Most Channels Were Never Built for Outreach
The Network Series · Part 8 of 10
LinkedIn and email do the heavy lifting. Everything else gets misused — asked to prospect when that was never its job. Here’s what each is really good at.
The two workhorses were the last post. Now the rest of the mix — the channels people either over-invest in or torch entirely, usually because they’re judging them on a job they were never built to do.
Phone — the trigger and the callback
The phone’s job is no longer volume; the arithmetic on cold dialing settled that. Its real job now is the call you make when a signal justifies it — an expansion, a new hire, an outage — and the callback you return the moment someone in your network raises a hand. It still answers in phone-culture industries: telecom operations, industrial, energy, finance. It’s weakest in tech, where the desk phone is gone, and in clinical healthcare, where it’s gatekept. And every wireless dial carries real regulatory exposure, so the trigger has to be genuine.
SMS — logistics, after a yes
Text is not a cold channel in B2B, full stop. Its job is logistics for people who’ve already said yes to hearing from you that way: the meeting confirmation, the event reminder, the quick post-demo follow-up. (The famous “98% open rate” is a device-level statistic with no reliable primary source — don’t build a strategy on it.) As an opener it’s an intrusion; as logistics it’s genuinely useful.
Facebook, Instagram, X — presence, where your buyer lives
These are presence channels, not B2B outreach channels, and it’s worth being honest about which is which:
- Facebook is community and groups — valuable if your buyer actually lives there: agriculture and equipment, local and franchise operators, small-organization communities.
- Instagram is brand, culture, and the buyer’s own storefront — it earns its place for retail, e-commerce, and media brands as their channel, not as a way to reach a B2B decision-maker.
- X is listening and pockets of presence — developers, fintech, journalists, government comms, energy policy — but engagement fell roughly 48% in a year, and reliable B2B outreach benchmarks for it don’t exist, which tells you something.
The rule for all three: show up where your buyer’s world genuinely is, and don’t mistake presence for prospecting.
Stop forcing a channel to do a job it was never built for. Let each one do the single thing it’s actually good at.
YouTube — the proof that outlasts the campaign
YouTube is the one on this list I’d argue is underused in B2B. Its job is proof — the demo, the explanation, the evidence a buyer finds on their own when they go looking. Roughly 70% of B2B buyers watch video during the buying journey, and 72% say a vendor’s video influenced their shortlist. Unlike a campaign that stops the day you stop paying, a good explainer keeps working — still there, still making your case, the night a buyer is quietly building their list. It earns a place almost everywhere, and it matters most where long-form technical proof decides the deal.
Next: the single highest-leverage habit inside all of this — cutting what I call the imagination tax.
Go deeper
The full argument — every channel regraded on one question, plus the playbook for a small team — is in the white paper.
Read: Digital Marketing Is Dead →
If any of this lands and you want to talk about what it means for your team — 15 minutes at cal.com/shawn-ennis. No prep needed.
