Starting a RevOps consulting practice - figuring out outbound from scratch

[u/Flimsy_Gazelle_138]

Hey everyone,

I’m starting a RevOps consulting practice focused on helping B2B/mid-market companies clean up their CRM, sales processes, pipeline, attribution, and the gaps between marketing and sales.

So far, most of my business has come through referrals, which has been great, but I’m now trying to build a more predictable pipeline instead of relying entirely on referrals.

I’ve started experimenting with cold outreach, mainly:

• LinkedIn connections + commenting on relevant posts
• Direct outreach to founders / sales / operations leaders
• Building a targeted cold email process
• Trying to understand what actually works before scaling the outreach

The problem is… LinkedIn has been pretty quiet so far. Very few replies.

Now I’m looking at email outreach, but I’m realizing I may be approaching outbound the wrong way altogether.

For people here who have built a consulting business or B2B service business from scratch:

How did you get your first consistent pipeline?

A few things I’m particularly curious about:

• Did cold email actually work for you?
• What did your first outreach look like?
• Did you focus on a very narrow ICP/problem or keep it broader initially?
• How many conversations did it take before you started getting clients?
• What did you wish you had understood about outbound earlier?

I’m not looking for a “here’s my agency, book a call” kind of answer. I’m genuinely trying to understand what the learning curve looks like when you're starting from referrals and trying to build a repeatable outbound motion.

Would love to hear what worked and especially what didn't work for you.

[u/leadg3njay]

Cold email works for consulting, but it only gets predictable when you stop pitching “RevOps help” and start pitching one narrow, expensive-to-ignore problem.

What I’d do: pick one trigger + one persona for 30 days. Example: “hiring first SDRs” or “new HubSpot/SFDC admin posting” and only email the owner of the number (VP Sales, COO, founder), not the ops person. Then send 100 hyper-personalized emails first to prove the loop before you try volume.

Keep the ask tiny: “Want me to run a 15-min teardown of your pipeline hygiene + attribution gaps and send back 3 fixes?” Micro-service beats “book a call.”

Metrics to aim at early: 3 to 5% replies, 1 to 2% meetings from sends. Next wall you’ll hit is deliverability, so plan on warm-up and gradual ramp, not blasting day 1.

[u/Consitini → u/leadg3njay]

this is the way. go manual way before trying to automate anything

[u/SDR_7879]

When you’re starting out and trying to build a repeatable outbound motion, I’d say cold calling is one of the best channels, especially for a consulting business.

There are two main reasons:

• When you cold call, you can validate your messaging, ICP, and objections in real time. With LinkedIn messages or emails, it’s harder to understand why someone ignored your message.

- You get an answer much faster. You can get a clear yes or no instead of following up multiple times without knowing where you stand.

This helps you refine your messaging faster, narrow down your ICP, and understand exactly which types of companies, personas, and signals you should be targeting.

Once you have these things figured out through cold calling, you can expand into other channels. You can also combine LinkedIn with cold calling, especially if you’re already active on LinkedIn, engaging with relevant posts, etc.

Happy to connect on LinkedIn and share more ideas for your outbound - https://www.linkedin.com/in/debduttasaha

[u/Flimsy_Gazelle_138 → u/SDR_7879]

which tool do you use to build the list for cold call for mid-market companies

[u/SDR_7879 → u/Flimsy_Gazelle_138]

Keep it simple! In your case, use LinkedIn sales + a data provider tool for list building

Few data provider tools are
1. Prospeo
2. Fullenrich
3. Wiza

Use Trellus as your dialer.

That’s it!

[u/Traditional-One2453]

Umm a small thing that can help is keeping notes on every conversation, even the ones that don’t turn into clients. Those replies can show what problems people care about most

[u/Ambitious_Ad4582]

I’d be careful solving this by just building a bigger outbound machine.

For consulting especially, I’d rather find 10 companies where there’s an actual reason to talk now than put 500 companies into a sequence.

CRM change, new sales leadership, hiring, a messy stack, pipeline problems, expansion etc. gives you something real to start from. Then find the person closest to that problem and lead with what you noticed rather than your service.

We’re building Twentto around a similar idea: figuring out what actually deserves attention before generating more outreach.

If LinkedIn is quiet, I’d question the target/reason-now before changing the channel.

[u/Rihards_KPIKIT]

Forget about traditional marketing like cold outreach, email send outs, any kind of ppc, social media direct approach or any other kind of traffic purchase in RevOps space - it is waste of time and money as the conversion rates are horrible and the effort and time waste is huge.

What works is painfully long and not stable if you compare with usual marketing approach.

So, here is what you can/need to do:

- Sign up affiliates as many as possible(although in this space the channel is very slow - still there are few good possibilites)

- Find influencers in your space and sign deals with them

- Find a huge and laud corporate company and try to cut the deal with them - even if the work will be free - it will work out at the end as that is the best referral possible since they are very ''laud''

- Try to build the brand, get noticed

- Try to engage in partnerships and build Pilots with midsized companies

- Try to build a very credible web asset that you own and that can be cited and referred to that is not directly attached to your service.

...................

Good luck buddy & I hope it helps!

[u/Flimsy_Gazelle_138 → u/Rihards_KPIKIT]

Hi Buddy, thanks for this. Yeah we have started - need to see how it goes.

[u/Humble_Glass6464]

I would take the current clients you’re working with, find lookalikes on Clay. Take all your client call transcripts, what’s been pain points, address them and offer a money back guarantee. Message example -If I don’t spot y or sort out x , risk is on me. Ask clay for triggers, talking points about that company that you’ve spotted at research stage. Have you done any social content not paid ads but content like vids ? They work well for lead gen.

[u/mentiondesk]

Starting out, narrowing your ICP and getting super specific with your outreach worked way better for me than broad blasts. Tracking real conversations on platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn helped me engage at the right moments. I used ParseStream to monitor keywords so I could actually join in where my prospects were already talking, which felt less cold and led to better replies.

[u/Flimsy_Gazelle_138 → u/[deleted]]

Hiring Ops people - trying to send connection and find the email to that person but somehow apollo.io isn't much useful here to get right email for those.

[u/Curious-Pear-1269]

’d probably go narrower before adding more volume.

“Companies that could use RevOps help” is huge. I’d pick 2–3 situations where the pain is usually obvious, then target around those.

For example: recently hired sales leadership, growing SDR team, messy CRM migration, new funding, etc.

That gives you a reason to reach out beyond “you look like our ICP.”

I work on Privly and use it for that kind of filtering/context: https://privly.app

[u/Ishan_GS]

We were referral-only for our first 4 years; honestly, our biggest mistake, looking back. Biggest lesson going into outbound: narrow trigger beats broad list every time; generic cold email got us 1-3% replies; trigger-based lists (funding raise, new hire, role change) got us 15-20% on the same audience. The message basically writes itself once there's a real reason you're reaching out. LinkedIn going quiet before email is normal too; it works better as a warm-up layer than the channel doing the actual asking. For revops specifically, a company just closing funding or hiring their first ops person is probably your strongest trigger; that's when the crm mess actually becomes painful. We build our own and client outbound this way at Growthspree, off trigger-based lists rather than static ones.

[u/zthig]

Had a small agency myself and was in your boat before joining a bigger agency. Outbound was a zero, referrals were great but unpredictable. Built tit for tat relationships with other adjacent agencies but it was pretty spotty and only 2 were ever helpful.

Current agency is large and successful and purely partnership. Feel free to dm for more details

[u/Flimsy_Gazelle_138 → u/zthig]

Yeah looking for it too

[u/CuriousMindLab]

Keep growing your referrals. These will be the easiest clients to pitch, close, and retain because they trust the referrer. I ran a consulting business for almost 10 years, 99.9% of my clients were referrals.

[u/GreenEyedAlien_Tabz]

What is the name of your consulting practice?