Rob Snyder explains why startups resort to mass cold email campaigns when they need revenue, and why those campaigns usually fail. Once product is done, pipeline becomes the bottleneck that kills growth.
At some point reality hits and you're like, okay, I need revenue in order to survive or to raise my next round. How do we get there? How do we start figuring out sales and getting people on board? And at that point, what people tend to do is they're like, all right, cool. How do we figure out sales? Blast out a bunch of cold emails. And so what we do is we go and look at HubSpot's 2017 article of, you know, here's the sales email sequence that works. Load that into some sort of a sequencer, blast it out, and get zero responses except for a couple middle fingers. Or maybe we get a demo or two or something like that. And that's the point at which pipeline is the bottleneck. We have grand theories about our product. We've probably built way too much already. We're like, all right, time to figure out sales. We've nailed the product side, time to figure out sales. Go, and we hear crickets. Or we have like one or two demos in a month and it's like, I have no idea what to do. And so at that point, pipeline is the bottleneck and nothing else matters unless we can figure out pipeline.
