Don't hand off a channel you haven't worked yourself

When you launch a new lead gen channel, don't route the leads straight to your SDR team. Work them yourself first. You get faster, more honest feedback. Sitting in the queue yourself — seeing who's actually booking, what they say, whether they're real buyers — teaches you more in a week than a month of reporting. You'll catch targeting issues that would otherwise get buried in a handoff. You earn credibility with sales. Your SDR team will be skeptical of a new channel. That's rational — they've probably been burned before by marketing experiments that wasted their time. Show up with a few closed deals and say "I worked these myself." We launched LinkedIn Conversation Ads earlier this year. Rather than routing responses to the SDR team from day one, I put my own calendar link in the ad. The leads started coming in. And the problems became obvious immediately. Targeting issues I might have missed in a dashboard: Some respondents were early-stage founders who weren't enterprise buyers at all — they were better suited for our Startup Grants program. They didn't need a sales call. They needed a link to the application page. Routing them to an SDR would have been a waste of everyone's time. I had set broad targeting for Engineering titles to try and reach technical buyers, but hadn't added exclusions. I was getting Front End Developers and Network Engineers — people with no plausible reason to buy what we sell. A few exclusions fixed this quickly, but I never would have prioritized it without sitting in the data myself. In trying to reach EdTech platforms, I had inadvertently swept in primary school administrators. Same category, completely different buyer. I also kept seeing candidates with the #OpenToWork frame on their profile photo — people who had left their listed role but hadn't updated their profile. They were matching on their old company and title. There's no clean way to exclude this in LinkedIn Ads today (it's a feature request I have outstanding with the LinkedIn Ads team). The thornier issue: Once I cleaned up the targeting, I hit a bigger problem. I was running bottom-of-funnel Conversation Ads to cold audiences. LinkedIn had actually told me this was a mistake before I launched. I chose to ignore them. People were booking meetings with no clear idea of what we do or why it was relevant to them. Cold audiences haven't seen enough of you to know whether a sales conversation makes sense. We pivoted. Instead of cold targeting, we moved Conversation Ads to retargeting — people who had engaged with upper-funnel content, attended webinars, or visited our enterprise pages. Once the channel was dialed in, I worked the leads myself long enough to close a few enterprise contracts. That proofpoint made the handoff to the SDR team straightforward. You shouldn't ask someone else to figure out a channel you haven't figured out yourself. Do it yourself for faster feedback loops and to protect your sales team.