He Proved It Worked, Then Quit

I was on a coaching call with a software developer who'd been running his agency for a few years. Custom software for veterinary clinics. High-ticket work - his projects start around $20,000 Australian dollars. He had a list of 50 manually researched leads sitting on his desk, complete with phone numbers and the names of decision makers. He'd even paid someone to compile it.

And then he told me something that stopped the whole conversation in its tracks.

"I got a client from cold calling one year ago," he said. "But it's hard. It takes my confidence."

He hadn't picked up the phone in twelve months because doing it felt bad.

He had no evidence it wasn't working.

He stopped doing a thing that worked because doing it felt bad.

Avoiding a proven channel is one of the most expensive mistakes in sales.

The Most Dangerous Avoidance Is the Kind You Can Justify

When something hasn't worked, you have a reason not to do it. "That channel doesn't work for my niche." "Cold email doesn't work in my industry." Fine. You tried, you failed, you moved on.

But when something has worked, and you still won't do it? That's a different animal. Because now you can't claim ignorance. You know it works. You know you just don't want to do it.

What happens next is fascinating. The brain goes looking for other reasons. Suddenly the infrastructure isn't right. The market is too small. Somehow the offer still needs more refinement before the timing is ever right. You need to watch one more training video before you're ready.

This guy had a full deck of those cards ready to play. I want to walk through each one - because they all cost money.

Card One: The Infrastructure Problem

Before our call, he'd run a cold email campaign. He pulled 150 contacts from Apollo, built three email sequences, and sent them out to see what would happen. The results were bad. Lots of bounces, probably hitting spam filters, nothing to show for it.

His diagnosis was that he hadn't done enough research on his audience and hadn't built a strong enough offer. The infrastructure was broken from the start. When you pull leads from Apollo without running them through a verification tool first, you're looking at 50% bounce rates or worse. And when you're sending from a standard Google or Outlook inbox that hasn't been properly warmed up, you're going to spam regardless of how good the email is.

Separate your lead sourcing from your sending platform, verify every address before it goes into a sequence, and set up custom SMTP so your deliverability doesn't get destroyed by the major email providers. For scraping lead data from Apollo and similar databases, tools like ScraperCity's Apollo scraper let you pull the data you need without paying Apollo's subscription cost - then you run it through an email finder and verification tool before anything goes out the door. That's the stack. That's how you stop burning your sender reputation on bad addresses.

For sending, tools like Smartlead paired with custom SMTP domains are what we use in the mastermind. The way email sending works now is completely different than it was even a couple of years ago. You can't drop into Outlook and start sending campaigns. Every inbox needs to be warmed, every domain needs to be aged, and without proper infrastructure you're invisible before you even start. The goal before you even try to evaluate campaign performance is to get 5,000 emails out the door properly. You cannot learn anything from 150 emails, half of which bounced.

All of it needs to be fixed. And I'm not dismissing any of it.

He had 50 manually researched leads with phone numbers and decision maker names sitting right there. No infrastructure required. Cold calling doesn't need domains, SMTP, or warmup periods. And he hadn't touched those leads once.

Card Two: The Market Size Problem

Then came the second card. He told me there were about 2,600 veterinary clinics in Australia, and he was only targeting Australia. "Is that not too small a market? Should I even bother?"

The market size question is cover for wanting to stop and try something else.

I ran through it on the call and it ended the conversation fast.

2,600 clinics. Let's say you reach all of them. Let's say 10% respond - that's a high number, but let's use it. Now you have 260 conversations. Let's say 10% of those buy, which is also generous. That's 26 clients. At $20,000 AUD per client, that's $520,000 in Australian dollars from one country alone.

I asked him straight: "If you signed five veterinary clinics in the next three months, would you be happy?"

"I'd be super happy," he said. "That's like one month to build the initial version of the project, and then we're billing monthly on top of that."

There's your answer. Stop talking about market size. Go get five clients.

The market size concern only applies after you've saturated something. When you haven't even booked your first ten meetings, worrying about running out of leads is like worrying about where you're going to park your fleet of private jets before you've made your first dollar. And if Australia becomes too small later on, expand to the UK, then the US. Veterinary clinics everywhere run on the same outdated software. You've already built the solution.

Market size is a long-term planning question. Use it to decide where to go after you've won your current market. If you want a framework for thinking through your lead strategy before you hit capacity in a niche, the Best Lead Strategy Guide covers exactly that.

Card Three: The Perpetual Market Switch

He mentioned almost in passing that a few months earlier he'd been targeting medicinal cannabis clinics. Decided that market was too small. Left it. Moved to veterinary. And now, mid-call, he was already questioning whether to stay in veterinary or broaden out to healthcare software generally.

This is the third card. It's also the most expensive one.

He'd do partial work in a niche, notice something imperfect, declare it broken, and switch. Repeat. He never accumulated data, built relationships, or became the known name in any vertical.

Agencies spend three years doing this. It's an elaborate way to stay busy without making progress. Every switch feels like a fresh start and a sensible decision. Every switch resets the clock.

I told him: for the next six months, I only want to hear about veterinary clinics - not healthcare generally or adjacent industries. Veterinary clinics. Run the full experiment - cold email, cold calling, LinkedIn, industry events, walk-ins - and see what the market gives you back before you make any decisions about leaving it. You cannot evaluate a market based on a 150-email campaign where half the emails bounced and the other half hit spam filters. You can't learn anything from that.

What He Had (And Wasn't Using)

It's easy to get lost in the problems and miss the assets. Let me lay out where this guy was sitting.

He had 13-plus years of software engineering experience, a working agency he'd built from scratch, and a specific niche he'd chosen deliberately. Fifty manually researched leads with phone numbers and decision maker names. Cold calling had already produced one paying client a year ago. A $20,000 AUD minimum deal size. And a genuine competitive advantage: the existing veterinary clinic software forces clinics to restructure how they operate to fit the software, instead of the software fitting the clinic. That's a killer value proposition. That's the pitch: "your current system is making you work around it, and I can fix that."

He had an offer, leads, and proof that his outreach channel works.

He was missing fifty phone calls.

The Confidence Problem Is a Numbers Problem

"It takes my confidence."

I'm not going to tell him to just feel better about it. That's useless advice, and anyone who's made cold calls knows it. You pick up the phone, someone answers, you have about ten seconds to be interesting before they hang up. That's not comfortable. It wasn't comfortable for me the first thousand times I did it either.

But the reframe I gave him is this: at $20,000 per client, one week of cold calls that produces a single signed deal is $20,000. A bad week that produces nothing still gives you data about your script and your market that you cannot get any other way. Two weeks of grinding calls and you'll either have a client, or you'll have a script that you know works - which is the foundation for eventually hiring someone else to make the calls for you.

This is the principle I come back to with every agency owner: prove the channel yourself before you hire for it.

He was planning to hire a salesperson. I told him not yet. If you hire someone to run cold calls before you've made cold calls work yourself, you have no idea whether the failure is the person, the script, the offer, or the market. You'll spend months waiting for results, blame the hire, and start over. That movie plays out the same way every time, and it's always expensive.

But if you grind it yourself for two weeks - make the calls, get the rejections, figure out what moves people on the phone - then you have a script that converts because you tested it yourself. Now when you hire someone, you hand them that script, you know what "working" looks like, and you can hold them to it. The ROI on a few weeks of discomfort is enormous. If you want a starting point for what to say when someone picks up, the top 5 cold outreach scripts are a good place to start.

The Event He's Overlooking

Veterinary trade shows.

Think about who goes to a veterinary trade show. Veterinarians, practice managers, and clinic owners.

Now think about who else goes. Pharmaceutical reps, equipment suppliers, pet food companies, and training organizations.

You know who doesn't go? Software companies that build custom clinic management systems.

That's the opening. You show up as the only person at the event with a software product built specifically for these people. Bring a clear one-sentence pitch, shake hands for two days straight, and tell every person you meet: "I built software that works the way you run your clinic." In a room full of vendors selling drugs and equipment, that's the most memorable conversation anyone will have all weekend.

He's currently based outside of Australia, so he can't do walk-ins regularly. But a trip to Australia specifically to attend a veterinary industry event? Do it. And once the model is proven, the scaling path is obvious: hire someone locally in Australia to do the walk-ins and attend the events on an ongoing basis, then replicate it in the UK and the US with people on the ground there.

The LinkedIn Problem Is the Same Problem

We pulled up his LinkedIn during the call. His headline didn't mention veterinary clinics. The content wasn't veterinary-focused. If you landed on his profile with no prior knowledge, you'd have no idea what he did or who he did it for.

The channel exists. He was kind of using it. But he hadn't made the one essential move that would make it work: making everything speak directly to veterinary clinic owners.

The fix isn't complicated. Rewrite the headline to say exactly what he does and for whom. Add a call-to-action button linking to a landing page - even a simple squeeze page where clinic owners can drop their email in exchange for something useful. The content needs to cover problems vet clinic owners care about. If a few hundred people in your target niche start seeing your name regularly, outreach becomes a lot less cold. You're calling someone who already knows what you do.

The other point I made on the call: this isn't something you set up and come back to. The LinkedIn call we do in the mastermind - I rework my own LinkedIn funnel almost every week. On the call right before his, I'd spent the whole session redoing my LinkedIn flow for the fourth time that month. The reason I keep coming back to it is because it keeps working better. You can't optimize something you're not running.

What the Numbers Say

When you stop a channel that's working, you don't just lose the deals it would have produced. You lose the referral chain that comes from those deals. One cold call that turns into a $20,000 AUD client might produce a referral to another clinic. That clinic sends you two more. Now you have case studies, testimonials, and proof you can put in front of every new prospect you talk to. "I built software for one veterinary clinic" versus "I've built systems for twelve clinics across three countries" - and the only way to get from one to twelve is to keep making the calls.

He had a one-year head start and didn't use it.

What I Told Him to Do Next

We ended the call with clear actions. Skip the theory and analysis of whether the market was right - just do the work.

Fix the cold email infrastructure first. Domains need to be bought, warmed, and set up with custom SMTP. Get leads scraped and verified before a single email goes out the door.

The goal before evaluating anything is 5,000 emails sent properly. Then post the email scripts in the group so we can give feedback - because there's no point optimizing copy until the deliverability is there.

Start making cold calls this week. He already had 50 researched leads. That's enough. One hour of calls. See what the script does in the real world, then adjust and repeat until something works.

Rewrite the LinkedIn profile to speak directly to veterinary clinic owners. One clear headline, one call-to-action, and a landing page for people to book a conversation or get something useful in exchange for their contact information.

Find the nearest veterinary trade show and get it on the calendar.

And commit to veterinary clinics for the next six months. Don't pivot or switch to healthcare broadly. Run the full experiment before making any decisions about the market.

You get the data by doing the work - then adjust based on what it tells you. You can't get clients from cold email if you're not sending cold emails. You can't get clients from cold calls if you're not making cold calls.

Ask Yourself This

If you're running outbound - or trying to - ask yourself one question.

Is there a channel you already know works, that you've already gotten a paying client from, that you're not currently using?

A channel you've proven, one that paid you once, that you walked away from because it was hard or uncomfortable or inconvenient.

Because if the answer is yes, strategy, niche, and infrastructure aren't your problem.

You have fifty phone calls you haven't made yet.

If you want to build the full outbound system - cold email, cold calls, LinkedIn all working together - the 7-Figure Agency Blueprint lays out how to stack these channels so each one compounds the others. But the blueprint doesn't help until you're running the channels.

Start with what you already know works. You already have the proof.