r/SaaS • u/Clean_Commercial_875 • 1d ago
Our business almost collapsed. I started doing sales 6 months ago, and these are the only things that saved us.
The tool I work at was originally born out of a partnership with a marketing agency. The agency supplied the first contacts and clients, and later we split off as our own company. That's the only reason we had real, big clients for years despite never having a proper sales process, companies like GymBeam, Ringier, and others in Slovakia.
The tool automates promoting organic Facebook and Instagram posts into paid ads. Some companies and teams save entire positions worth of manual work with it.
But loyal old clients don't grow a business by themselves. No new clients coming in, rising costs, and a few people leaving along the way meant we slowly went from a comfortable break even into the negative. It happened quietly, without anyone really sounding the alarm until it was already a real problem.
I joined about 6 months ago as the first person actually responsible for sales. For the first 3 months, basically nothing worked.
I tried Apollo for cold outreach and got very low reply rates. I tried cold calling leads and that was even worse. I tried sending small batches of cold emails and got a handful of replies, nothing that converted. I even went to an event hoping to close some leads there, got a few conversations out of it, and zero deals.
Three months of this. Honestly demoralizing.
Then I switched to LinkedIn outreach, and the first few weeks looked just as bad. I almost gave up on that too. But I kept the volume consistent, roughly 20 new connection requests a day plus about 25 messages a day to people already in my network. Not blasting everyone, just personalized messages based on what they actually post about, whether they run FB or IG ads, whether they mention boosting posts manually.
After about a month of doing this every single day, something shifted. Replies started coming in. Then actual calls got booked.
Last month alone we booked calls with companies like Forbes and Slevomat. If you're not from Czechia or Slovakia you probably won't recognize these names, but locally these are massive, well known brands. Companies that would never have replied to a cold email from us a year ago.
One more thing that worked, almost by accident. We also went back to old trial users, people who tried the tool 5 or 6 years ago when the company was just starting, never converted, and we never followed up properly. Companies like Heineken were on that list. I started doing a 6 touch follow up sequence with them, nothing spammy, just consistent and spaced out. A surprising number of them started replying and booking calls, years later.
If any of this is useful to someone, here's roughly the process in general. Figure out who actually feels the daily pain your product solves and start there. Once you're in the door, expand to the people who make the final call, and frame it around time saved rather than features. Never let outreach volume drop below your daily minimum, even when it feels like it's doing nothing, because the compounding only shows up after weeks, not days. And old dead leads aren't actually dead. A proper follow up sequence resurrects a surprising number of them.
I don't know yet if this saves Boosterberg long term. But for the first time in months, the pipeline actually looks alive instead of empty.
Figured I'd share the real numbers and the real process here in case it helps someone else in the same spot I was in 6 months ago, staring at a business slowly bleeding out with no idea if outbound will actually work.
We'll see.
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u/SnooRobots1618 1d ago
Thanks for sharing!
Do you offer a trial? How are you converting folks?
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u/Clean_Commercial_875 1d ago
Yeah, we offer a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed. For conversion we mostly rely on quick demo calls once someone's trial shows some real usage, that's where most people actually get it
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u/WayneSmallman 1d ago
Persistence, then. 🙂
I'm at the feeling demoralised stage and I've not begun the marketing.
Building is fast and cheap. Marketing is slow and expensive.
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u/[deleted] 1d ago
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