2025 Sales Stack

Sales is changing.

B2B strategies that worked well a year ago don’t seem to be as effective. New AI-native approaches have fundamentally shifted how people find and enrich leads.

I’d been somewhat ‘out’ of the full-throttle sales game until recently. Coming back in it feels like it’s all different. It’s exciting and a bit scary.

We’ve been working hard lately building out sales function and learning a lot. I figured it might be nice to share a quick off-the-dome summary what seems to be working for us, what’s missing, what’s next:

1) Outbound 

The days of easy brute force leads are over, now it’s less about breadth and more about depth. Mass broadcast cold email doesn’t work anymore - people get too many of these now (AI / stricter spam filtering impacting this), so it’s really hard to break through.

It used to be effective to spin up a bunch of lookalike domains for your business, warm them up using Instantly, then send 100s of cold emails per day. These days you’re lucky to get <1% response rates

Instead, what does seem to work is highly curated, personalized, omni-channel email outreach to a set of high signal leads (the old fashioned way)

Ie. instead of spraying and praying emails to 100 random cold prospects each day, use tools like Clay to go through those 100 leads first and identify the top 10 worth talking to, then tools like Birddog to find recent news/signals about them worth reaching out about

Use perplexity, claude, chat, your AI research/code tool of choice to help you generate a 1 page report personalized to them, send it over in 1-off white glove email. If they open it send them a similar DM on linkedin later

Non-email forms of outreach are working better these days; LinkedIn does really well (+SalesNavigator) when used correctly, targeted cold calling / SMS can work but be careful not to get added to blocked lists

Whenever possible, offer to buy people coffee and do meetings in person, it makes a difference.

2) Inbound

Speaking of, other strategies that are working well these days are events – both live and virtual. Every B2B business should have a strategy for both

Live events are back bigger and better than ever; a refreshing break from the oversaturation of email & social media. Go to local meetups in your city, go to tech weeks outside your city, find ways to attend industry conferences at a discount (more on that here). Try to attend 1 per month

Start by hosting a linkedin live event for 1 hour each month. Talk industry trends, answer questions. You can live stream it across multiple channels using Restream and make it interactive

Webinars also do surprisingly well for a few reasons. First, it’s a reason to reach out and invite ppl to the even beforehand. Then whether or not they show up, it’s a reason to touchbase after with the recording (2-3 touchbases!)

Better yet, afterwards cut it up into short-form content that can be shared across channels, republish to YouTube / Spotify, and transcribe to turn it into blog content. Great way to use the whole cow.

3) Other Things

Thought leadership content on linkedin works pretty well if you are consistent and have a strategy for adding prospects routinely. Substack/Beehiiv newsletters is emerging as a pleasant space to be. As for Twitter/X if you don’t have >1000 followers its brutal

SEO is not yet dead but certainly less potent than it used to be especially if starting from scratch. There are ways to gamify the system and lean more into whatever the equivalent is for showing up in LLM search results

We recently upgraded to a real CRM (from our 1000-row Notion table) - have been really enjoying Attio for it’s integration ability (apparently they are poaching startups left and right from the likes of Salesforce)¹

Don’t have much to say about ads at this point… sponsor a few events if you can afford it; but I wouldn’t spend too much personally. Maybe more on that in the next update.

If you’re experimenting with sales tools too would love to discuss :-)

Cheers for now,
Ramsey

1  Birddogs’ Jack Porter had a great write up on much of this and more here on LinkedIn