A client asked us to audit their B2B sales process. They had a 51-page playbook, defined ideal customer profiles and a real discovery framework. On paper, a company that had its act together.
What we found once we looked at what was actually happening
- No LinkedIn outreach. The team sold to lawyers, hospital administrators and government buyers, people who live on LinkedIn. They were running two of three channels and did not know it.
- No KPIs. Not loose ones, none. Fifty-one pages and not one number for calls per day, emails per day, or what a good week looks like. When a rep underperformed, nobody could say why, so they were simply blamed.
- Rules changing weekly. New scripts, new targets, new process every few days. You cannot coach anyone against a standard that does not exist long enough to measure.
- Blind outreach. The person running the email campaigns could not see open rates or reply rates. She could confirm emails went out, and that was all. They were sending several hundred cold emails a day with no deliverability monitoring, so nobody could know how many arrived.
The strategy on paper is usually fine. The system underneath it is what is broken.
What we tell anyone running outbound
- If you cannot see open and reply rates by campaign, you are not running outreach. You are running blind.
- A playbook without numbers attached is not a playbook. It is a wish.
- Changing the rules every week does not fix underperformance. It guarantees you will never learn what was broken.
- For B2B in 2026, LinkedIn is part of the mix. Leaving it out leaves meetings on the table.
The teams that win at outbound are not the ones with the cleverest scripts. They are the ones who can see what is happening, and who leave a good process alone long enough to find out whether it works.