Solved: Is Cold Outreach Still Effective for Appointment Setting?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some of my thoughts on your question about cold outreach. It’s a debate that comes up all the time, and you're right, opinions are all over the place. The short answer is that yes, cold outreach can still work, but the way most people do it is completely broken. It’s often a slow, manual, and inefficient way to fill a calendar.

Honestly, the real question isn't whether cold outreach is dead, but whether there's a more scalable, predictable, and effective way to get in front of the right people. From my experience running paid advertising campaigns for dozens of B2B companies, the answer is a definite yes. But it requires a fundamental shift in thinking away from just 'booking appointments' and towards understanding and solving a very specific problem for a very specific person.

I'll walk you through my perspective on this. It’s based on what we've seen work time and time again for our clients, moving them from frustratingly low response rates to a consistent flow of qualified leads.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

This is probably the biggest mistake I see, not just in cold outreach but in almost all B2B markering. Companies define their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) with sterile, useless demographics. You've probably seen it: "We sell to CMOs in the tech industry with 50-200 employees."

What does that actually tell you? Nothing. It tells you nothing about their challenges, their fears, their ambitions, or what keeps them up at night. It leads to generic, forgettable messages like "Hi [Name], I saw you're the CMO at [Company] and I'd love to show you our amazing platform that will revolutionise your marketing." It’s no wonder these get ignored. You're just another bit of noise in a crowded inbox.

To stop burning cash and time, you have to redefine your customer not by who they are, but by the problem they have. You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare. Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. A career-threatening problem state.

I remember one scenario. Let's say you sell a project management tool for software teams. Your old ICP might be "Head of Engineering at a mid-sized SaaS company." Useless. Your new ICP is a Head of Engineering who is terrified that her two best developers are about to quit because they are completely burnt out from a chaotic, disorganised workflow. She knows that replacing them will take six months and cost the company over £100k in recruitment fees and lost productivity, not to mention derailing the entire product roadmap for the next two quarters. That's a nightmare. It's specific, it's urgent, and it has a massive financial and career-related cost attached to it.

I remember working with a client in the legal tech SaaS space. We advised them to stop targeting 'law firms'. Their nightmare wasn't 'needing document management'. It was 'a junior partner missing a critical filing deadline because of a document versioning error, exposing the entire firm to a multi-million-pound malpractice suit'. When you understand the problem at that level, you can speak to it directly. Suddenly, you're not a vendor; you're a solution to a massive, painful problem.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, everything else falls into place. You can find out where these people live online. What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute, like 'Acquired' or 'This Week in Startups'? What industry newsletters do they actually read, like 'Stratechery'? What SaaS tools are already on their company credit card, like HubSpot or Salesforce? Are they lurking in the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Who do they follow on LinkedIn or Twitter, people like Jason Lemkin or SaaStr?

This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire lead generation strategy. If you haven't done this work, you have no business sending a single cold email or spending a single pound on ads. Because without it, you're just guessing. And guessing is expensive.

We'll need to look at Crafting a Message They Can't Ignore

Once you deeply understand the nightmare, you can craft a message that resonates. Most B2B advertising is a bland list of features and benefits. It’s boring and unpersuasive. You need to talk about the pain.

There are a couple of powerful copywriting frameworks we use for our clients that you can adapt. They work because they are based on human psychology, not corporate jargon.

For a high-touch service business (like an agency or consultancy), use Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS).

You don't sell 'fractional CFO services'. You sell a good night's sleep to a stressed-out founder.

-> Problem: State the nightmare you identified. "Are your cash flow projections just a wild guess every month?"

-> Agitate: Pour salt on the wound. Make them feel the pain. "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis, watching competitors confidently raise their next funding round while you're stuck in uncertainty?"

-> Solve: Present your service as the clear, simple solution. "Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build the dashboards that turn financial chaos into predictable growth."

See the difference? One is a service description. The other is a lifeline.

For a B2B SaaS product, use the Before-After-Bridge.

You don't sell a 'FinOps platform'. You sell the feeling of control and relief.

-> Before: Paint a picture of their current hell. "Your AWS bill just landed. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. It's another fire to put out, another tense meeting with the CFO."

-> After: Show them the promised land. "Imagine opening your cloud bill and actually smiling. You see exactly where every single dollar is going. Waste is automatically flagged and eliminated before it becomes a problem."

-> Bridge: Position your product as the vehicle to get them from Before to After. "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today. No credit card, no sales call."

This kind of messaging is what you use in your ads, on your landing pages, and even in your outreach if you insist on doing it. It cuts through the noise because it’s not about you; it’s about them and their biggest problem.

I'd say you should Delete the "Request a Demo" Button

This brings me to the next massive failure point in B2B. The offer. The "Request a Demo" or "Book a Call" button is probably the most arrogant and ineffective Call to Action ever invented. It presumes your prospect, a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do than schedule a meeting to be sold to. It screams, "I want to take up an hour of your time to talk about myself."

It's high-friction and low-value. It immediately frames the entire interaction as a sales process, and people hate being sold to. You need to flip the script. Your offer’s only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value. An "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution.

If you're a SaaS company, this is your unfair advantage. The gold standard offer is a completely free trial (no credit card required) or a genuinely useful freemium plan. Let them get their hands on the product. Let them experience the "After" state for themselves. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a simple formality. You're no longer chasing Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs); you're nurturing Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced.

If you're not a SaaS company, you're not off the hook. You have to bottle your expertise into a tool, a piece of content, or an asset that provides instant value. For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated SEO audit that instantly shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities. For a data analytics platform, a free 'Data Health Check' that flags the biggest issues in their database. For a corporate training company, a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' for new managers.

For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it’s a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit a company's failing ad campaigns and give them an actionable plan. We solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing. This approach builds trust and demonstrates expertise far more effectively than any sales pitch ever could. It changes the dynamic from "Can I sell to you?" to "How can I help you?"

You probably should calculate your LTV to understand your true budget

This is where things get really interesting. Most founders are obsessed with getting the lowest possible Cost Per Lead (CPL). They see a £100 lead from a LinkedIn ad and panic. But that’s the wrong question. The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a fantastic customer?"

The answer lies in calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This single metric is the key to unlocking aggressive, intelligent growth. Here’s a simplified way to calculate it:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What does a typical customer pay you each month? Let's say it's £500.

2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for costs of service? Let's say it's 80%.

3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month? Let's be conservative and say it's 4% (meaning the average customer stays for 25 months).

Now for the calculation:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04

LTV = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000

In this example, every new customer you acquire is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This is a transformative piece of information. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single £10,000 customer.

Let's take it a step further. If your sales team converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can now afford to pay up to £333 per qualified lead.

Suddenly that £100 lead from LinkedIn doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. And that £5 lead from a low-quality source that never converts looks like what it is: a complete waste of money. This is the maths that separates businesses that stagnate from those that scale. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to invest in the channels that deliver real, high-value customers.

You'll need to choose the right ad platform and targeting

With a clear ICP, a compelling message, a value-first offer, and a realistic budget based on LTV, you can finally turn to paid ads as a predictable engine for booking appointments. This is a much better approach than the scattergun of cold outreach.

Here’s how I’d think about the main B2B platforms:

Google Ads (For Active Searchers)

This is for capturing intent. These are people who are already aware they have a problem and are actively searching for a solution. This is the lowest-hanging fruit. For a service business, you'd target keywords that show commercial intent.

-> For instance, instead of a broad keyword like "what is AI", you'd target "AI implementation service", "AI agency near me", or "hire AI developer".

-> The ad shows to someone who is literally asking for what you sell. They are prequalified by their own search query. I remember one client, a medical job matching SaaS, where we used a combination of Google and Meta Ads to reduce their Cost Per User Acquisition from a painful £100 down to just £7. That’s the power of targeting active intent.

LinkedIn Ads (For Specific Decision-Makers)

This is your primary tool for reaching specific people when they *aren't* actively searching. The targeting is unmatched for B2B. You can target people based on:

-> Job Title (e.g., Chief Technology Officer, Head of Sales)

-> Company Size (e.g., 51-200 employees)

-> Industry (e.g., Computer Software, Financial Services)

-> You can even upload a list of target companies (from a tool like Apollo.io or just your own list) and target the key decision-makers within them.

The key here is to run lead generation campaigns. We often test two approaches: Sponsored Content ads that open a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form (which pre-fills the user's details, making it very low friction) versus ads that send traffic to a dedicated landing page with a value-first offer. The lead forms often get a lower CPL, but landing page leads are usually more qualified.

I recall a campaign for a B2B software client where we targeted specific decision-makers on LinkedIn and achieved a $22 Cost Per Lead. Given their LTV, this was an incredibly profitable channel for them, far more so than the team of people they had doing manual cold outreach.

Meta Ads (Facebook/Instagram) (For Broader B2B)

Most people dismiss Meta for B2B, but it can be surprisingly effective, especially if your customers are small business owners or have interests that can be easily targeted. The B2B targeting options are more limited than LinkedIn, but you can target people based on interests like 'small business owners' or 'Facebook business page admins'.

Where Meta can really shine is when you've built up some data. You can create lookalike audiences based on your best customers or retarget people who have visited your website. I remember a campaign for a B2B software tool on Meta where we generated 4,622 registrations at a cost of just $2.38 each. It can absolutely work if your offer and messaging are sharp.

The trick is to structure your campaigns properly, moving people from top-of-funnel (ToFu) awareness, through the middle (MoFu) consideration, to the bottom-of-funnel (BoFu) conversion stage. It’s a more systematic approach than just blasting everyone with the same message.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you in a table below to give you a clearer picture:

So, to bring it all back to your original question: is cold outreach a viable way to book appointments? It can be, but it’s often a grind. A well-oiled paid advertising machine, built on a foundation of deep customer understanding, a compelling offer, and smart financial metrics, is almost always a more reliable and scalable way to fill your calendar with people who are not just willing, but eager to talk to you.

It requires more strategic thinking upfront, but the payoff is a predictable system for growth, not a constant struggle for the next meeting. This is the kind of strategic work we do with our B2B clients every day.

I know this is a lot to take in. If you’d like to chat through how these concepts could apply specifically to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation strategy session where we can take a look at what you're doing now and give you some concrete advice. Just let me know if that's something you'd be interested in.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh