lopez.brooke•4d agoMost Upvoted

Showerthought: That advice from a $10k course was dead wrong for my B2B launch

I paid $3k for a sales course last year that swore up and down cold email is dead for SaaS. The guy, a former VP at a big CRM company, said to focus purely on LinkedIn DMs. So I did that for 6 months and got maybe 5 meetings out of 500 DMs. Out of frustration, I sent 200 cold emails last Tuesday using a simple template I found for free. Got 12 replies and 3 demos booked. Now I'm wondering if that course advice was just wrong for my specific niche or if I executed it poorly. Has anyone else had a guru's specific recommendation totally backfire when you applied it to your own B2B situation?

2 comments

2 Comments

iris_rivera444d ago

I feel you hard on this. Spent $2,500 on a course from some LinkedIn influencer who swore up and down that cold email was dead for enterprise sales. Followed his playbook for 4 months, sent hundreds of DMs, got nothing but ghosted. Then one bored afternoon I sent 50 cold emails to a list I scraped myself, got 6 responses and 2 meetings. That course advice was just wrong for my niche too. Gurus sell one-size-fits-all solutions and they don't know your specific market. Your experience sounds exactly like mine, sometimes you just gotta test stuff yourself instead of trusting the hype.

aaron6774d ago

That's the thing nobody talks about - those gurus are selling their past success, not your future one. The VP at the big CRM was probably right for his company's product and market five years ago, but that doesn't mean his advice fits a bootstrapped B2B launch in 2024. Cold email works or doesn't work depending on your list quality, your offer, and how well you know the person you're emailing. Sounds like you found a template that actually hits the pain points your specific buyers care about, which is way more valuable than any generic strategy. Maybe the real lesson is that the guy selling the course didn't even test his own advice in a different market before hyping it up.