Why Most Outreach Doesn’t Work and What to Do Instead
Prefer to listen rather than read? Listen to the podcast episode covering this same topic here → Quietly Disruptive Podcast
Let me ask you a personal business question. Is your outreach working? And if you are being really honest with yourself, are you even doing any? Marketing has two arms. Content, which broadcasts your presence and your thinking to anyone who finds it, and outreach, which takes that conversation directly to specific people you actually want to connect with. Most founders are doing one without the other and wondering why the results feel slow. The old strategy of posting content consistently and waiting for the right people to find you is no longer enough on its own, because organic reach is not what it was. The founders who are building the businesses they actually want are the ones combining content with outreach, having real conversations with real people and making genuine connections deliberately rather than accidentally.
Outreach Has One of the Worst Reputations in a Founder’s Toolkit
When most people hear the word outreach they picture the spammy LinkedIn message that arrives thirty seconds after you have connected with somebody, the copy and paste email that clearly had five minutes spent on it at best, the relentless follow up sequence that makes you feel like a number in someone’s pipeline, or the pitch in the first message that dives straight into will you buy what I am selling without any context or even a hello. All of that comes under the heading of cold outreach and it does feel horrid. I completely understand why it puts people off because it puts me off too.
But that version of outreach is not the one I use or what this post is about. The quietly disruptive version is something else entirely. It is warm, it is specific and it is genuinely personal. It is about reaching out to a real person because behind every email address and every LinkedIn profile there is a real person, having a genuine reason to connect because something about their work or their situation made you think of them, and treating that first message as the beginning of a relationship rather than the opening move in a transaction. It is being curious, asking questions and wanting to know more. And this approach, most people are genuinely glad to receive, because not many people ask questions that nobody else asks. When somebody does, it lands differently.
A Founder Booked a Call with Me This Week, Seven Months After Our First Conversation
This post was inspired by something that happened this week. A founder booked an Onwards and Upwards experience with me, and she was somebody I had first connected with back in January. We exchanged a few messages on LinkedIn, struck up a conversation, and I said I would be happy to chat more about her business when the time was right. Since then we had exchanged a few comments on posts and I had kept her in the loop of things I was doing, but other than that there was silence. If I had been measuring the success of my outreach by quick responses and immediate action, I would have written that conversation off months ago. But this week the founder came back and booked the call. Seven months later.
What had been happening was that she had been watching and thinking and waiting for the right time. And when that right time arrived, she came back, as she said she would. Outreach needs time to build and brew in exactly the same way that relationships need time to form. I check in with people I have spoken to at least once a month, not with an agenda or a pitch but with a genuine hello, how are you, how is your world. Someone told me the other day that I am known for my follow ups, which was one of the weirdest and most wonderful things I have heard, because I did not realise it was noticed. But the care behind those messages lands in the way I hope it does. It is not a strategy. It is just how I work and how I think relationships are built, slowly, one conversation and one check in at a time.
The Most Common Reason Outreach Fails Is Timing, Not Technique
The most common reason outreach does not work has nothing to do with whether it is hot or cold or warm, nothing to do with the platform or the message or the volume. It is often the timing. Founders pitch too fast, go quiet too soon, or give up entirely before the relationship has had time to form, and then conclude that outreach does not work. When what was not working was patience. The founder who booked this week had been in my world since January. She did not need chasing, she did not need a follow up sequence or a limited time offer. She needed to keep seeing me do my thing consistently until the time was right for her. The outreach made the connection, my content kept saying I am here still doing my thing, and together they created the conditions for her to find her way back when she was ready. Not on my timeline. On hers.
So here is the question I would like to leave you with. Are you doing outreach? And if so, is it working in the way you want it to? Whatever the answer, the next post dives into how to know the difference between patience and avoidance, because they can both feel like waiting and that is what trips most founders up.
About the Author: Becky Benfield Humberstone partners with Quietly Disruptive founders to build businesses that change their corner of the world, on their terms. If you started your business because you believed things could be done differently, and you're ready to make that vision real, she gets it. Based in the UK and working globally via Zoom and in person, she's done this work herself, more than once.
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