriales.
Cualquier experiencia, consejo o crítica constructiva será bienvenida. En este sector conseguir un cliente puede tomar meses, así que cualquier idea que ayude a mejorar el proceso vale mucho. Gracias.

I've noticed that most salespeople agree their CRM is valuable, but after a busy day of calls it often ends up being out of date anyway. Follow-ups get missed, notes stay in a notebook or Slack, and by the end of the week the pipeline doesn't really reflect what's happening.

I'm curious whether this is mostly a tooling problem or just human nature.

For those of you in B2B sales, what usually causes your CRM to fall behind? Too much manual work? Too many required fields? Constant context switching? Or something else?

I've been doing cold email to local businesses for about a year. Contractors, HVAC, dentists, lawyers, cleaning services, roofing. Same setup across all of them, same sequence, same sending tool. Very different results depending on the niche.

Here's the honest breakdown:

Niche	Reply rate	Bounce rate
HVAC / contractors	7-9%	1.8%
Roofing	6-8%	2.1%
Dentists	3-4%	1.2%
Lawyers	2-3%	1.1%
Cleaning services	1-2%	4.3%
Restaurants	0.8%	6.1%

The bounce rate column matters more than people think. High bounce isn't a copy problem, it's a data problem. Stale listings, businesses that closed years ago but still have a Maps profile, generic inboxes nobody checks.

HVAC and roofing perform well partly because the owners actually run their own email. A 3-person roofing crew doesn't have a gatekeeper. You send to the owner directly and they read it. Dentists and lawyers are the opposite, someone screens everything before it gets to the actual decision maker, and reply rates reflect that.

The cleaning services number surprised me. It looks like an easy niche on paper but Maps is full of ghost businesses in that category. Companies that registered, ran a few jobs, stopped operating without closing the listing. I didn't catch this early enough and burned a domain on it.

Restaurants I'd just avoid unless you have another channel. Nobody's checking email, and the closure rate makes the data unreliable.

What actually moved things wasn't changing the copy. It was filtering harder before sending. Businesses with 10+ recent reviews and an active website outperformed everything else. That filter alone cut bounce rates more than any subject line test I ran.

The other thing that helped: stopping with info@ addresses. For most local niches the owner isn't in that inbox. Once I started finding actual names tied to the business domain, reply rates moved in a way copy tests never had. For list building I mostly use (WebLeads or Outscraper) depending on what I need.

What niches have you had the most success with for local outreach?

Two year ago, when I was starting my clg and was actively looking for different opportunities,I thought sales was just convincing people to buy.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to work across different industries—from helping generate outbound opportunities that contributed to over $1M in signed business, to working as a closer for an Asian industrial boiler company, and now diving deep into consultative outbound for B2B service businesses.

One thing I’ve learned:
People don’t buy because of clever scripts.
They buy because you understand their business better than everyone else emailing them.
Today, my workflow looks something like this:
• Research companies instead of mass blasting emails.
• Understand bottlenecks before reaching out.
• Build personalized outreach based on real business signals.
• Focus on conversations and building authority instead of please book a call!

I’m always looking to work with founders, agencies, and B2B service businesses that value thoughtful outbound over volume.

Sometimes one well-researched email is worth more than a thousand generic ones.

It feels like recent B2B marketing successes rely not so much on the execution of more campaigns as on making the internal processes work better.

What tends to break is lead research at the upstream stage.

While messaging, offers, and ICP can all be top-notch, if the list of targets is inaccurate, outdated, overly broad, or lacking important context information – everything downstream becomes more complicated.

Poorly targeted lead list leads to low personalization.

Low personalization leads to low response rates.

This, in turn, makes a whole campaign look ineffective despite a problem that occurred way before reaching out.

That's what happened to us while developing Lessie AI. Initially, the solution was obvious: we needed to find the right target audience and start reaching out. However, while working on it, we got the feeling that B2B outreach is actually the issue of systems.

There is a need to answer such questions as:

Who actually fits our ICP?

Is that person relevant at the moment?

Sub: b2bmarketing

Can we verify business email?

Do we have enough context for personalized communication?

Will the process be scalable?

So, I would be interested in your thoughts on this topic.

If you are working on demand gen, growth, or outbound marketing – what do you think is the current bottleneck in your work?

I was contacted over WhatsApp for a a sales representative job, not what I’m looking for but they said my CV looked great and I seem like a great candidate for a new job opening and I thought you know what let’s see what it’s about.

Joined the Zoom call with three other candidates also which I wasn’t expecting, the interviewer asked us to read out our CVs (obviously didn’t look at them) and talk about ourselves. Eventually said that they have onboard training and you can pick either the sales course or the business development course (while calling universities a scam) and that you get what you put in. The other candidates were line chefs and just out on college, the recruiter said they’re looking for people that are at the beginning of their journey, a new start.

Obviously I asked if it’s commission based and so on, of which the recruiter was taken back by and said “no one’s ever asked me that in an interview”.

Anyway seems like a scam, take the time out of your life to do training on a commission only “brand ambassador” role ( 3 different job titles mentioned by this point)

Maybe this is normal but first I’ve had so far.

Any thoughts?

14 months in, product is working, have real customers using it. But distribution is the thing I keep hitting a wall on and I'm running out of ideas.

The buyers we're going after are small business owners in a traditional offline industry. They're not on LinkedIn. They don't read blogs or newsletters. No Slack groups, no forums, no communities. The only place they show up digitally is Instagram and WhatsApp and even there they're posting, not browsing.

Every channel I try runs into the same problem.

Cold email doesn't work because half of them don't have a business email, some don't have any email. LinkedIn is a dead end, they're just not there. Content takes forever and I'm not even sure who's reading it. Tried paid ads for a bit, burned through budget, the intent just wasn't there at that awareness stage.

What's actually moved the needle is cold calling and Instagram DMs. Manual, slow, hard to scale. The calls that actually go somewhere are almost always because I did something specific for that business before dialling, looked at their actual setup, made it personal. Anything that feels like a template and they're off the phone in under a minute.

I keep seeing the advice "find where your customers hang out" but genuinely what do you do when the answer is nowhere you can reach at scale?

For anyone who's done B2B in a non-tech or traditional industry, how did your first 10 customers actually come in? Would love to hear what worked that you didn't expect.

Hello everybody,

As we're working on our product (Lessie AI), a B2B outreach platform, we've spent quite a lot of time thinking about outbound marketing and cold emailing.

Building Lessie AI, we've had to solve this exact problem ourselves. We needed to find the right people in B2B marketing, growth, sales and demand generation in order to share with them our solution that solves their exact problem.

Here are some things that we discovered about this process:

1. Lead research is not just about getting a big list

Big lead list may look productive, but it can actually be harmful for your campaign if your leads are not specific enough.

The question is not "can we get 5,000 leads?"

It should be:

• who really has the problem
• who feels the pain right now
• who is in the right role/influential enough to care
• who would actually understand the message you're trying to deliver

Usually small, specific list would be more valuable than big and messy one.

2. Targeting matters more than people tend to say

People may have similar job titles at different companies.

"Founder", "Head of Growth", "Marketing Manager", "Demand Gen Lead" mean very different things depending on the company.

Company's type, size, market, business model, current stage affect a lot whether it makes sense to talk to a particular person or not.

That's why targeting is contextual rather than purely positional.

3. Contact data verification goes deeper than people usually think

Low-quality contact data affects many aspects of outreach quietly.

Bad emails, outdated roles, wrong companies and generic inboxes waste your time and obscure your message.

If your campaign performs worse than expected, it is hard to say whether the problem is the offer, copy, list or data.

That's why quality contact data is important.

4. Personalization requires real context

Many personalization efforts sound artificial due to shallow information.

Good personalization is about understanding why this particular person might be interested.

• What does this person's company do?
• What problems is he or she facing?
• Why this offer is relevant to this person?
• Why now?

Without that context, AI-generated personalization remains artificial.

5. Best cold email system starts upstream

Outreach process usually focuses on visible elements of cold email: subject line, opening line, call to action, follow-up email.

These elements matter.

However, most of the leverage might be in what comes before them:

• better lead research
• sharper targeting
• cleaner contact data
• more relevant context
• and then better outreach

That's why we're building Lessie AI as an outreach workflow, not as contact database.

Our goal is to make communication between the following process steps seamless:

• finding the right leads
• understanding why they are relevant to you
• getting verified contact data for them
• composing a personalized outreach message
• starting the conversation

In reality, these steps are usually divided between many tools and tabs and done manually.

Would like to hear thoughts of people here about this approach.

For those who are doing B2B sales or outbound marketing: where do your campaigns usually break first? Is it offer, list, data, personalization, deliverability or follow-up system?

A startup can get 1,000 signups and still have no idea who is actually interested in buying.

Over the past few months, I've been paying more attention to what users do after they sign up rather than how they found the product.

For example:

• Do they come back the next day?
• Do they explore multiple features?
• Do they invite a teammate?
• Do they revisit pricing after using the product?
• Do they solve the same problem more than once?

Those actions seem much more meaningful than whether they came from Product Hunt, Reddit, Google, or Twitter.

It's made me wonder if most teams are optimizing for acquisition metrics while missing the behavioral signals that actually predict conversion.

We're building around this idea, but I'm curious how others think about it.

If you had to pick just one user action that best predicts someone will become a paying customer, what would it be?

So, I'm ran several mail campaigns before for my company, other clients in europe. but it differs for customers in USA, right. how's the normal timeline, do you spam your customers a lot? do you use other techniques to push your product? What advice would you give someone who wants to explore (i've read other posts, but wanted to see if i can get some good insights firsthand)
For context- I have a AI-sales crm mobile app, and another tool for seo/geo content automation (webapp).
Thanks!

Hey everyone,
I’d love some honest advice because I feel like we’re missing something obvious.
We run an Australian-based Entity SEO agency. We don’t lock clients into contracts, and we focus on getting measurable results rather than selling long-term retainers.
The strange thing is that when we actually get in front of a business owner, our close rate is really strong. Once people see what we do, the results we’ve achieved and what we charge, it usually becomes a pretty easy decision.
Our problem isn’t sales—it’s consistently getting in front of the right people.
A little about us:
Australian based.
We specialise in Entity SEO.
We also build websites.
We’re heavily involved in the travel industry and are building our own travel platform.
We’re a Google Things To Do (GTTD) partner, so we spend a lot of our time building technology as well as doing SEO.
No lock-in contracts.
We’ve tried appointment setters in the Philippines, but it just hasn’t worked. Maybe it’s the messaging, maybe the targeting, maybe the market—I honestly don’t know anymore.
If you had this business and needed to build a predictable flow of qualified leads, where would you put your time and money?
LinkedIn?
Cold calling?
Paid ads?
Partnerships?
Referrals?
Content?
Something else?
I’m not looking to sell anything here—I’m genuinely interested in what has actually worked for people who’ve been in this position.
Appreciate any advice, even if it’s brutally honest.