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

If my team replies to my Slack messages in 30 seconds I get a little bit worried about our work.

In most agencies everybody feels a pressure to stay active so the boss thinks they are working hard. 

You feel like if you do not answer a DM immediately you might look like you are slacking off. 

But I think that culture is a mistake.

If you are answering me in 30 seconds it means you were not in the zone. You were just waiting to be interrupted. 

A brain cannot do its best work if it is getting interrupted every few minutes.

Tell your team to turn off notifications for a few hours and disappear. Go do hard stuff that requires deep thinking. 

I would much rather wait two hours for a brilliant strategy than get a "On it!" in three seconds.

Remember that you hired adults because you trust them to do the job. You do not need to watch their status bubble to see if they are sitting at their desk.

If your team is answering too fast they might be losing the chance to do their best work.

Fast reply or good work - what matters more to you?

Don't follow up with your prospects today. Trust me on this.

It is the first week of January. Everyone just got back to their desks. I know for a fact their inboxes are a total war zone right now. They have 300 unread emails. Maybe 500. 

They are stressed and they are just trying to survive the morning.

If you send them an email right now saying "just bubbling this up," you are not being a good salesperson. You are just annoyance number 301. 

I like to give people what I call Grace Week. Just give them some room to breathe. Let them delete all the junk and get back to normal life.

I am waiting until next Tuesday. When I reach out, I will tell them I waited because I knew their inbox was probably a mess. 

It shows you have some empathy. It shows you care about their sanity more than your quota.

People appreciate it when you don't act like a robot chasing a number.

Are you sending emails today or are you waiting?

I spent 3 months sending emails to SaaS founders who didn’t have a budget until I found this.

I used to spend a lot of my outbound efforts guessing. I would find a SaaS company through Sales Nav, find the CEO, and send them a pitch for our influencer services. 

Sometimes they replied. Most of the time they didn't. 

Then Matthew from Prospeo.io showed me what they built for their V2 update. It was crazy. 

I finally stopped searching for "companies" and started searching for "signals."

Here is how I use it now for Saasfluence:

→ I set a filter to only show me SaaS companies hiring for marketing roles.
→ I check the "Technographics" to see if they already use tools like HubSpot.
→ I also check "Intent Signals" to see companies that are researching Linkedin marketing.

This changes the whole game for me.

If a company is hiring a marketing leader (or other related roles), I know three things for sure:

1. They have a massive problem they need to solve.
2. They have the budget to pay for a solution.
3. My timing is perfect because they are already thinking about growth.

The data is refreshed every 7 days and 98% of the emails are verified. I don't even scrub the list anymore!

I’m moving almost all our internal searches over to Prospeo.io now because it saves me so much time on cleaning CSV files.

Swipe through the carousel to see how I set this up and the exact email template I use.

I’ll put a link in the comments if you want to try Prospeo.io yourself.

Signal based outreach

Is work-life balance just a lie we tell people so they don’t quit?

I have been looking at my own life lately and I see a pattern that makes me a bit angry. 

Every single time Saasfluence is winning and we are managing MORE clients, my health automatically goes into low priority mode.

I skip the gym and I eat whatever is near me because my brain is always on the next meeting.

Then I get tired of feeling slow and I focus on my fitness. I spend more effort on my health and I eat clean. 

And what happens? My to-do list piles up. I am not pushing the business as hard because my energy is somewhere else.

I'm starting to think you can't have every area of your life in the green at the same moment.

I see these influencers on Linkedin say "My work is my life.” If you spend 14 hours every day building a company, doesn't something else need to die?

Maybe it is your relationship with your kids or your physical health. You only have so much energy in the tank.

Does anybody here have it all figured out? Are you winning at health, money, family, and work at the same time? 

Or are we all just choosing which part of our life we are going to neglect this week?

(Please no AI comments below. I want to hear from humans.)

I used to spend 4 hours a day on LinkedIn trying to grow. Now I use these 4 tools to do it in 45 minutes:

Trigify.io → I use this to find social signals. I don't message random people anymore because that is a waste of time. 

I find people who are leaving comments on my favorite niche thought leaders. These people are already interested in what I'm interested in. Higher chances of converting them.

Extrovert → I used to spend forever thinking of what to say on 20 different posts every day. This tool helps me stay active in the comments. 

It keeps my name visible where my customers are hanging out and I don't lose my mind doing it.

MagicPost → When my brain feels like a dry sponge and I have no ideas, I open this. I don't let it write for me. That is a mistake. 

I use it to kickstart my drafts. I can get a post done in 30 minutes instead of an hour of staring at a blank screen.

Aimfox → This is the heavy lifter for the DMs. Once the other three tools have warmed up my profile and people recognize my name, I use Aimfox. 

It handles outreach at a scale I could never do by hand.

The point is not to use bots to manage my Linkedin. These tools just let me be more human faster. 

I spend less time on boring stuff and more time talking to people who can grow the business.

How much time do you spend on LinkedIn every day?

I have a confession: I am not passionate about B2B influencer marketing.

Do not get me wrong. I love my team and our clients say we do great work…

But I do not wake up every morning dreaming about creator briefs or looking at invoices for software.

I think gurus tell founders a big lie. They say you must be obsessed with your product. 

You must live and breathe your niche every second and I think that’s totally unnecessary.

What I am obsessed with is getting our clients a win. I like when a founder tells me their sales calls are finally converting because of the work we did.

I love the game of building a company. I love finding great people and making a plan and seeing it succeed. The "thing" we sell is just the car we drive to get to the goal.

It is okay to not be in love with the tool. It’s okay to just be in love with the results you get for people.

We shame founders who are not obsessed with their specific niche and it just makes people feel like they are doing it wrong. It’s fine to just love the win.

Are you in love with the product or are you in love with the game?

I found a way to stop the "Day 1" onboarding chaos with one single link.

Do you send an email asking for your client's logo? Then another email with a Google Form? Then another one asking them to book a kickoff call?

The client is already overwhelmed and you haven't even started the work yet.

We stopped doing that. We use a tool called Flowla and we create one "Onboarding Room" for everything.

Here is exactly what we put inside:

→ A 30-second welcome video:

Record it right there in the room. Say "Welcome! Everything you need to get started is right here."

→ A checklist:

They see a list of what they need to do and what we are doing. They know exactly what is happening next so you never have to send "just checking in" emails.

→ An intake form:

We embed a form in the page. No PDFs to download. They fill in their KPIs and their target audience and we get it instantly.

→ A calendar link:

Our Cal(dot)com link is sitting at the bottom. They book the kickoff call as the final step.

→ An upload section:

We ask them to drag and drop everything into the room. It keeps our inbox clean.

We send one link. 

The client feels like they hired a professional team instead of a messy freelancer. It sets the tone for the whole relationship.

Do you have a smooth onboarding process or is it a mess of emails?

fix your onboarding

Why does a lead from a creator close 3x faster than a cold lead?

It’s because of "Distance to Trust."

When you get a cold lead the distance is very long.

Path A:

It starts with a Stranger. Then you send a cold email. They feel scepticism. 

You have to do 3 demo calls to prove you can solve their problem. You earn trust and you close.

That path takes a lot of time.

The distance shrinks when you try to convert a lead from a trusted creator’s post.

Path B:

It starts with a stranger. But then they see a creator's post. The creator hands their trust over to you. 

The prospect comes to you already believing in the product. You do 1 discovery call and you close.

Influence is a shortcut.

Do you want the long path or the shortcut?

I think most of us on LinkedIn are aiming at the wrong target and here’s why…

We look at viral posts and think "I need to post about how to get 10k followers."

Or we post generic advice about "how to be a better leader."

We are fighting for attention at the very top of the pyramid.

It is crowded there and honestly, there is not much money in it.

The "money" is hidden at the bottom of the pyramid.

It is where people are looking for boring solutions to boring business problems.

A post about "How to get 100 likes" might get you a dopamine hit. But a post about "How to fix a messy CRM so your sales team stops quitting" might get you 10 likes.

But 3 of those likes are from CEOs who have that exact problem right now. And they have a budget to fix it.

If you want to be a famous creator, stay at the top. If you want to build a business, go to the bottom and solve a boring problem.

Do you post for likes or for leads?

If you are a SaaS founder, here is how you make one creator post last for months...

I see this all the time. A brand pays a lot of money for a creator to post. The post goes live, it gets some likes for a day, and then it is gone.

This makes the math very hard for your business because you paid a lot for something that only lasted 24 hours.

You need to turn that one post into a content engine. Try using this playbook:

Day 1: 

You do the obvious stuff. The creator answers every comment. You share it to your company page. You make sure everyone sees it.

Day 7: 

Take the main lesson from that post and put it in your email to your users. Tell them a story about why this creator uses your tool. It feels more human than a standard marketing email.

Day 14: 

You take the video or the image from the creator. You run it as a paid ad.

It looks like a friendly recommendation instead of a boring commercial. Usually your cost per click goes down.

Day 30: 

When someone books a demo on your site, show them that creator's video on the thank you page. Tell them "While you wait for our call, see how this person uses us." 

Day 40:

Write a simple blog post on your site. Title it "How [Creator Name] solved this big problem using our tool." You are just telling their story again.

You paid for the post once. But now you are getting value for more time, and you can repeat this playbook for all creator posts.

Are you reusing your creator content?

Creator marketing tactics

Before I started my influencer marketing agency, I did cold emails for SaaS clients.

And I found one framework that worked for pretty much any tool I was selling.

Here is the exact structure I used to book hundreds of meetings:

1. Salutation

"Hey [Name]" is fine. 

2. Relevant Personalization

This is where everyone messes up. Do not just say "I saw you went to X college." That is weird. You need to connect the observation to the problem you solve.

Example: "I noticed you run a pay-per-meeting model at your agency. That means you cannot afford to waste credits on bad data, right?"

See? I am proving I understand their business model.

3. The Offer

Connect it right back to the personalization. Tell them why you are emailing them now.

Example: "Asking because we just launched a new verification feature at [Tool Name]. It helps you find verified emails without burning your credits on the wrong people."

4. Social Proof

Give them a reason to trust you. A number or a name works best.

Example: "We are already helping 50 other lead gen agencies keep their bounce rates under 1%."

5. CTA

Do not ask for marriage. Just ask if the topic is relevant.

Example: "Would this be relevant to you right now?"

That is it. 

What is your go-to cold email framework?

I haven't used this tool yet, but I'm obsessed with the idea behind it.

When one of our creators puts out a post, we see the likes and comments. But we have to spend hours reading through hundreds of comments just to see if people like the price or if they like feature X.

I saw Trigify.io and it looks like it can fix this mess. 

One thing I want to do is sentiment analysis. I want the tool to tell me if everyone is complaining about a specific part of the dashboard. 

Instead of me guessing, I can get a clear report on what the market hates. That is pure gold for a product team.

The other part is even more crazy. They say they can connect social signals to your pipeline. 

If I can show a client that a single comment from a prospect led to a closed deal in their CRM... that is holy grail.

Right now, the link between a LinkedIn comment and a dollar is very blurry. I think this might be the tool that finally makes it clear. 

Do you track the sentiment of your comments or count the likes?

Sending a cold connection request to a stranger is just weird.

If a random person stops you on a dark street you get nervous. Most LinkedIn requests feel like that. 

You get a notification from a face you never saw before and you probably hit delete because you have zero clue who they are.

We use a method I call the Shadow Strategy. We use a tool called Extrovert for it and it has changed everything for our team.

→ I pick 50 people I want to work with.
→ I add their names into Extrovert.
→ Every time they post anything the tool sends me a notification.
→ I leave a helpful comment within the first hour of them posting.

I do this about three times in two weeks. I'm not trying to sell them anything yet. I'm just sharing my thoughts on their ideas.

When I finally send the connection request they already know who I am. 

They see my name and they think 'hey this guy has been leaving some good comments'. It is not a cold request anymore.

Our acceptance rate is about 60 percent (for prospects).

You spend 15 minutes a day doing this and your outreach stops being an intrusion.

Do you message strangers or do you let them get to know you first?

Kellen Casebeer

Helping companies find Message-Market-Fit | Founder @ The Deal Lab | Smartlead Certified Partner | Clay Certified Expert

Obsessed with speed to value.

The #1 revenue struggle that most companies face is their inability to consistently & repeatably generate pipeline that converts into stable revenue.

I’ve built a systematic way of dividing a market, identifying where your buyers are within it, and rapidly testing messaging against those segments in the pursuit of Message-Market-Fit.

For less than the cost of an SDR I can run cold outbound campaigns (phone and/or email) on your behalf and establish what works vs what doesn't.

10x the volume, 10x the quality, and 10x the rate of learning vs doing it yourself or hiring a jr sales rep to try.

I do this through my company, The Deal Lab.

We are a proud Smartlead Certified Partner, which means the #1 tool for people building businesses like ours has recognized us for our excellence in the space.

If you’re considering building an outbound program, or have one that isn’t performing like you wish it would - give me 30 minutes to change your perspective & I guarantee you’ll want to find ways we can keep the wins rolling together… people often remark that they're stunned what I'll do for free and confused why I don't paywall my helpfulness.

When I'm not running my business, I also hangout in the free communities that I have built for digital sellers & side hustlers with the goal of being everything I wanted ((and needed)) but didn't have access to earlier in my career.

I'm also really into submission grappling ((BJJ)), holistic health, lifting weights, and taking Lindy walks in the California sunshine with my beautiful family.

If you're a sales rep, sales leader or Founder with questions or looking for support on something - drop me a DM 🤠 I love chopping it up and solving problems with my fellow sellers ❤️

Founder

Message-Market-Fit is when you know exactly what to say in your prospects’ own language to book consistent outbound meetings with them.

We’ll help you find it for less than the cost of an SDR.

Then we’ll either keep running our systems and booking calls for you, or we can build & train your in-house team on exactly how we do it.

Chosen as 1 of 25 Smartlead Certified Partners.

The Clay creator & partnerships team has always been epic at “surprise and delight”

On the left is this sweet poster they sent of my 2025 usage of the product

the right is the first card Peter Kang ever sent me

I keep that card in my office because it was a special moment for me

I think sometimes, the digital business world can be focused on multiplying outputs per input - and it can be a miss

Hand written cards, 1 of 1 images… little things can stand out a lot when there’s such thoughtfulness behind them

Thank you team, it’s no surprise to see people who put so much thought into things win

Helping companies find Message-Market-Fit | Founder @ The Deal Lab

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The Battle

Denis Acia

Kellen Casebeer

Followers

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The Battle

Denis Acia

Kellen Casebeer

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

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);}Denis Acia's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreKellen Casebeer's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreDenis Acia's LinkedIn Performance