Cold calling, ads, SEO... none of it worked

June 01, 2025•4 min read

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“Do you think cold calling will work?”

“What about paid ads?”

“Is LinkedIn prospecting worth it?”

I get questions like these all the time from MSPs and business owners trying to make smart decisions about where to invest their time and money.

But they’re asking the wrong question.

Because if you're in a B2B market and someone—anyone—in your industry is landing clients through a particular strategy…

Then yes, it works.

The Real Question

Will you make it work?

That’s where the game is won or lost.

The truth is that most business owners dip their toes into new strategies with zero real commitment. They try cold email for a few weeks. Throw up a landing page and run some ads. Maybe they hire an SDR for a couple months.

When they don't get instant results?

They declare the strategy a failure.

But most of the time, it wasn’t the channel that failed. It was the approach.

Mark’s Story

I was talking to Mark, who runs a $5M MSP, at an event I was speaking at recently.

He told me flat-out: “SDRs just don’t work for my business.”

He’d tried hiring a few over the years, and every time it was a flop. He was convinced his market was different, that SDRs just wouldn’t work for MSPs like his.

So, we dug into it.

I asked what he looked for when hiring SDRs. He shrugged. “Just someone entry-level and inexpensive to make some calls.”

I asked what they were pitching. An assessment? A free training? A piece of content?

Nope. It was just a 30-minute meeting with Mark. No clear offer. No hook. No perceived value.

I asked if he was backing them up with any marketing.

“Not really,” he said. “But nobody opens emails or reads the mailers anyway.”

I asked what kind of list his SDRs were calling on. He told me it was a ZoomInfo data dump—uncleaned, unverified.

And I asked what he was hearing when he listened to calls and coached his SDR.

“We didn’t really do much coaching. I wouldn’t know what to change in the script if I did.”

You can probably guess where this went.

As we kept talking, I could see the light bulb start to go on for Mark. It wasn’t that SDRs didn’t work.

It’s that his approach didn’t.

And here’s the kicker…

I asked, “So what did you try instead?”

Mark said they’d done a little content. Dabbled in SEO. Threw some money at PPC.

I asked how those were going.

None of them worked either.

Strategy Isn’t the Problem

Mark had cycled through multiple strategies and written each one off as ineffective.

But the problem wasn’t any of the strategies themselves.

It was how he engaged with them.

He never fully committed to any single one. He didn’t stick around long enough to diagnose the issues, fix the parts that weren’t working, and build something that could scale.

And that is exactly what I see with countless MSPs and service businesses.

They jump from one strategy to another, hoping the next one will be the silver bullet.

But winning strategies aren’t found.

They’re built.

Big Wins Come from Iteration

When you break down the ROI of a new sales strategy, you can see 10x returns from a great SDR, cold email campaign, or paid ads.

But you don’t get a 10x ROI from a plug-and-play solution.

You get it from structure, consistency, and iteration. From doing the work most people avoid.

For example, business owners who win with outbound aren’t running perfect playbooks out of the gate. They just commit to making it work.

They build systems around:

A compelling offer
A clean, relevant list
A trained SDR
A consistent, repeatable playbook
Coaching, feedback, and iteration
And—probably most importantly—the expectation that it’s going to take time to figure out

They don’t bounce when it gets bumpy. They solve one small problem at a time and trust that if they keep doing that, success becomes inevitable.

That mindset—the expectation that success takes time and iteration—is what separates the winners from everyone else.

Make This Actionable

If you’re choosing your next sales or marketing move, here’s how to approach it:

Pick a proven channel.
Cold calling, email, paid ads, direct mail, LinkedIn—it all works if someone in your industry is doing it well.
Commit to the long game.
Choose one strategy and commit to it for at least six months. During that time, your only job is to uncover and solve the individual problems keeping it from working—nothing else.
Break it down.
Every underperforming strategy is just a set of fixable constraints: Offer. List. Messaging. Execution. Process. Treat them as a to-do list, not a signal to quit.
Get support if needed.
Consultants, frameworks, and service providers exist for a reason. You don’t have to go it alone—and you shouldn’t try to.