Small But Mighty Agency: Win clients and build better networks for marketing and consulting agencies Cold Outreach Is Hurting Your Growth (Even If You’re Not Sending It)
Sep 3, 2025
Dan Englander, founder of Sales Schema and author of Relationship Sales at Scale, discusses how agency owners can shift from cold outreach to trust-based growth strategies. He argues that cold tactics widen the trust gap and emphasizes the importance of referral systems over accidental connections. Dan highlights the need for genuine commonalities to build relevance and the role of specialization in establishing credibility. He also stresses that agency founders must lead relationship-building efforts for sustainable success.
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Trust Is The New Scarce Resource
- Trust has become the scarce resource in sales, especially for complex services where buyers can't see immediate results.
- Cold outreach lengthens cycles because buyers default to skepticism and need trust before engagement.
Personalize Around Genuine Commonalities
- Do focus personalization on real commonalities that create relevance, not surface-level facts anyone can regurgitate.
- Do prioritize referrals and relationships where trust already exists over endless cold personalization experiments.
Turn Referrals Into A Repeatable System
- Do systematize referrals: pre-identify connectors and specific target accounts before asking for intros.
- Do make requests low-effort by asking about named people and offering scripts for the connector to use.
