Cold Outreach Is Dying...This Is What I Do Instead In 2024

In the last 3 years, I’ve made over 500k in sales from doing cold outreach alone.

But in 2024, I completely stopped ALL my cold outreach and replaced it with something more effective.

You should as well.

Before we get started, shout out and big thank you for Matt who built this incredible community for like-minded entrepreneurs like us to network!

For context, from 2019 until now, I’ve scaled 2 separate businesses to around 50k per month (one in the agency space, the other being a group coaching/infoproduct).

For years, both of those businesses grew mostly due to cold outreach on email, Linkedin, and Facebook.

But in 2022, everything fell apart.

Our cold outreach went from being incredibly effective to being a total timesuck that barely generated conversion.

We saw a drop in bookings, more objections, and higher no-show rates across the board.

This was despite sending out a high volume of outreach, being equipped with very good systems and processes, and having a talented Appointment Setter team…

It was extra baffling because just a year prior, the exact same copy and workflow was working extremely well for us.

So what changed?

Well, the market did.

Back in 2020, linkedin automation was new, and organic outreach was still in its early days.

And since there was barely any competition, prospects were intrigued and we grew fast as a result.

But heading into late 2022, the average person was getting pitched EVERY DAY from random strangers in the DM’s.

The audience became skeptical due to the noise, spam, and BS they saw daily.

And as a result, buying behaviour changed, and conversion rates dropped.

People still wanted to spend on products, BUT NOW, they only wanted to talk to those they already trusted and had faith in.

That’s when I pivoted my entire strategy.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐲 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟒

Long story short, the “post cold-outreach” era of marketing is based on becoming a “trusted expert”.

In 2023, we focused on two tactics to achieve this.

1. Youtube

2. Community

Let’s breakdown each of these with more depth:

Y͟o͟u͟t͟u͟b͟e

First, we focused on building a really strong content library on Youtube.

We cranked out 100+ videos in 2023 which shared all of our secret sauce for free.

Even if that free content was something other people normally charged for, we just gave it away.

In the first month, we barely had any traction (most videos under 100 views), but a month in, we saw some meetings start to flow in.

We closed our first deal off of Youtube around 2 months into our channel.

It’s now been 14 months since we began our channel, and we’ve brought in 27 clients and just shy of $150k USD sourced via leads from Youtube.

Something that we noticed was the quality of the leads that came in via Youtube were higher than the typical call we’d book via cold outreach.

This is because these Youtube leads had already seen 30 mins or more of our content. They were pre-sold and already trusted us.

In contrast, a meeting that came from cold outreach was more likely to no-show, had more objections, and had a lower close rate.

The really cool thing is that we got all these results despite our Youtube channel having only 3k subscribers.

It just shows you don’t need a huge audience to win.

As long as your audience trusts you, and you have a good high-ticket offer to sell, it should be easy to earn a decent income.

The other thing we noticed with Youtube is it helped us with the rest of our marketing channels and funnel as well.

For example, during a sales conversation, sometimes the prospect wouldn’t be willing to move forward quite yet even after a call.

But by having a YT channel, I could send over additional content to help nurture them and overcome objections, and that increased our close rate.

Another example was that we were linking our Linkedin and Instagram profile to our Youtube channel.

Before Youtube, we had thousands of people that would see our social profiles, who never converted because the content on our Linkedin/Instagram was too shallow.

But now, those same people were navigating to our Youtube, and because the content there was so much more in-depth, we were now starting to convert way more of that organic social traffic to actually booking a call.

So in summary, Youtube improved our top-of-funnel lead gen, accelerated our sales cycle, and increased our close rate.

The coolest thing about Youtube is that it also compounds over time.

This is because good content stays relevant and continues to generate results for years.

I have videos I made over a year ago that STILL generate thousands of additional views every month, generating leads.

Think about it like digital real estate that constantly earns you passive rental income month after month.

And this makes Youtube a much more sustainable and scalable strategy in the long term.

I have a video guide on how to set up Youtube for business if you're interested.

C͟o͟m͟m͟u͟n͟i͟t͟y

The second pillar of our strategy was community.

The one downside of Youtube is that you can’t really communicate with your prospects directly due to a lack of DM’ing and back and forth dialogue (the comment section is simply not enough).

So initially, we focused on driving traffic from Youtube to our Facebook group and Linkedin network so we could have ongoing dialogue.

Our Facebook group grew to over 5k members, and my Linkedin network grew to past 10k members.

Everyday, we had new people joining and DM’ing us because they loved our YT content.

And then once they were in our social communities, we could nurture them with more content, and engage with them in conversation to accelerate them into a sales call.

Both FB and Linkedin have a ton of distractions though, which is why I want to invest more time into Skool.

𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬

As a business owner, lead gen is the lifeblood of your business.

You want to invest in the channels that will sustain over time, and actually generate you high quality leads that are qualified to by.

My argument is that focusing on long-form video content and community is the best way to do that in today’s market.

Hopefully this was helpful, and I’d encourage you all to also share your biggest learnings in the comments below or in your separate posts.

If you’re still just learning and only have questions, ask them in the comments and I can try to answer - that still provides value to the community since others can learn from the dialogue.

That’s the entire point of Skool, so we can all network and exchange value with each other.

Once again, thank you to Matt for building a great and supportive community.

Good luck guys!

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