There are thousands of small time lead gen companies that go nowhere.
There are probably hundreads in the $200K to $3M range with solid case studies, solid operations, sales team etc. (this is where we are atm)
And there are a few absolutely huge ones like CIENCE, Martal Group, Belkins, SalesHive.
These businesses make $50M+ in revenue.
What’s the secret to growing that big? I don’t get it, because my biz partner and I have been working really hard to grow and we want to go super big. It’s a tough industry to acquire clients in and retention isn’t great.
The same holds true for the giants, the only difference is that they have millions they can pour into content to attract the attention of companies like General Electric. They get a lot more inbound traffic.
But they weren’t always like this. So what helped them get there? What’s the missing key? Before you can pour millions into content you need to produce those millions in profits.
Clearly it’s not just sending more cold email, building case studies and so on. Something else is required, but I can’t put my finger on what. Can anyone help?
How do some cold outbound companies grow huge?
byu/JohnWaltz13 inEntrepreneur
Posted by JohnWaltz13
2 Comments
Hey, I think the real inflection point is usually one of two things: either they got hyper-specialized in a specific vertical where they became *the* name (not just “we do SaaS” but like “we own outbound for fintech”), which made referrals and retention way easier, or they brought in someone who’d already scaled an agency past $20M to completely rebuild their sales org – because founder-led sales becomes the bottleneck. The big uncomfortable truth though? A lot of agencies stall at $3M because the retention/margin issues in the core service can’t be outrun by more sales. Sometimes the answer isn’t a secret growth hack, it’s evolving what you actually sell or moving way upmarket to enterprise contracts that stick for years instead of churning every 6 months.
The big ones didn’t win by being better at cold outreach, they won by productizing trust with narrow ICPs, repeatable outcomes, enterprise safe processes and then scaling distribution with brand after that engine worked. Most agencies stall because they sell effort, the giants sell a derisked system buyers feel safe betting real budgets on.