Derek Aryiku

The leading data and delivery excellence platform.

I walked into my first job interview expecting to write copy. I walked out with a sales job I didn't want.Best career mistake I ever made. Twenty years old, new father, journalism degree in hand. I bounced into that interview with more energy than sense, talking a mile a minute about stories and campaigns.

 Turns out, that infectious energy is exactly what got me the offer. Just not for copywriting. Sales clicked immediately. It became my obsession.Since then, I've been the first sales hire on the ground for multiple companies, building teams and figuring out what actually works when there's no playbook. 


The story's not finished, but I'm enjoying every minute of this ride.Let's connect if you're building something worth talking about.

Sales Director

Parcel Perform is the leading delivery experience platform. We enable modern e-commerce enterprises to create unique end-to-end customer journeys and optimize logistics operations with powerful data integrations, parcel tracking, delivery notifications and logistics performance reports in real-time. 

Our scalable SaaS platform executes more than 100M parcel updates daily and integrates with 900+ carriers. Furthermore, we are pioneering innovative ML / AI use cases in e-commerce logistics including its 'Date of Arrival' prediction engine. Parcel Perform is the provider of choice for top brands like Nespresso, marketplaces like Zalando, idealo and Wayfair as well as carriers across all major verticals globally.

I went quiet for 6 months. 
Here's the honest reason why, and what I'm bringing back with me. 

I owe you an honest conversation before I owe you anything else.

Six months ago I stopped posting.

Not because life got busy. 
Not because I ran out of things to say. 
I stopped because I looked at what I was putting out into the world and realised something uncomfortable:

I was performing expertise instead of sharing it.

I was writing posts that sounded good rather than posts that actually meant something. And at some point that started to feel hollow. So I stopped. 

I went back to the work. 

I closed deals the old-fashioned way: face to face, phone in hand, real conversations with real human beings.

And I paid attention. 
To what was actually working. 
To what the best enterprise salespeople around me were doing differently. 
To where the industry was drifting, and where it was quietly going wrong.

What I noticed was this 👇

The world got louder. 

AI started writing everyone's emails. 
Automation replaced conversations. Inboxes became impossible. And in the middle of all of it, the salespeople who were genuinely thriving were doing the opposite of everyone else.

They were turning up. 
Picking up the phone. Sending handwritten notes. Building actual relationships instead of engineering artificial ones.

That's what I want to talk about. 
No recycled frameworks. No content that exists just to fill a calendar.

Just the honest, specific, sometimes uncomfortable truth about what it actually takes to sell at enterprise level in 2025.

I'm glad to be back. 🤝

Del Aryiku

Enterprise AE at Sociolocal | Daily Sales Content from Someone Still in It

9 things I wish someone had told me before my first enterprise discovery call. 

Save this. You'll thank yourself later.

I've been on hundreds of discovery calls.

l've closed some brilliantly. 
I've lost others so badly I still think about them in the shower.

Here's the unfiltered list of things I had to learn the hard way:

1️⃣ The first five minutes set everything. If you spend them on small talk with no direction, you've lost the frame.

2️⃣ Your agenda is a gift, not a formality. Share it at the start and invite them to add to it.

3️⃣ Never ask 'what keeps you up at night?'
Instead ask: 'What's the problem you've stopped trying to solve because nothing has worked?'

4️⃣ You are not there to pitch. You are there to diagnose. Think: the world's best GP, not a sales rep.

5️⃣ Ask about the past before the future. 'What have you already tried?' tells you everything.

6️⃣ The real decision-maker is almost never in the first call. Ask: 'Who else needs to be involved?'

7️⃣ Silence is a tool, not an accident. After a big question, count to five before speaking.

8️⃣ Always confirm the next step before you leave the call. Specific date. Specific person. Specific action.

9️⃣ Send your recap within two hours. Three sentences. What we discussed. What we agreed. What happens next.


None of this is complicated. Almost nobody does all of it.

That gap is your advantage. 

Which of these do you consistently nail and which one are you guilty of skipping? Be honest. The comment section is a safe space.

Denis Acia

Co-Founder at SaasFluence | B2B Influencer Marketing for SaaS Brands

I’m Denis, Co-Founder of SaasFluence

We’re an influencer marketing agency helping B2B tech brands drive demand and visibility by partnering with LinkedIn influencers.

Currently — with over 200 influencers, we manage influencer marketing programs for B2B sales tech companies like Maildoso, Icypeas, Saleshandy, Fowla, and others.

Why We Started SaasFluence

Before SaasFluence, I ran an outbound agency, Applus Leads. Through that experience, we worked with some incredible B2B tech brands — companies with fantastic products and real value to offer. But despite outbound efforts (cold calls and cold emails), they weren’t getting the traction they deserved.

A big reason?

Their LinkedIn presence and engagement were minimal. Most had only a few hundred page followers and very little visibility in the market.

That lack of recognition made it hard to convert cold leads. Without social proof or brand mentions, prospects were hesitant to engage — especially in the highly competitive sales tech space.
What they really needed was a new approach — one that would:

1. Build credibility
2. Earn trust
3. And drive demand by establishing them as trusted solutions in the market.

That’s where SaasFluence comes in.

Our mission;
To help B2B tech brands leverage influencer marketing to drive demand, increase sales, and grow.

How We Can Help

☑ If you’re a B2B tech founder or business leader with an influencer marketing budget of at least $10K/month,
 ☑ And you don’t have the time to run campaigns or manage influencer partnerships,
We’ll handle it for you.

We’ve launched thousands of LinkedIn-sponsored campaigns, and our clients are seeing exceptional ROI.

If you’re curious, DM me and I’ll share a few of our client case studies so you can learn more about our systems and results.

Or, visit our website to explore further:
 👉 www.saasfluence.co

Lead Generation Partner - Outbound

I am so tired of seeing 20-year-olds giving me life advice on this app.

I scroll my feed and I see people who haven't really done any work yet telling us how we should run our companies.

Why is everyone trying so hard to be a teacher before they have even been a student?

I don't want to hear your philosophy or your 'mindset' tips that you found in a book. I want to see what you did with your own two hands.

Show me the scars from a mistake you made last month. Tell me about the client you lost or the project that blew up in your face because you messed up. 

That is the only way I can believe that what you are saying is something I can use in my life too.

We have enough people on LinkedIn talking about how things should be. We need more people showing how things are.

I would rather follow a person who is failing and being honest about it than a "thought leader" who has never done any work.

Do you want to see more advice or more stories from trenches?

I looked at 100 creators who make $10k a month and they all use this exact 4-part formula.

I get asked a lot about what a creator should post to finally get sponsors. 

Most just post whatever they feel like that day. One day it is a selfie and the next day it is a news article.

And brands, they see this mess and they walk away. They don't know what you are an expert in or why they should trust you with their money.

If you want to make money on this app, try following this content distribution strategy:

→ 50% Guide

This is half of your posts. You show people how to do things. You talk about the work you do every day. 

This builds your authority and proves you do things instead of just talking about it.

→ 30% Human

Tell stories about your mistakes. Share your weird opinions. People buy from people and this builds trust. 

If I don't know who you are, I won't care about what you suggest.

→ 10% Curator

Share the best things you find from other people in your niche. It shows you are part of a community. It makes you a valuable resource for everyone.

→ 10% Partner

These are your sponsored posts. If this number gets too high, people stop trusting you. If it is too low, you won’t make money.

If your "Guide" part is zero, nobody will think you are an expert. If your "Partner" part is 50% everyone will think you are just a walking advertisement.

You have to keep the balance or you will lose the audience you worked so hard to build.

What is your biggest slice right now?

Creator Linkedin Post Distribution Strategy

I found a way to stop my sales team from wasting 4 hours a day clicking on LinkedIn profiles.

When a post goes viral, you get hundreds of comments. Most of them are junk. You get students, bots and "nice post!" comments.

Not a while back my team spent their whole mornings clicking on profiles just to find one or two people who could buy from us.

Now we use Trigify.io to do the dirty work:

→ We tell Trigify to watch a specific creator's post.

→ We set a filter. We only want to know about people with titles like "Founder," "VP of Sales," or "Head of Marketing."

→ Trigify.io ignores the 450 comments from students and bots.

→ It scrapes the 50 comments that match our filter.

→ It sends those 50 names directly to our CRM as "Warm Leads."

Now the sales team does not waste time. They wake up to a list of 50 people who fit our ICP and who are already engaged with the topic.

Do you manually check comments or do you just ignore them?

I see all these "New month, new goals" posts today and I have a question:

What happened to the plan you had in January?

Did you follow through with it? Or did you get bored because the results were not fast enough?

I see this every single month on LinkedIn. People love the feeling of a 'fresh start'. It is like a drug for them. They think a new page on the calendar means they should try a new strategy or a new 'hack'.

But here is the truth you probably do not want to hear.

If you started a new strategy in January, it is probably just now starting to warm up.

In my business, new things take some time to show results. If you are doing something that nobody else in your market is trying, it is going to be slow. That is the price you pay for being first.

But when you quit after three weeks to try a 'new plan' for February, you just reset your progress back to zero. You killed the momentum before it could even help you.

It is hard to stay consistent when results are not showing and nobody is clapping yet. I know that feeling and it sucks.

But February is not for new plans. It is for finishing the work you started thirty days ago.

If your plan was good in January, it is still good today. Stop looking for a fresh start and look ahead at the path you’re already on.

Are you sticking to the old plan or starting a new one today?

PS - even if you are not doing something new, all the more reason to stay consistent because what you are doing has probably worked for other people in the past!

If you are looking for SaaS leads, you know the pain of finding a bunch of "software" companies that are just agencies in disguise.

Most lead tools are very lazy. You filter by "Software" and they give you a list of 5,000 people. But when you look closer, half of them are law firms or marketing agencies that just happen to use a computer.

It makes me want to scream. I used to spend hours every weekend just deleting junk from my CSV files.

Then I found a few buttons in Prospeo.io that changed my life.

I call it the "True SaaS" Filter. Here is how I do it now:

→ I set the industry to Software.

→ I check the "Has Public Pricing" box.

→ I check the "Offers Free Trial" or "Offers Demo" box.

You see what happens?

Agencies do not have a "Free Trial" button on their site. Law firms do not have "Public Pricing" pages.

By clicking those boxes, I instantly delete 90% of the junk. I am left with a list of pure software companies. 

And because the data is refreshed every week, I don't have to worry about old info. I just find the VP of Marketing on LinkedIn, use the Prospeo.io
extension to grab their verified email, and I'm done.

The emails are 98% accurate. I don't even use a separate verifier anymore.

If you are tired of paying for lists that are full of trash, you need to try these filters. It saves me so much time and my bounce rate is almost zero now.

I put a link in the comments so you can try it yourself.

Do you spend more time cleaning your lists or actually sending emails?

taplio

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The Battle

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Denis Acia

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Derek Aryiku's LinkedIn Performance

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