There is no question that the M&A space has gotten a lot noisier over the last few years. Every owner worth contacting is getting contacted, and the tools that made outreach easy made it easy for everyone.
One channel is still great. One channel is just not going to break through the way it used to. If you want to reach someone now, you have to get in front of them a few different ways.
What one channel actually costs you
Maybe you do have an origination machine, but you are only working your list one way. Only emailing. Only messaging on LinkedIn. Only dialing.
Every one of those has the same failure: a single message on a single channel is easy to miss, and easy to ignore without any decision being made. The owner is not rejecting you. He never registered you at all.
What combo prospecting looks like
We take one list and work it on every channel at once, in the same month:
- Email, three times a month. Written to the owner, not to a title.
- Calls, three to four times a month. To the business owner. We are not interested in calling the front desk.
- A voicemail on every single pass.
Same owner. Same month. Every angle. And the ask never changes: I want to have a conversation with you, do you want to have a conversation with me?
That sentence is the whole argument. The emails did not book that meeting and the call did not book that meeting. The combination booked it. The emails made the caller familiar instead of cold, and the call gave the owner something to answer.
The channels feed each other
It works in the other direction too. When someone replies to an email saying they are interested, we reply the same day to set up a time. If they go quiet the next day, they do not get dropped. They get loaded up for the caller, who picks up the phone and books it.
A reply that goes cold is not a dead lead. It is a warm lead sitting in an inbox because nobody called it.
None of this is clever
This is unsexy work. Good old-fashioned elbow grease and brute force, run at volume every month and measured the whole way. And you can go do every part of it yourself. Hire a caller, train them every morning, build the list across twenty databases, stand up the email infrastructure, and run it.
Or you can hire us to do it, which is all we have been doing for a while now.
The volumes above are what we run on a full combo engagement. Results vary by market, offer, and follow-through.