skills/ads/references/b2b-paid-playbook.md
Cross-platform operating rules for B2B paid acquisition — where sales cycles run 2–24 months, in-platform conversions mislead, and lead quality matters more than lead cost. Use this alongside the platform playbooks (Meta decision system, LinkedIn, Google Search, ABM).
TOFU/MOFU/BOFU stops at conversion. B2B revenue doesn't — closed-lost deals, open pipeline, and existing customers are all addressable with ads. Plan across five stages:
| Stage | Outcome | Buyer awareness | Typical offers | KPIs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Create | Build affinity & trust | Unaware / Problem-aware | Educational content, POV | Cost per consumption, blended cost/opp |
| Capture | Convert in-market buyers | Solution / Product-aware | Demos, trials | Pipe-to-spend, direct cost/opp |
| Accelerate (sales-led) / Activate (product-led) | Close open deals faster / convert free users | Product / Offer-aware | Case studies, webinars, events | Pipeline velocity, paid signups |
| Revive | Restart closed-lost | Offer-aware | Incentivized demos, guided trials | SQOs created, cost/SQO |
| Expand | Grow existing accounts | Most aware | Referral programs, new-feature content | Expansion revenue, influenced SQOs |
Build bottom-up for fastest ROI: Expand → Revive → Accelerate/Activate → Capture → Create. The bottom stages are cheap, small-audience, and quick to pay back; Create is the biggest and slowest investment. Most teams build top-down and burn months waiting for ROI.
| Stage | Budget size | Time to ROI | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Create | High | 90+ days | High (needs strong content + POV) |
| Capture | Moderate | <45 days | High (expensive, competitive) |
| Accelerate/Activate | Low | Tracks sales cycle | Low |
| Revive | Low | <45 days | Low |
| Expand | Low | <60 days | Medium (small audiences) |
Weight by motion: product-led skews budget to Create + Capture; sales-led with a small TAM skews to Create + Accelerate. The stage with the most pipeline isn't automatically the stage that deserves the most budget — fund where pipeline share exceeds budget share and the audience is under-penetrated.
You can't optimize on closed-won when deals close in 6 months. Split every stage's metrics:
The leading metric must demonstrably correlate with the lagging one — a proxy metric worth optimizing is measurable, moveable, not an average, and hard to game. If CPL falls while pipeline doesn't move, the proxy broke; fix the proxy, not the ads.
Derive targets from deal math, not platform benchmarks:
Set the actual target below breakeven by your required margin. Every kill rule and scaling decision keys off this number.
Two hard rules that remove emotion from pausing decisions:
These aren't statistically rigorous — they're repeatable, cheap to apply, and better than deciding by mood. Never pause a producer without a replacement staged (see the swap rules in the Meta decision system).
Smart bidding optimizes toward whatever you call a "conversion." Feed it raw form-fills and it will buy you cheap junk form-fills — CPL improves while pipeline dies. The fix, in order:
Reconcile platform-reported conversions against the CRM monthly. When they disagree, the CRM wins.
The platform can't see lead quality — score it yourself and rank ads by it:
Whoever runs the sales calls scores each lead (max 9) and logs it against the originating ad. After ~20 scored calls, rank ads by average quality score, not CPL or CTR — the ad with the best CPL is regularly the one producing 3/9 leads. Scale the high-score ads; kill variations whose average drops below ~5.
Route scaling tactics by your actual constraint:
| Low effort | High effort | |
|---|---|---|
| High budget | Audiences — bigger audiences, more segments, more frequency | Geography — new countries/regions (localization work) |
| Low budget | Ads — new creative, angles, formats | Objectives & bids — change objective or bid strategy to buy cheaper |
Before scaling spend, score yourself 1–3 on each: blended pipeline dashboard; per-channel dashboard; conversion tracking (1 = none, 2 = pixel only, 3 = offline conversions flowing); web analytics; a documented, agreed attribution process. Under ~6/15, fix visibility before adding budget — you're flying blind and every optimization is a guess. Fix the lowest score first.
Five channel families: paid social, paid search, paid review listings (G2, Capterra, Software Advice — often skipped, high intent), programmatic (display, audio, CTV, native), and sponsorships (newsletters, podcasts, events, creators). Evaluate on four axes: can you actually target your ICP; media cost (CPC/CPM); reach at your targeting; platform policy for your industry.
Before committing to a new channel, run a ~$100 test campaign to learn its real CPC/CPM for your targeting — platform estimates and published benchmarks are consistently wrong for specific ICPs.
Framework lineage: several operating rules in this file are adapted (re-expressed, restructured, and extended) from practitioner playbooks, notably Ivan Falco's ads-skills. Benchmarks and thresholds are practitioner-reported starting points — always recalibrate against your own account's first 30 days.