I am building my freelance consulting side hustle for the past few months, and cold outreach has become this endless loop that's starting to wear me down. I spend hours crafting personalized emails and LinkedIn messages to potential clients in my niche marketing for small tech startups. I research their company, mention something specific from their recent blog post or funding round and keep it short, asking for a quick chat. But out of maybe 50 messages sent over the last two weeks, I got only two replies, and neither led anywhere. One was a polite no, the other just ghosted after the initial response. It feels like I'm throwing effort into nowhere and now i think am wasting time or there's something fundamentally wrong with how I m approaching it.
I know the generic advice is to personalize more or follow up, but I hve been doing that and it still flops. Is cold outreach just inherently inefficient these days or am I missing some key tactic? Would love to hear your takes or any resources that actually helped shift things for you.
how do you keep going when outreach barely gets responses
byu/Key_Brilliant_9100 inEntrepreneur
Posted by Key_Brilliant_9100
5 Comments
Cold outreach can be incredibly draining, especially when you are putting in so much effort and seeing minimal returns
What are you doing to show up as an expert in your field? If people google you after seeing your name from your cold outreach, what do they see?
Pick up the phone and call them or go to office if possible. Network.
Pick 10-15 business’s you want to get into and get owners details. Email, follow up call, follow them on Instagram, tell them your story, don’t pretend to be established. Your sales point is you need them and can’t mess up the relationship.
Even if these 10-15 don’t buy find out why from them and change strategy in line.
Other is ask for advice before business but be genuine. Go and learn what people are looking for often they will offer to partner with you.
well then that’s your ratio. 50messages and 2 replies. So 1 in 25replies.
Just multiply that effort. Copy those 2 messages that you’ve done, analyze what went well, keep that and remove what’s bad and just do it again.
Cold outreach and 50emails in 2 weeks is not much.
I know that you’re worn out, but that’s the sales part and the name of the game.
You need to do much more outreach, and then over time it gets easier.
Think about it this way. If they don’t answer, what do you have to lose? Just keep sending.
Another thing is, they may not see your email as something useful or worth looking at. Then you’ve definitely done something wrong in your PMF process.
Do over 500emails and you may get 20 answers.
Improve your emails and PMF process and you get more answers. It’s pretty straight forward once you have numbers to work with.
Nailing cold outreach can feel brutal these days even when you personalize and follow up. Lately I’ve started spending more time where my ideal clients already hang out instead of only relying on emails or LinkedIn. For example, I track relevant Reddit threads to spot real time leads and conversations. ParseStream helped me filter those threads so I focus on quality opportunities rather than just blasting messages into the void.