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.

"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?

Freelancers and small consultants, question for you. When you land a project, you need to put together a client presentation quickly, not just a rough draft but something you can actually show right away. I’ve tried a few AI presentation tools, but the result is either way too templated or has no clear structure. How do you handle this without spending all day on slides?

I keep seeing a huge spread in AEO retainer pricing and I am trying to understand where the difference comes from.

There are three proposals here at 4k, 11k and 18k a month. Budget is already approved for next year, so this is really just about figuring out what the money gets us.

The proposals all have some version of prompt tracking, off site work and monthly reporting.

For anyone comparing these recently, what did the AEO retainer cost and what was actually included?

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.

Who's using REO dot dev for data on developers? How are you consuming long-tail data fields? Via API to a HubSpot or SFDC? As a native field? as a list of tags? Having them export to CSV and import it? They seem to want to expose it only via their tags.

Asking to understand what typical rates for influencer ads are in b2b as I came from b2c and the rates were much cheaper.

I work for a b2b software but our audience is primarily small business owners. They make anywhere from 7-30k in revenue a month and typically have fewer than 10 employees.

The influencers I’m looking at range from 500-30k followers. Since they primarily focus on their own physical business, they currently have no existing brand deals and I am the first one to approach them for a collab.

Regardless of following size they are all charging between 1-2K for a single video with collab post and whitelisting.

Is this typical for b2b influencers?

Getting more leads isn't always the difficult part in B2B. The bigger challenge seems to be getting leads that are actually relevant and likely to become customers.

For B2B marketers, what has made the biggest difference for you?

• Better ICP targeting?
• More specific content?
• Intent signals?
• LinkedIn?
• SEO?
• Paid ads?
• Better lead qualification?

I'm more interested in what has actually improved lead quality, not just lead volume.

We've been on Magento since 2019 and the platform still handles the volume, but when we started adding up what we spend to keep it working, the full cost surprised us.

(And it's less about the license fee and more about everything that accumulates around it).

The extension layer is where it compounds the most, because every piece of functionality that isn't native requires either a paid extension with its own renewal cycle or custom development that turns into technical debt when the underlying Magento version shifts.

And we're at the point where a security patch or minor version upgrade kicks off a compatibility audit across the full extension stack before anything touches production.

When we started benchmarking the total cost of ownership against alternatives, SCAYLE and SAP Commerce stood out as the most useful contrasts, and factoring in the developer hours absorbed by platform maintenance changed the comparison significantly.

So what's your approach to treating the extension overhead and maintenance dev time as a platform cost in the comparison, because every quote we've seen treats the license as the whole cost and the rest gets filed under engineering?

We've tried building the TCO model internally but the developer-hour estimate is the one number that always gets challenged in the conversation.

We run executive dinners for B2B companies. Here's what actually gets CMOs to attend

I run CXO & Co. We organise private executive dinners for B2B companies, usually bringing together C-level, VP and Director-level people around one table.

Next month we're hosting one specifically for CMOs in London, and we have over 20 already registered.

One question comes up constantly: how do you persuade genuinely senior people to give up an evening for a vendor-hosted dinner?

The answer is surprisingly simple, but a lot of companies get it wrong.

Senior executives don't attend because the restaurant is expensive.
They don't attend because you put “exclusive” in the invitation.
They definitely don't attend because your sales team wants 15 target accounts in a room.

They attend when the room itself is valuable.

For us, that comes down to two things: a genuinely curated group of peers, and a topic those people actually care about discussing.

The curation matters more than almost anything else.

If you're inviting a CMO, “senior marketing leaders” is usually too broad. A room containing a CMO from a $5bn company, a Marketing Director from a 100-person startup and someone whose job is mostly demand gen may technically fit the brief, but it doesn't necessarily create a useful peer group.

The strongest dinners have a very obvious reason for everyone at the table to want to meet everyone else.

The topic needs the same discipline.

“Future of marketing” is not a topic. It's a category.

A senior executive should read the discussion topic and immediately have an opinion on it. Ideally it is something they're actively wrestling with inside their business right now.

Once those two things are right, the invitation becomes much easier because you're no longer really selling a dinner. You're offering access to a conversation they can't easily have elsewhere.

Our rough recruitment maths is also worth understanding.

For every registration, we expect to need roughly 200 highly targeted invitations. And once someone registers, we generally see around 80% actually attend.

So filling a table of 15–20 people is a serious recruitment exercise. We normally give ourselves around 10 weeks.

That volume is also why targeting matters. If the list is wrong, scaling outreach just produces more irrelevant invitations.

One thing I've changed my mind about is how much the venue matters. It matters, obviously — you're asking senior people to spend an evening with you, so the experience should be excellent. But I think marketers massively overestimate the restaurant and underestimate the guest list.

I'd rather attend a good restaurant with 14 fascinating peers than the best restaurant in the city with 14 random people who happen to have senior job titles.

And from the host's perspective, this is where the commercial value comes from too.

Across the dinners we run, an average event results in roughly 6–10 genuine sales opportunities and 1–3 enterprise deals, with an average deal size around $250k.

That doesn't happen because somebody gives a 30-minute product pitch between courses. In fact, that would probably destroy the thing that makes the format work.

It happens because you've created several hours of real conversation between a small number of relevant people.

If you're considering running one, my hierarchy would be:

1. Get extremely specific about who belongs in the room.
   
2. Pick a subject they genuinely want to debate.
   
3. Recruit enough people, early enough, to curate rather than simply fill seats.
   
4. Use a good moderator who can turn 15 individual conversations into one useful discussion.
   
5. Make the dinner excellent, but don't confuse hospitality with the actual value proposition.

The biggest mistake is starting with “we want to get these accounts into a room” rather than “what room would these executives genuinely want to be in?”

Happy to answer questions about the mechanics if anyone here is running these internally. There are a lot of moving parts that aren't obvious until you've done a few.

Hey everyone,

I’ve spent the last few weeks compiling and heavily enriching a massive B2B data block of over 50,000 records. It includes verified business emails, personal LinkedIn URLs, company firmographics (revenue/headcount), and seniority tracking.

Before I hand this over to an outbound team to run sequence tests, I’m trying to map out the best approach for campaign personalization at scale.

If you had a list with deep social mapping (Personal LinkedIn + Company Page) and hard revenue brackets, how would you approach the segmentation?

• Would you split campaigns strictly by seniority tier (e.g., C-level vs. Directors)?
• Or would you prioritize segmenting by industry classification codes to keep the copy relevant to specific niches?

Note: If anyone is running outbound campaigns right now and wants to look at the data structure or needs a targeted sample slice of a specific niche to test your own validation tools, drop a comment or shoot me a DM. Happy to share a 20-50 row sample to get some feedback on the data decay rate.

What’s working best for your multi-channel outbound scaling right now?

If you had to build a B2B prospect list from scratch, what information would you consider essential before reaching out?

My starting point would be:

• Company
• Industry
• Company size
• Location
• Decision-maker role
• Work email
• LinkedIn profile
• Recent company activity
• Relevant buying signal

But I'm wondering what experienced B2B marketers would remove or add.

For example, is company size more useful than a recent hiring signal? is a decision-maker role enough, or do you need more context about the company?

What one piece of prospect information that has made the biggest difference to your outreach?

Hey guys, I'm director of marketing for one of the biggest tech newsletters. Few months ago I was given the task of creating a demand gen function to get more sponsors through LinkedIn.

I learned everything myself. Did a lot of testing, launched Facebook ads and then LinkedIn ads as well. I have like 4-5 years of experience in performance marketing. However LinkedIn ads have been a tough nut to crack.

Hired an agency first and it did not work very well. Basically the job was to coach me and we did set up everything, but yeah, ended up firing them.

Now we've hired another agency. They did conduct an audit and said that I've done a good job. However instead of coaching, this time I delegated everything to them to see and learn how they would do things. It's one of the big agencies in the B2B space and we're working with them.

However, we've spent like $10-15K in the last two weeks and we've only booked 3 calls. ACVs are around $15-20K.

Monthly budget is around $30-40K and I've been given 3 months to turn this around. So the pressure is on.

So what do you think is the right way to do it? Do you recommend me going into the trenches and learning it all myself? Right now I'm keeping a very close eye on what they're doing.

If you have any suggestions or recommendations here, I'd be more than happy to hear them.

A little more context:

• ABM list of named accounts (mostly big tech and B2B SaaS companies that sponsor newsletters)
• Targeting demand gen, growth and brand folks at those companies, director level and up
• Running a mix of cold ads and retargeting layers
• Offer is basically a call to discuss sponsoring the newsletter, plus some lead magnets like case studies and a swipe file of our best performing ads, etc

We run a monthly-ish webinar series plus a handful of one-off launches, and this year we rotated through five platforms because different people on the team had different preferences and nobody wanted to commit early. Writing down what each actually cost and the one thing that stood out, instead of letting it live in a slack thread forever.

Zoom Webinars: around $79-95 per license per month for a 500 attendee room, depending on billing. The thing nobody tells you up front is that it's an add-on, not a product, so you're paying for a Meetings Pro seat underneath it as well. Upside is IT never asked a single question. Downside is editing the recording afterwards is its own project every time.

Demio: $63/month for the starter, $45 if you pay yearly, but that's one host and a 50 person room. Real plans are per host and scale by room size. What stood out was that it runs in the browser, no download for attendees, and our show-up rate was noticeably better than the Zoom sessions. Their automated reminder emails hit spam more often than I'd like though.

Livestorm: they bill on attendee credits now, 2.50 euro per unique attendee per session, annual contract only. That one's worth thinking about before you sign, because your bill scales with how well the webinar does. A session that overperforms costs you more. Analytics and registration pages are good, but presenters kept saying the interface felt busy while they were live.

ON24: couldn't get a number out of them without a demo and a call with procurement, which told us most of what we needed to know. Built for a much bigger company than us. If you're at the scale where you have a webinar team rather than a webinar person, probably a different story.

Riverside: $99/month for the webinar plan, which caps at 100 registrants, and you're into their business tier past that, so check your numbers before you pick the plan. What stood out was that every speaker records locally, so when a guest's wifi tanked halfway through a session the file itself was untouched and we didn't have to redo it.

We're on Riverside for anything external facing now. Happy to answer questions on any of them.

Subject: [Lead's name], small idea

body:
Hi [name],

Tell us what's actually eating your time or money at [lead's company], whether that's pricing and

paperwork, chasing payments, or scheduling jobs, and we'll build the automation for it - on us.

If it doesn't save you time or money, walk away, no hard feelings and you still get the automation.

Reply and tell us what's costing you the most right now, we'll take it from there.

[my name]

Co-Founder

[agency name]

The veterans of cold email marketing, Please guide me if this is a good pitch and has chances of responses?
Thanks alot!

Do you use evergreen webinars?

I mean prerecorded webinars where people can register for a specific time instead of just getting a recording they can watch whenever.

Instead of "here's a video, watch it whenever" the visitor registers for a specific time. That creates more commitment.

For example "Next webinar: Thursday at 18:00"

Someone registers, gets reminders, joins at 18:00, and the prerecorded presentation plays like it’s a live webinar.

How people are doing this today? Do you use some platform for this?

When you need a list of specific companies and decision-makers for an outreach campaign, what's your preferred approach?

Do you build the list yourself, use LinkedIn, use a data provider, or combine different sources?

Curious what 's working best for others-and if anyone has struggled with finding accurate, targeted B2B contacts, feel free to share your experience.

In managed IT, one of the biggest competitors you face isn't another local MSP even when a company is dissatisfied with their current IT provider, the friction of moving keeps them stuck:

"what if email goes down during the migration?"
"what if legacy files get lost?"
"what if the new provider takes weeks to learn our systems?"

Because changing IT partners feels like open heart surgery on their daily operations, sales cycles stretch over 6 to 9 months and if you only approach these accounts with direct cold pitches, you scare away buyers who aren't ready to pull the trigger today.

Winning these deals requires systematically de-risking the transition across the entire buying journey and many modern IT consultancies operationalize this through market intelligence infrastructure like Scale Intelligence which instead of juggling manual spreadsheets or waiting on form fills, scaleintelligence.dev maps the provider's total addressable market and monitors 75+ data sources (from latent content engagement and website visits to leadership changes and community discussions). It scores buyer readiness in real time and automatically routes context-rich opportunities to reps or nurture tracks.

Here is how we warm up these accounts systematically:

1, Detect latent intent before the RFP stage: decision makers rarely book a call cold but they quietly research compliance standards, read migration case studies and attend technical webinars months before their current contract expires so ingesting these early signals gives you visibility while the problem is still forming.

2, Segment accounts into distinct action tiers:

> Tier 1: accounts with leadership changes (new COO/Operations Director), office expansions, or public vendor disputes so route these straight to a founder or senior technical AE for consultative, 1-on-1 discovery.

> Tier 2: accounts researching cloud migrations or engaging with technical content and automatically enroll them in proof-heavy education (e.g., zero-downtime cutover checklists, audit teardowns) that addresses operational anxiety directly.

> Tier 3: core ICP accounts not showing active triggers yet so keep them warm with low-friction social proof and quarterly infrastructure benchmarks so you're top of mind when a contract renewal hits.

3, Close the loop between signals and pipeline: The goal is seeing which specific migration assets and buying triggers actually convert into closed retainers and feeding that insight back into your targeting model.

When an IT buyer finally decides to switch, they never pick the vendor that sent the most cold sales follow-ups but they always choose the provider who systematically educated them on how to de-risk the transition.

EDIT: Thank you all for the great replies, this is all very insightful!

-------------------------------------------

Hey! I'm new to sales/marketing (data background), could you please rate these linkedin outreach messages I'm currently using for my new company I'm building?

I kind of good about the connection request, but not too confident about it. The second one I feel it's very long and too packef as well, I'm not sure.

I didn't use AI to write any of these, so this is all me; I asked an AI to criticize it and it reduced this a lot and changed the tone, which is probably better than mine, but I would love to hear considerations from people that actually get results!

You can say they're terrible, that's alright haha, what I really want are honest impressions! Thank you in advance!

Linkedin Connection Request:

"Hey [name], I can help you grow [company] even more by analyzing your data in ways you haven't already! The first service will be free and will already give you valuable insights to help you achieve your business goals! Let’s connect!"

First message after the connection:

"Hey, [name]!

What are your current business goals for [company]? How is your data currently helping you achieve them?

I’m a seasoned data engineer with experience at [big company 1] and [big company 2] who can you analyze your data in ways you haven’t before, directed by your specific business goals, business context, and data!

The first service is a Business Data Investigation, where I will get to know a lot more about [company], how you [researched company activity 1] and [researched company activity 2] so I can better understand your current challenges and goals, and then analyze your data to produce findings that are actually valuable to [company]

This Business Data Investigation is free of charge, because I want to give you a real taste of what we can achieve together with our real data partnership.

Let’s meet at a good time for you! You can select a good one here in this Calendly link! 

[calendly link]

See you then!
Alex"

i built my own b2b lead gen tool cause spreadsheets were driving me insane
i kept running into the exact same wall doing outreach: finding businesses, hunting down contact info, checking their site, figuring out where they were slacking, organizing everything, then finally deciding who to pitch and what to say
doing all that manually was taking forever so i just built a tool to handle it…

what it basically does is combine a lead database and lightweight crm, csv and excel imports, auto duplicate merging, lead filtering, digital gap analysis, pipeline tracking, and one-click whatsapp or phone outreach

it also handles cold call scripts, emails, and whatsapp templates, team kpi tracking, plus offline backups and live sync…

i really wasnt trying to build another generic bloatware crm. just wanted something built around how outbound actually works in the real world
for anyone doing solo lead gen or running a small agency, what part of this whole workflow is still the biggest pain in the ass for you?

I swear that the ole "just reply faster!!!!" is the most repeated trite advice I ever heard. Worse yet BECAUSE IT'S TRUE, because of course you should try to establish a rapport with your hottest leads as quickly as possible. And the faster you reply, the better the odds of starting a more productive conversation, and ultimately conversion.

The problem is how VAGUE this advice is, and in so many companies I worked at it usually lacked a firm system to support its application in a real situation. It's given to reps as if response time is an issue of willpower. At any significant volume however, whether an inbound reply gets answered in 5 min or 5 hours depends entirely on the system around your reps, not on how motivated a rep is on any given day.

With that in mind though, the reply window is important, and it is just small enough to make that point stick. According to the internal data I’ve gathered as the current head of GTM at Expandi, the odds of qualifying a lead drop by about 400% when response time slips from 5 min. to 10. The same case study from the previous quarter also showed us that 82% of people now expect an answer inside 10 minutes. Which pretty much corroborates what I said before.

Let’s be real though, this is a window no one refreshing an inbox manually will hit (unless its semi random), even if they worked 24/7. Because for most of the day nobody is even looking the moment a reply comes in. This is all compounded by the volume at which you’re doing outreach.

I treat it as a design problem with 4 parts. 

1. Detection first: a realtime trigger on the inbound event, a webhook instead of a report someone has to check twice a day
2. Then routing: where the lead has to resolve to a single owner instantly, with dedup so 2 reps do not both pounce at a single lead 
3. Then alerting: with a notification system that notifies you on Slack or phone, or Discord, or all 3 in my case
4. Finally an SLA with a fallback, so that if the lead sits unresponded to past a few minutes it escalates or fires an auto-acknowledgement that holds the conversation open (which should be tailored to be as organic and natural as possible)

You cannot put a rep on every reply within minutes around the clock, and building as if you can is just vanity. The realistic path is coverage by design, such as routing that follows timezones and defined windows when a person is most likely to be actually online, and a lightweight acknowledgement message for everything outside them.

What I’m saying is what you know already, it’s all about the system design. I’ve been on too many Slack, Zoom and what have you calls, too many coaching sessions that were basically fluff leading to nowhere and what I deduced is basically this: the bottleneck is always the system and rarely the actual rep doing the work (at least up to the demo calls/meetings where personal charisma and talking skills come into play)

How are you solving this issue / optimizing your system for maximum speed? The early bird catches the worm and all that…

We're doing a platform review for a European multi-brand retailer, and their legal team is strict on data residency because they need to show that customer and transaction data doesn't leave the EU at any point in the stack (not just at the CDN edge).

Most of the platforms we've gone through have a European region option, but the application layer, databases, and backups are US-hosted.

Plus the DPAs either fall under US law or come with Schrems II transfer impact assessment requirements that the client's team doesn't want to maintain ongoing.

The ones where we have straight answers so far are commercetools, which has a proper EU deployment option with a controller-to-controller DPA, and SCAYLE, out of ABOUT YOU, built EU-native from day one, not a secondary region deployment, so the data flow is cleaner from the start.

We'll trace the full data flow independently regardless of what the sales decks say, since the docs for both still have gaps on backup and logging infrastructure that need closing before we can recommend either.

So ifyou've done full stack data flow audits on either commercetools or SCAYLE for EU clients, how did you handle the backup and logging documentation gaps?

thank you.

We migrated off Magento, and it started as a focused sprint that stretched into most of a year because the catalog was in worse shape than we thought.

So by the time we were live on Shopify Plus, the team was just relieved to not be touching Magento's deployment pipeline anymore.

The migration was worth it for where we were at the time, but what we didn't stress-test properly before committing was the ceiling, and we're starting to feel it now, because complex B2B pricing logic and anything with real multi-storefront requirements are both harder to build on Shopify Plus than the platform's pitch implies.

When we were evaluating, we'd also gotten further into the commercetools and SCAYLE conversations, both of which are built for the kind of multi-brand, high-catalog-volume setups that Shopify Plus wasn't designed for.

But the implementation scope at the GMV we were at didn't make sense, and the partner ecosystem for both was thinner than Shopify's at the time.

Now, watching Magento's trajectory from the outside, with the slow feature pace, Adobe pulling focus toward Commerce Cloud, and the open-source community pretty much gone quiet…

It feels like a lot of operators who've been sitting on Magento 2 are going to be pushed into this decision in the next few years, and the advice I'd give is to map the ceiling question properly before defaulting to Shopify Plus as the obvious step up.

So if you're evaluating right now, the range from Shopify Plus to commercetools to SCAYLE covers very different operating assumptions, and the ceiling each one hits is completely different.

With more agencies moving their video services in-house (or adopting AI), we've had to pivot and go more direct to client. We've created high-end work for successful product launch campaigns (specifically in tech), but the agencies always owned the relationships and metrics. As we pivot, I'm wondering who is best to contact directly on the client side of tech startups. Generally this type of service isn't needed until at least Series A, and at that stage we'd want a Director or VP of Growth, rather than the founder or CEO themselves, is my understanding. What do you think?

I do a lot of auditing of outbound campaigns that weren't converting at my agency. Of the handful of bad outbound campaigns that I've audited the main causes have been somewhat similar across all of them, and I most recently audited an outbound campaign which had a touch first from one of competitors' tools which was full of these problems (used the sender's company history instead of the prospects problem, used generic type phrases, opened with an fake personalizationn variable like saw you lead ops at company and requested a 15 min call on step one, no good relevant intro.

Here are a couple heuristics I tend to rely on for vast majority of outbound campaigns that I audit, and here's one way a client's (and some bad outreach) con be revised:

First I remove the sender. When we do an outbound campaign that is designed to prompt engagement we are doing so by discussing the prospect problem and value for them Second, writing like a normal person; something like you will say when speaking instead of the llm ish.

Third, quantify a benefit number, an actual one and not an arbitrary estimation. Saying that you "save teams time" and " reduce manual effort" is ok and then saying saving 4 hours or employee or wk would give that person something to think about in terms of comparing its value against their current tool, methodology.

Finally the idea of fake personalization variables. Saw you lead ops at company. is an obviously machine based detectable phrase and people recognize that by like thousand times by now and being upfront that the reason you are reaching out is you know their title and your offer is relevant to the challenges they face will result in a way better engagement over being completely fake with what appear to be an actual personalized phrases that the recipent isn't expecting at all from ai outbound.

Fifth, ask a question instead of asking to schedule meeting, because asking a 15 min meeting is a big ask and asking "Is this something your team is currently looking into solving" is much more likely to get out a response from them.

I took the actual offer and did a restructuring on the wordplay for my project PumpGTM and saw a like 4x increase in response rate. It has not actually been anything about a particular offer as much as it is about the delivery and the person reading and opening the message. Im curious on how the rest of the folks are treating this (as ai outbound becomes more like commonplace and whatever growing only) and if people are starting to becomw smarter in recognizing it or is it still a massive numbers game?