Ben Reed's Weekly B2B Growth Insights & Highlights | Oct 15th, 2025

Benjamin Reed's weekly B2B sales, marketing, & revenue insights...in one simple email.

Author

Benjamin Aaron Reed
October 15, 2025

Hey everyone,

This week’s recap saves you time: I’ve distilled the top B2B sales, marketing, and growth insights from my podcast + LinkedIn — so you can scale smarter without the noise.

🎧 Podcast Episode of the Week

The GTM vs. Revenue Operations Wars. What You Missed with Carolyn Dilks (Episode 28)

Guests: Carolyn Dilks

Highlights:

  • Why most B2B teams are still using decade-old models for measuring revenue success.

  • How to transition from a source-based attribution model to a more insightful causal chain of events.

  • What defines a true GTM Engineer and how that differs from RevOps.

  • The biggest constraints holding back revenue growth and how to solve them using data.

  • How Passetto uses tech-enabled advisory services to clean CRM data and unlock actionable growth insights.

💡 LinkedIn Highlights

The Real Reason Your Outbound Efforts Aren’t Paying Off

The #1 reason your GTM pipeline leaks (and it’s not a copy or reps)...It’s the lack of a central record. Last month, I watched a VP of Sales brag about “50 new opps created.”
…Read Full Post

Fake Yeses Are a Sales Killer!

A polite “yes, let’s chat” wastes an hour. A blunt “no, not interested” gives you clarity in 10 seconds. Why the best closers hunt for the "no" first.

3 Hours of Hair-Pulling for Nothing? There’s a Better Way

VLOOKUP hell. CSV Purgatory. De-duplication heaven? Answers below. Here's the problem & the solution:

Every List After Your First is a Trap

Fun Outbound Agency fact: 85% of your new web scrapes are leads you already have, enriched, and lost track of. This is why your agency won't scale.

The Modern Outbound Playbook Your Team Isn’t Using…

I’ve seen lean 3-person teams out-sell 20-person SDR armies, using just Clay, RevyOps, and Instantly. Everyone claims they’re “doing outbound.” AND, 95% of it is just…

The Survival Guide for Non-Technical Founders Scaling Outbound

Here are my Top 8 Lessons in the first 90 days of Bootstrapping RevyOps as a non-technical Startup Founder. Here’s what I did right.

Sheets Aren’t a CRM. Here’s What You Really Need.

Google Sheets isn’t built to scale GTM operations 🙂 It’s a calculator with a nice UI. Not a database. Not a CRM. Definitely not a real-time engine.

Your GTM Database Should Remember Everything | Here’s Why

Most outbound teams think the problem is scraping, it’s not. The real problem is memory. Here’s the pattern I see every single year: You enrich 100k contacts. 12 months later, you want to go after them again.

Your CRM Isn’t the Source of Truth

Everyone loves to call their CRM the “single source of truth.” It’s not. It’s the most expensive lie you pay $200/mo to maintain. And if you’re running a leadgeneration agency, it’s worse.

Cold Email Still Works, If You Follow These Rules

100 cold email campaigns failed before I figured this out. Here are 4 lessons that changed the game for me…

Big Agencies Hate This, But New GTM Owners Need to Read It

I'm not often this blunt. This article is going to enrage the big agency owners. They don't want you to know this truth (or they don't know it themselves)..

From Burnout to 50% Close Rates | The Agency Systems Playbook

I’m not a better salesperson than you. I just stopped pretending I could scale by "selling more." 41 clients. 3 FTEs. 50% close rate. All because we turned our lead list ops into a machine.

💭 My Take of the Week

  • Succeeding with B2B go-to-market (regardless of tactics or channel, such as outbound, inbound, paid, or organic) requires relentless testing. This means you must become a mad scientist of B2B sales and marketing.

  • Like any good scientist, you must:

    • 1. Form a hypothesis

    • 2. Create a test to determine if your hypothesis is true or false.

    • 3. Gather data and analyze it with your entire team.

    • 4. Iterate fast based on the results.

  • What I’ve learned from founding and working at 14+ B2B companies, each with their unique go-to-market strategies, offers, products, and services, is that most of my ideas have been wrong. The few “right” ideas led to all of my success. Yet, the hardest part is finding the right ideas among the overwhelming number of wrong ones.

  • The way to make the process of finding the right ideas faster and easier is:

    • Have a “Growth Mindset.” Know that “failure” or, if you want to use a more positive word, “pivoting,” is a part of the game. It is a necessary evil (or a good thing, depending on how you look at it) to find out what works.

    • Know that business is often counterintuitive. What seems like an obvious “good” path, strategy, or tactic to use may be wrong. This is why the only way to truly know the best path is to test, test, test and actually try things in the real world - get out of your head and into reality.

    • Create a culture of “Truth Seeking.” This means encouraging your team to put aside “looking bad or good” and all the human politics to relentlessly pursue a deep understanding of reality (even if it means our ideas and thinking have been flawed). It is better to look bad and find the right path than to protect our egos (unless you want to stay poor).

      • Check out this great YouTube video from Jeff Bezos:

  • Be willing to “wander” and know this is a part of the journey. Because answers are not always obvious and because our ideas are prone to be more wrong than right, we need to embrace the fact that we are on a journey. This means embarking on adventures without a clear path all the time. To this end, I love the quote: “The path illuminates as we walk it.”

  • With experience, you’ll gain intuition and taste. Over time, you’ll be able to act more with your “gut” than with your analysis. In the beginning, gather as much data as possible and don’t believe yourself. In the long run, begin to trust yourself, but never stop questioning or testing your assumptions.

📣 What do you think?

👉 Hit reply and let me know what resonated most this week — or tell me what you’re struggling with in B2B sales right now. I read every response

👀 Stay tuned next week

I’ll be covering:

  • Podcast: B2B Sales Hiring | How to Find Amazing Sales Talent To Scale Your Business

    • Guest: Kristie Jones | B2B Sales Hiring Consultant

🚀 Let’s connect