Nothing is dead. Your execution just sucks.
What Works in B2B: 4 Experts on Sales, GTM, Community, and Newsletters
Hey, I’m KP 👋 Join my quest to interview 100+ B2B growth experts to learn what actually works, and what the top operators do differently. Enjoy the best ideas from the “Compound Growth” roundtable below. And stay tuned for the official launch of Compound Growth LIVE.
Tool of the week 🤔
The 1st tool I shared 2 weeks ago (business intelligence report) got an un-precedented 86% click-through rate!!
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Insight of the week 🤔
KP: When people say a channel is dead, is it an execution problem?
Phillip Alexeev: Almost always. One of my favorite examples: a company was targeting CFOs with cold email and getting 0.02% response rates. Terrible.
Instead of giving up on the channel, they sent an email saying "we're sending you a gift at this address" – but they deliberately used the wrong address!
Response rates jumped to 50%. People rushed to correct their address (they didn’t want the neighbor getting their gift!). The channel wasn't broken. The approach and messaging were.
Meet the Guests
Stephen Steers: Sales consultant and author of Superpower Storytelling. Over seven years, he's worked with 1,000+ companies across 40 countries (from $10M startups to $5B enterprises) on what he calls "context selling": tailored coaching based on each rep's specific gaps rather than generic training.
Phillip Alexeev: Growth and GTM leader with four exits in ten years. Forbes 40 Under 40. Runs the Evergrow AI GTM & Growth podcast, where he interviews operators from companies like Reddit, Ramp, and ElevenLabs. Also consults on integrating automated outbound with traditional demand gen.
Brian Oblinger: Community and customer marketing strategist. Has spent his entire career helping B2B SaaS companies build communities, advocacy, and customer experience programs. Previously led community at Alteryx.
Aram Taghavi: Co-Founder & CEO of Optin. Was employee #2 and CRO who helped grow Bisnow Media to 1M+ subscribers across 30+ newsletters and 300 events a year. Now helps B2B brands grow newsletters using proprietary cold email infrastructure, and publishes six private-markets-focused newsletters of his own.
Key Takeaways
Every channel works… for the right business. Cold email, LinkedIn, events, newsletters – none of them are dead. The question is whether the channel fits your ICP, price point, and customer journey.
Storytelling beats features, especially now. AI has raised the floor on sales competence. What separates you is the ability to share real experiences and demonstrate judgment. Stories build confidence; feature lists don't.
Community is a platform, not a feature. The best communities serve customer success, product, sales, and marketing simultaneously – not just Q&A support.
B2B newsletters fail when content is lazy. Growing subscribers is the “easy” part. Retention requires original research, curated value, and a reason to keep showing up in someone's inbox every week.
What Good Operators Do Differently
Good operators iterate with data; bad operators delegate and disappear.
Stephen: The clients who get results try the strategy, come back with data – here's what worked, here's what didn't, here's where I'm confused – and we iterate. The ones who fail expect me to come in and fix everything. "We hired a consultant, it's gonna work now." That never works. My mentor always says "implementing is learning." I'll give 150% of my 50%, but you have to do your part.
They match the channel to the customer, not the trend.
Phillip: Step one in my decision tree is always: does this channel fundamentally work for your industry and your target customer? That's almost always the reason something "doesn't work." People blast LinkedIn because they heard it works, without asking whether their buyer even lives there. I invested in a biotech company doing medical equipment sales. First thing we did was interview customers and figure out their buying committee. Turns out they're non-digital natives. So we mapped every niche directory, niche event, and trade journal they actually participate in. It felt old school, but that's what worked for that customer.
They think in systems, not silos.
Brian: The companies that do community well treat it as a platform that serves the entire business; not a side project for one team. They're pulling in customer success, product, marketing, and sales. The ones that fail treat community as a checkbox: "We launched a Slack group. Done."
Aram: Same with newsletters. The ones that work have their business model dialed in, their economics dialed in, and the newsletter is a deliberate part of their funnel. The ones that fail are usually figuring out their business at the same time. They're not patient. They want results in three months.
On Storytelling as a Sales Weapon
KP: I get the concept of storytelling in sales, but where does it actually fit? I'm probably not telling a story in a cold email, right?
Stephen: The best place for stories is on the sales call. You take in what the prospect tells you, and you share how you helped someone in a similar industry with a similar problem achieve a specific outcome.
Here's why it matters now more than ever. AI has made it easy for anyone to generate content and outreach with personalization at scale.
What's going to differentiate you is the ability to demonstrate judgment, tone, and trust. That’s the power of stories.
Aram Taghavi: I just analyzed 30 of our inbound sales calls, and the best-performing ones were where I shared my origin story – how I was building a media company, grew to 400,000 subscribers, ran into a specific problem, and built a solution. That led naturally into case studies and built trust faster than any pitch deck.
Phillip Alexeev: And it extends well beyond the sales call. Your story has to be consistent across the entire funnel and channels in your GTM. If your cold email says something different from your landing page, you're not building confidence – you're creating confusion.
On Whether Cold Email and Outreach Are "Dead"
KP: People keep saying cold email doesn't work, social selling doesn't work. What's the truth?
Phillip Alexeev: I’ve seen everything work actually: cold email, LinkedIn, newsletters, blog articles. Things fail only when you take shortcuts, get lazy, and don’t do the upfront work.
The real question is: does a channel make sense for your business? If your TAM is 500 companies, don't blast cold emails. Fly across the country and visit them. Attend events they’re at. Connect with them in advance to grab drinks after the event… But if you're mid-market SaaS with a broad ICP, cold outreach will always work.
My strategy is to allocate 80% of bandwidth and resources to channels that are proven for the specific industry and customer profile. The remaining 20% goes to aggressive experimentation.
I know a company doing millions in ARR by sending printed cakes as outreach. Will that work in every industry? No. But I'll test it with 20% of my budget while the other 80% keeps performing.
On Building B2B Communities That Actually Work
KP: Everyone wants a community. Almost nobody makes it work. What's the formula?
Brian Oblinger: The first mistake is the mindset. If your first thought is "how quickly can I monetize this?" or “how can we extract value from these people immediately,” you've already lost. Great communities lead with value and give 10x more than they ask for.
I teach companies to think of community as an internal platform that serves every customer-facing function:
Customer Success uses it for self-service education and enablement.
Product uses it for ideation and feedback.
Sales uses it as a live library of customer stories.
Marketing uses it to build advocacy.
Support uses it to build scalability and sustainability.
Building trust and authenticity with your community is critical. How? Instead of "trust me," connect customers to “people like me” and share their success stories as social proof ("here's what Walmart did with this exact use case”).
But community doesn’t have to be all-digital. As AI handles more of the transactional Q&A, community becomes the place for the things AI can't do – the cocktail hour in Miami, the small cohort groups, the expert panels. People with real opinions and real careers, connecting face to face to create real belonging.
On Growing B2B Newsletters
KP: Most B2B company newsletters I've subscribed to are basically product announcements. What should they be doing instead?
Aram Taghavi: The content is almost always the problem. We grow newsletters using a proprietary cold email approach and platform.
We've learned the hard way that this only works if the content is genuinely good. One of our clients had a newsletter that was basically "check out our stuff, we're great." No real value.
A great B2B newsletter is like a buffet of 5-7 things. This is the ideal but it’s totally fine if you’re missing certain elements. The most important thing is the mindset that you want to add value to your audience!
The main course in this content buffet is a piece of proprietary or original research – a data dive, an industry insight, something only you can produce.
Then layer in a trend of the week, a deal or case study spotlight, curated articles, and sharp data visuals.
If you have all that, our unsubscribe rates on cold-distributed newsletters are very low – MUCH lower than our double opt-in newsletter actually! – because people at work will keep reading something that's genuinely useful.
KP: Should companies think of newsletters as part of a broader strategy?
Aram Taghavi: A B2B newsletter works best as part of a system of channels that amplify and reinforce each other. You need a brand, outbound, SEO/AEO. Together, they all contribute to a strong and successful newsletter.
If nobody knows you and you’re only putting out a newsletter, it’s going to be difficult to convert because you have to earn their trust first. That comes over time, which you can shortcut with channels amplifying one another.
If you're a B2B growth expert or operator and want to join a future session, reply to this email. I'm hosting these weekly and always looking for sharp people to add to the mix.
