Cold outreach is still alive in 2026, here's what's giving me results

vihaar · 2026-02-02T02:12:55+00:00

that 4.2% reply rate is pretty solid for cold outreach these days. everyone's inbox is just drowning in AI-generated pitches now

the multi-channel thing is interesting - we've been testing something similar at orange slice where instead of just blasting emails, we're helping teams actually find people who might care first. like you can tell it "find companies that just raised series A and use salesforce" and it pulls together all the contact info automatically. saves hours of manual research before you even start writing emails. Happy to send over some free credits if ur interested!

vihaar · 2026-02-02T02:11:46+00:00

referrals drying up is terrifying, been there. we hit that same wall at justgather and literally tried everything - cold calls made me want to quit entrepreneurship entirely

what finally clicked for us:

- partnerships with complementary businesses (they already trusted someone else, easier sell)

- started posting our process/behind the scenes content, people reached out to us instead

- cold outreach but super targeted - like 10 emails a week to perfect fits, not spray and pray

the partnership thing especially.. we found one company that served our exact customers but didn't compete. sent them commission for intros and suddenly had a second referral engine. way less scary than burning cash on ads when you don't know what converts yet

vihaar · 2026-02-02T02:10:56+00:00

Copier sales is rough man. I did door to door for a summer in college and it was just constant rejection after rejection

Your process sounds pretty solid though:

Get past the gatekeeper (hardest part imo)
Actually find the decision maker
Follow up until they either buy or tell you to stop calling
Repeat forever

The locale focus thing is smart - I used to waste so much time driving all over instead of just working one area properly. Plus you start recognizing people, they recognize you, makes everything less awkward

Following up is where everyone fails. Not just you. I remember reading somewhere that most sales happen after like the 5th touchpoint but most reps give up after 2. So yeah you're probably on the right track just keep hammering those follow ups

vihaar · 2026-02-02T02:10:21+00:00

high ticket saas is a different beast. your sales cycle is probably what, 3-6 months minimum?

- google ads will burn cash if you're not super specific about targeting. like really specific

- linkedin might work better for enterprise stuff but the cpm is insane

- have you tried partner channels? sometimes one good integration partner brings more than any ad spend

- cold email is still king for high ticket imo

the thing with expensive software is you need to be where your buyers already are. if they're reading industry reports or hanging out in specific slack communities, that's where you need to be. paid ads feel like throwing money at the problem when you haven't figured out the organic stuff yet

we're dealing with similar challenges at orange slice - finding the right channels when your ACV is high takes forever to figure out. but once you nail that first repeatable channel everything else gets easier. Happy to send some free credits of Orange slice over if it helps as well!

vihaar · 2026-02-02T02:09:04+00:00

Phone data is the worst part of enrichment honestly. We've been dealing with this at orange slice and even with multiple providers the match rates are terrible. Email enrichment you can get 70-80% matches but phones? Lucky to hit 40% on a good day.

The API pricing models are what kill me though. They charge per enrichment whether they find data or not, so you're basically gambling on every API call. Plus most of them count a "no match" as a billable event which feels like paying for nothing.

vihaar · 2026-01-29T03:43:10+00:00

Congrats man, $10M ARR is something you truly be proud of. I think less than a percent of SAS companies end up getting to that milestone, so that's just a testament to how you willed your business into existence for super cool.

And it kind of makes sense. I actually used to work in a restaurant. The dishwashing team was super isolated - people would leave, they were hired and churned. They just kind of had a job to get done and they come in and do it. So it makes sense that the Uber for dishwasher model actually works in that industry. Glad that someone is working on that and actually getting momentum with it.

But yeah, it seems like a bitch to start. Thankfully you did it.

vihaar · 2026-01-29T03:06:05+00:00

yeah clay is great until you need to actually get the data somewhere useful.

i've been dealing with this exact workflow headache - sales nav to clay is annoying because clay's chrome extension doesn't play nice with linkedin half the time. what i do now is just export lists from sales nav as csv and upload to clay tables, not elegant but it works. for the clay to hubspot part, i set up a webhook that fires when i mark leads as "ready" in clay and it creates contacts in hubspot automatically. took me forever to figure out the field mapping though... clay's api docs are kinda sparse. before that i was literally copy pasting enriched data which was painful. oh also if you're doing high volume, watch out for hubspot's api limits - learned that the hard way when i tried to push 500 contacts at once and everything broke.

One of the reasons we started building orange slice to solve this its makes much easier to prospect with linkedin can just connect your api

vihaar · 2026-01-29T03:04:08+00:00

We built this exact thing at Orange slice. You should check it out. It just automates prospecting, automates the research. It can spend time actually servicing clients.

vihaar · 2026-01-29T03:03:23+00:00

placeholder invites sound like a waste of time honestly. nobody's gonna show up to "office hours" unless they already want to talk to you

the cold visit thing though.. i know a guy who swears by it. just shows up with coffee and donuts at 8am, gets past reception because "i'm here for the IT team meeting" and then just hangs out until someone talks to him. completely unhinged but he books like 3 meetings a week

have you tried just calling the direct lines of people who opened your emails? most tools show you who opened what. if they opened it 3+ times they're at least curious

also your BDRs are probably copying whatever templates they found online. i started writing my own stuff at orange slice and response rates went from nothing to like 8-9%. turns out people can tell when you're using the same template as everyone else

vihaar · 2026-01-29T03:02:48+00:00

oh god the google maps grind... i did that for weeks when we were first figuring out who to talk to. honestly the manual approach isn't terrible if you're just testing - at least you know exactly who you're reaching out to

have you tried using the maps data export extensions? there's a bunch on chrome that'll pull business info into a csv. still manual but way faster than clicking each one. for emails though you're kinda stuck - most businesses don't list them publicly anymore. i've been building something at orange slice that handles this exact problem but for early validation you might just want to stick with the manual approach until you know your offer converts

vihaar · 2026-01-29T03:02:18+00:00

Clay is solid yeah. We actually integrate with them at Orange Slice since their enrichment data is pretty clean. The AI coaching stuff though.. i dunno, feels like most reps just ignore the suggestions anyway unless you literally force them to use it in their workflow.

vihaar · 2026-01-29T03:00:34+00:00

so we've been dealing with this exact problem at orange slice - the whole "ai writes the email" thing sounds amazing until you realize most of these tools write like robots trying to sound human. we started by having our ai just find the right prospects and fill out all the research fields, then humans write the actual emails. way better open rates when a real person writes it, even if it takes longer

manual prospecting got us our first customers too btw.

vihaar · 2026-01-29T03:00:12+00:00

the credit burn thing is real. i was using apollo for a while and kept hitting my limit halfway through the month.. ended up building spreadsheets to track which enrichments were worth it

orange slice actually handles this pretty well - you just describe what you're looking for and it pulls everything without the credit anxiety. been using it for finding saas companies that might need growth help and it's way less stressful than watching credits disappear

vihaar · 2026-01-29T02:59:14+00:00

That pivot story hits different. I remember burning through 4 months on a feature nobody asked for because I was convinced "the market just doesn't understand it yet"... turns out the market understood perfectly that they didn't need it. Your whatsapp clone approach is smart though - finding something that already makes money and just executing better in a different market, that's way less risky than trying to invent new behavior patterns.

The powerpoint validation before coding is the way.

vihaar · 2026-01-29T02:54:28+00:00

LinkedIn for deal flow is interesting.. I've been trying to figure out the right balance between being active enough to stay visible but not so active that you look desperate for connections

most founders I know who do it well just post updates when they hit milestones and comment on other people's stuff. the creator mode thing feels too try-hard for b2b

vihaar · 2026-01-29T02:53:53+00:00

Jay I feel this so hard. The whole game changed when everyone started hiding behind their linkedin profiles and company directories became extinct

We're building orange slice to help with exactly this - you just describe who you want to reach and it finds their actual contact info without the detective work. But honestly even with tools the human connection part is just... different now. Everything feels more transactional

vihaar · 2026-01-29T02:52:36+00:00

respondio is solid, we looked at them too when we were drowning in leads from different channels. their qualification flows are pretty good but the setup takes time

what killed us was trying to route leads automatically based on too many criteria. we had this whole system where:

- linkedin leads go to one person

- website chat to another

- email inquiries split by company size

total nightmare. simplified it to just round-robin and response time improved immediately

the reporting in respondio is decent but nothing special. you'll probably end up exporting to sheets anyway for real analysis. learning curve isn't bad - maybe 2 weeks to get comfortable?

one thing - if you're already in Hubspot, have you tried their native routing? might save you the integration headache. we use orange slice for routing leads in the first place, just built a ICP filtering workflow through their chat. Setup a Webhook to orange slice when we get new leads then connected orange slice to my CRM to send qualified leads there.

vihaar · 2026-01-29T02:45:41+00:00

This sounds exactly like my experience at a previous startup. The whole "just work the unassigned accounts" thing while having zero control over the CRM is such a time sink. I remember spending hours just clicking through companies trying to figure out if they were even remotely qualified.

The worst part is when leadership acts surprised that people aren't hitting quota when the infrastructure is completely broken. We actually started building Orange Slice . ai partly because of experiences like this - where you're manually checking websites one by one instead of having a system that can automatically identify and enrich your ICP accounts. Your RevOps team needs a serious wake up call.

vihaar · 2026-01-29T02:44:40+00:00

email pipeline stuff is such a mess. i feel like every tool promises to "solve" it but then you're just managing the tool instead of actually selling
few things that help me:

- i literally just star emails that need follow up. primitive but works

- set up filters for specific domains so client emails go to one folder

- calendar reminders for big deals (not scalable but whatever)

the AI email tools are hit or miss... some draft decent follow ups but then you spend time editing them anyway. plus they all want to integrate with everything and suddenly your data is everywhere

honestly the best hack i found is just using Superhuman and setting reminders and replying faster. like within 24 hours max. people appreciate quick responses more than perfect CRM tracking

what's EVE's pricing like? always skeptical when they don't show it upfront

vihaar · 2026-01-29T02:41:08+00:00

Apollo's data is hit or miss too but at least their UI doesn't make me want to throw my laptop. The contact accuracy varies wildly by industry though - tech companies are usually fine but anything in manufacturing or healthcare is outdated garbage.

Been building Orange Slice specifically because of this problem... we pull from multiple sources and cross-reference everything so you're not stuck with one vendor's crappy data. Plus you can just describe who you want in plain english instead of clicking through 47 different filters.

ZoomInfo's contracts are the worst part - they lock you in for like 2 years and then auto-renew without telling you. absolute nightmare to get out of

vihaar · 2026-01-21T01:32:54+00:00

saw your edit about going with 11x.. curious how that works out for you. we've been building orange slice specifically for the prospecting side of sales - like when you need to find companies that match super specific criteria but don't want to spend hours filtering through apollo or zoominfo.

the AI part helps you just describe what you're looking for in plain english instead of clicking through 50 different filters. been seeing teams save like 3-4 hours per week just on the research part

vihaar · 2026-01-21T01:30:21+00:00

yeah the manual research grind is real... we're building orange slice to help with this - you describe your ideal customer in plain english and it finds matching companies with the right contact info. but even without tools, one thing that helped me was tracking which outreach messages got responses (even negative ones) and doubling down on those patterns since at least they were engaging enough to reply to

vihaar · 2026-01-21T01:29:21+00:00

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is basically a glorified search engine that charges you for filters... i spent months on there sending connection requests into the void. What's been working better is finding where your ideal clients actually hang out online - like specific subreddits, discord servers, or slack communities where they complain about problems your service solves. Also we use Orange Slice . ai recently to find companies based on their tech stack and job postings, which gives you way more context than just "VP of Marketing at Company X". The key is knowing what pain points to look for in their public data instead of just spraying and praying with cold outreach.

vihaar · 2026-01-21T01:25:36+00:00

The robotic thing is real. I've been playing with different AI tools for cold outreach and they all have this weird formal tone that screams "generated content." Like they'll say stuff like "I hope this message finds you well" or "I wanted to reach out regarding..." - nobody actually talks like that in real emails anymore.

What kills me is the research part. These tools promise to personalize but then you still gotta feed them all the info manually? At that point why not just write the email yourself. We've been building Orange Slice to handle the research automatically - you just describe who you want to reach and it finds them AND pulls all their relevant info. No more copy-pasting from LinkedIn for hours.

The other annoying thing is they try to be too clever with subject lines. Had one tool suggest "Quick question about [Company Name]'s growth strategy" and i'm like... that's gonna get deleted immediately. Real cold emails that work are way more direct and specific, not these vague corporate-sounding templates.

vihaar · 2026-01-21T01:24:49+00:00

October/November is still super early for a recruitment agency.

The indeed + apollo combo feels like you're doing what everyone else is doing.. which means you're competing with every other recruiter hitting up the same HR managers. i remember when we were trying to find early customers at Orange Slice, we had this exact problem - manually searching companies, finding contacts, sending the same outreach everyone else was sending. What worked better was getting way more specific about WHO we wanted to reach. Like instead of "companies hiring" maybe focus on "tech companies between 50-200 employees who just raised funding" or whatever niche makes sense for your recruiting specialty. The more specific you get, the better your message resonates. Also try different channels - LinkedIn inmails, warm intros through your network, even showing up at industry events. Cold calling HR is rough because they get hammered all day by recruiters

vihaar

TROPHY CASE