The Results: Who This Strategy Gets Meetings With
This is the most powerful GTM strategy I know for sales-led B2B SaaS. If you need demos or sales calls to close deals, this is what you should be running. You probably shouldn't be doing a lot of other stuff — you should be doing this.
Here are the companies we've booked meetings with using this exact system: Tesla, Oracle, Microsoft, HubSpot, Meta, Amazon, IBM, Subway, and McKinsey — plus a lot of other companies that don't have household names but are generating serious pipeline.
One recent Slack message from a client after we added the GTM outbound layer: "Subway, McKinsey — all have demos booked in." Another: "All very promising, we should start exploring scaling things up." And from the LinkedIn ads side specifically, we're seeing conversation ad SQLs at $59–$388 per lead, with retargeting consistently outperforming cold.
This isn't a theoretical framework. This is what we're running right now, and the addition of the outbound layer is what's taken it from "good LinkedIn ads results" to "meetings with the biggest companies in the world."
Step 1: Build the Account List
Everything starts with a list. Put a lot of effort into getting a really high-quality account list. This works brilliantly for account-based marketing with a small ICP, but it also works if you have a large total addressable market of 5,000, 10,000, or even 20,000 companies.
Here's how to build it:
- Start with the mega list. Scrape different websites, use Sales Navigator, use Clay for enrichment — whatever it takes to build a comprehensive list of companies in your ICP.
- Segment into tiers. Not every company on your mega list is equal. For us, the highest-value segment is recently funded companies — anyone funded between $2M and $80M in the past 18 months. That's who we want to talk to.
- Layer signals. Sub-segment further with hiring signals. Companies that just hired a new VP of Marketing are a strong signal — they're about to spend budget, shake things up, and make decisions. Depending on how big your list is, these signal layers can sharpen your targeting significantly.
- Size it to your budget. The final list should represent roughly the next three months of your ad budget and outbound capacity. For us internally, that's 3,000–5,000 companies over three months. But it depends on your budget, your team size, and your goals.
Don't build the list once and forget it. Signals change. Companies get funded. People get hired. Accounts churn in and out of your ICP. Update your list regularly — refresh the signals, add new companies, remove ones that no longer fit. The quality of your list determines the quality of everything downstream.
Step 2: Nurture with LinkedIn Ads and Content
Now you have a great list. The next step is to deliver content to that list — and there's no better way to do it than with LinkedIn ads.
I would argue that LinkedIn is the best content delivery platform for B2B on the planet . There's nothing else that gives you this level of control over who sees your content, how often they see it, and from whose profile it appears. If your buyers are on LinkedIn — and in B2B, they are — this is the delivery mechanism.
This follows our full-funnel LinkedIn ads strategy , specifically the middle-of-funnel 180-day retargeting layer. But here's the key difference: if your list represents your budget size and you have enough budget to hit the right penetration and frequency, you can skip the retargeting setup entirely and go straight to list-based targeting . Upload your account list, target the right job titles, and deliver content directly.
Content delivery: 80% thought leader ads
You can deliver content through document ads, video ads, and single image ads. But 80% of your content should be delivered through thought leader ads — both video TL ads and text-based TL ads from personal profiles. People buy from people. Thought leader ads from your CEO, your head of product, or your subject matter expert will always outperform content from a brand page.
The 5×5 minimum
Here's the target: everyone on your list should see at least five pieces of content , and each piece should be seen at least five times . That's the absolute minimum. In practice, you should aim for more. The goal is that the people on this list — the specific job titles at the specific companies you're targeting — know who you are, what you do, how you do it, and why you're different. They should recognise your face, your brand, and your social proof.
Organic content amplification
The paid strategy above is the core engine. But you can amplify it massively with organic content — having three to five people at your company posting three to five times a week on LinkedIn. Some companies are doing this with 20 people. When you have multiple team members all creating content related to your product, your industry, and your expertise, you get inbound DMs, website clicks from profiles, and brand awareness at zero ad cost.
If you don't have the bandwidth for a full organic strategy, pick two or three key people — the CEO, someone close to the product, maybe a customer-facing leader — and write strategic content for those individuals. Five posts per person per month, maximum. It's not about volume — it's about delivering the right messages to the right people.
Even before you add the outbound layer, this list-based nurture strategy starts generating inbound. People on the list see your content repeatedly, visit your website, send you DMs, and start booking demos. The demand generation happens here — you're creating awareness and interest that didn't exist before. Everything that follows is about capturing and accelerating that demand.
The Content Strategy: Three Buckets
People overcomplicate content strategy. Here are the three buckets — rotate your content across all three:
Bucket 1: Social Proof
Share client wins. Brag smart — show how, not just what. Show results and then explain how you got them. Turn testimonials into ads. The goal is that your ICP sees multiple different people saying great things about you, which builds trust faster than anything you could say about yourself.
Bucket 2: Product-Led
Talk about your product. Show something people love. Explain the benefit, really clearly. Walk through how it works — do an ungated demo. Share how you do things differently from competitors. Old way vs new way. Us vs them. This is where your unique selling proposition lives.
Bucket 3: Problem-Led
Teach something useful. Share tips and solve real problems. Break down how things actually work. Focus on the problem and show the urgency — why this is an important problem that people should allocate budget and headspace to in the near future. This creates demand by making people aware of problems they might not have prioritised yet.
Step 3: Capture Demand
While the nurture engine is running, you need to capture the 2–4% of your market that's in-market right now . There are three demand capture channels:
LinkedIn ads conversion
This is the primary capture mechanism. Conversation ads (especially incentive conversation ads), single image ads with lead gen forms, and single image ads driving to your website's demo page. The conversion numbers are strong — $59–$388 per SQL depending on audience, with retargeting always outperforming cold.
Google Ads
Not essential, but if you have the budget, Google is great for capturing existing search demand. It's intensely competitive and getting more difficult with AI search, but for high-intent queries like "[your category] demo" or "[competitor] alternative," it still works. Add this if you have the budget — but the LinkedIn ads and outbound layers are the core.
Inbound from nurture
The content nurture engine generates organic inbound — website visits, DMs, and direct demo requests from people on your list who've been seeing your content. This happens naturally once the nurture reaches critical mass.
Step 4: The Six Outbound Flows
This is the layer that turns the strategy from good to extraordinary. The outbound flows take the engagement data generated by your LinkedIn ads and content, and convert it into proactive outreach. Here are the six flows we run:
Anyone who likes, comments, engages, or visits your profile from your thought leader ads gets collected by a tool like Trigify (though more affordable tools are coming out). That data flows into Clay for ICP filtering and enrichment — you need to make sure you're only reaching out to qualified prospects, not other agencies or irrelevant contacts. From Clay, qualified leads get pushed to LinkedIn outbound tools ( Aimfox, Smartlead ) and cold email ( Instantly, HeyReach ). We also ping Slack for SDR teams who want to do manual, hyper-personalised follow-up. The first automated step works really well — it's fast, doesn't depend on SDR availability or time zones, and Clay enrichment lets you add personalisation before sending.
Anyone visiting your website through your LinkedIn ads or organic content gets identified by a tool like Lead Forensics (which we highly recommend — great team). That visitor data gets pushed through Clay again to check for ICP match and enrich the contacts, then pushed to cold email and LinkedIn outbound sequences plus a Slack notification for your SDR team. Your content is driving traffic — make sure you're capturing and acting on that traffic.
This is one of the most important flows. When someone signs up for gated content — your LinkedIn Ads OS, a guide, a video — only about 3% of those leads are actually in-market . If you push all of them to an SDR, the SDR will get annoyed and demoralised after following up with hundreds of people who aren't looking for a demo. Instead: push content leads through Clay , automate the first outbound step with a message that shares more useful content plus a call-to-action, and the SDR only follows up with people who respond positively. For demo leads specifically — people who sign up for a demo but don't actually book into the calendar — an automated LinkedIn connection request plus email goes out saying "I saw you signed up, here's the calendar link." This automated follow-up has significantly improved the conversion rate from demo lead to booked meeting across all our client accounts. We set this up as standard now.
Anyone engaging with content about your topic — your competitors' posts, industry influencers, related subject matter — gets collected by Trigify , filtered through Clay for ICP match, and pushed to outbound. If a VP of Marketing is liking posts about LinkedIn ads, they might be considering running LinkedIn ads or changing their agency. We want to know about that. The key is filtering through Clay so you're not reaching out to other agencies or irrelevant contacts — only to companies that match your ICP.
Two approaches here. First: company-level engagement data from LinkedIn — you can see which companies are highly engaged with your ads and content, export those lists, and reach out specifically to contacts at those companies. Second: outbound to your nurture list after it's been warmed. Run nurture campaigns for six weeks, check that penetration rate and impression frequency are high, and then go outbound to that list. The people on it should already know your brand, who you are, and what you do. Rotate every two and a half to three months — nurture, go outbound, nurture again, go outbound again. You can run multiple lists simultaneously with different segments and signals. The ghosts — people who never liked or commented but saw all your content — are often the ones who book a call. They come in saying "I saw loads of your content" and I check and they never engaged with anything publicly. Warm outbound reaches the ghosts.
You still need cold outbound infrastructure. Make sure your domains are sorted, you have enough email boxes, and you can send 30,000 emails a month with proper deliverability. Cold outbound is the wide net — it catches people who aren't on your nurture list yet and haven't given you any signals. It's the least efficient flow, but it provides baseline volume and catches in-market buyers you'd otherwise miss entirely.
We're experimenting with warm calling and signal-based calling internally right now — adding phone calls to the flows above, especially the signal-based and warm outbound flows. We're testing to make sure it works well before rolling it out to clients, but early signs are promising. Expect this to become a standard part of the system in the near future.
Putting It All Together
Here's the full system in order:
- Build a high-quality account list of 3,000–5,000 companies, segmented by value and layered with signals (funding, hiring, etc.)
- Deliver content via LinkedIn ads — 80% through thought leader ads, targeting the list with the 5×5 minimum (five pieces of content, five impressions each)
- Run three content buckets — social proof, product-led, problem-led — across two to three key team members
- Capture demand through conversation ads, lead gen forms, and optionally Google Ads
- Run all six outbound flows — signal-based, website visitors, content/demo follow-up, topic listening, warm outbound, and cold
- Rotate the list every two and a half to three months — nurture, outbound, nurture again
- Update signals and lists regularly — the system improves as your data gets better
This is an inbound/outbound hybrid. The LinkedIn ads and content create inbound demand — people start recognising you, visiting your site, and booking demos on their own. The outbound flows capture the engagement signals and proactively reach out to people who are showing interest but haven't converted yet. Together, they compound.
If you build this out properly — the account list, the content nurture, the demand capture, and the six outbound flows — this is the most powerful strategy you can run for sales-led B2B SaaS. You probably shouldn't be doing a lot of other stuff. Focus here. Get this system running, optimise it, and let it compound. The results speak for themselves: Tesla, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Amazon, HubSpot, IBM, Subway, McKinsey. This is the playbook.