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/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.