In short
Your network is finite, acquisition is a numbers game, and the tools for it do not have to cost a hundred euros a month.
getting leads
Getting leads as a new business owner: from lucky break to system
Almost every starter gets their first customers from the network they already had. That works, right up until you have been through that network. This article is about what comes next, and about why that is mainly arithmetic rather than a matter of talent.
getting leads
acquisition for starters
outreach without an expensive sales team
Who this is for
Business owners who have just started and already have their first customers.
How my first customer came in
When I started 2lrn4, my platform for security awareness training, I had something I had barely needed to work for: a network on LinkedIn that had grown by itself because I had been posting articles there for years.
I started approaching those people. We already knew each other, so inviting myself for a coffee went smoothly. Over that coffee I talked about the platform. Before I knew it I had my first customer.
It felt as though I had discovered something, while in reality I was only harvesting what was already there.
Why it went quiet after that
My connections had formed around all sorts of subjects, because I had written about a bit of everything, and on top of that I knew many people from the various companies where I had worked. As a result only a small part of that network was genuinely my target group, and I had been through that group within a few months.
So I had to go looking for new connections. By hand you cannot keep that up, unless you have nothing else to do. And that is precisely the problem for someone who has just started: you are building, delivering and selling all at once, while the costs keep running and you need an income yourself as well.
That is the moment it gets tense, and not because something goes wrong but because quite simply nothing happens any more.
Visibility is not yet acquisition
The advice you get in that phase is almost always the same: get a good website, post more on LinkedIn, try some advertising, and go to networking events. That is not bad advice, but it solves a different problem than you think.
Visibility makes sure people can find you, whereas acquisition makes sure you find them. The first pays off in the long run and the second produces a conversation this month, and whoever is short on work needs that second one most.
- Posting more articles increases your reach, but it does not automatically increase your number of customers
- A good website convinces someone who is already there, but it does not bring anyone there
- Networking events produce chance encounters, but they do not produce a predictable stream
Acquisition is arithmetic, not talent
I had never had any sales training and therefore thought for a long time that selling was something you had to be naturally good at. That turns out not to be true, because it is mainly arithmetic.
Will you do the sums with me? I am using round numbers, and you replace them with your own figures as soon as you have them, because only then does the calculation become genuinely useful.
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One customer
For that you need roughly three quotes issued.
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Three quotes
Those come out of roughly nine demonstrations or advisory conversations.
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Nine demonstrations
For those you hold roughly twenty-seven first conversations.
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Twenty-seven conversations
And here the sum tips over: for these you approach not eighty people but several hundred.
That last step is the most important one. The first three ratios sit at roughly one in three, but at the top of the funnel that does not hold. On cold email the reply rate is usually in the low single digits. At five per cent you have to reach well over five hundred people to get to those twenty-seven conversations, and at ten per cent still almost three hundred.
That number is not discouraging but actually liberating, because it means a rejection says nothing about you and simply belongs to the ratio. It also says something else: approaching, enriching and following up a few hundred people per customer is not something you do by hand alongside your regular work.
What a system has to be able to do
What I was missing back then was not a program but a way of working, with a system underneath that remembers it. Before acquisition stops being a lucky break, four things have to be in place.
Leads coming in without retyping
Someone who signs up through an ad form on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or TikTok should appear in your system as a contact straight away, with a note of where they came from.
Email addresses found and verified
Looking up and verifying business email addresses works in any country. You enter a company and a name, the system searches for the matching address and checks whether it actually exists, so your messages do not bounce.
Seeing who is warming up
Contacts earn points for what they do, from an opened email to a booked meeting. Above a threshold you set yourself, someone is worth calling.
Following up without having to remember
You line up a series of messages by email and LinkedIn, with waiting times you choose, and that series stops by itself as soon as someone replies. This is precisely the part that gets dropped first in busy weeks.
What does that cost?
And that brings me to the reason I am writing this article. When I went to look at what such tools cost, I was taken aback. These are the published prices of well-known providers, retrieved on 17 August 2026:
Skylead
$ 100 per user per month.
Expandi
$ 99 per month, or $ 79 when billed annually.
Dripify
From $ 59 to $ 99 per user per month.
La Growth Machine
From € 60 to € 120 per connected profile per month.
SalesRobot
From $ 59 to $ 99 per LinkedIn account per month.
Clay
Free entry level, then from $ 167 per month.
Those are decent programs, built for sales teams who spend their working day on them. For someone who has just started, a hundred euros a month on tools alone is an amount you would rather put into your first advertisements.
At Crumm you pay € 5 a month for Starter, and € 5 a month for email outreach that covers your entire company regardless of the number of users. Ten euros together, then. If you want LinkedIn as well, that adds € 10 per connected account and puts you at twenty. All amounts exclude VAT, and if you pay annually you pay for ten months instead of twelve.
That does not make Crumm better than those other programs, but it does make it affordable in the phase where you get the most out of it and have the least to spend.
Where to start this week
Try not to introduce everything at once. In practice the following order works best.
- First make sure incoming leads land somewhere instead of lingering in your inbox
- Then switch on scoring, so you can see who is worth calling
- Only enable the follow-up sequences once you know which story lands
- Measure your own ratios and replace the round numbers from this article with yours
That way you build something in a few weeks that keeps working on the days when you are too busy to think about it. And that is what it comes down to in the end, because your acquisition should keep running while you are at work.
What is outreach?
Outreach means actively approaching potential customers you do not know yet, by email or through social networks such as LinkedIn. It differs from advertising because you send the first message, and from networking because you do it methodically rather than whenever the occasion happens to arise.
Frequently asked questions
Is cold outreach not just spam?
That depends on how you do it. Spam is untargeted and takes no account of who receives it. Responsible outreach means you skip existing customers, that unsubscribes are added to an exclusion list automatically, that you record per campaign which legal basis you are working on, and that a daily limit applies so you do not send out hundreds of messages in a single morning.
How many people do I have to approach for one customer?
Count on several hundred, although that varies a great deal by trade and by offering. In the calculation above, roughly three hundred to five hundred approaches lead to twenty-seven conversations, nine demonstrations, three quotes and one customer. Measure your own figures as soon as you have enough data, because then you know exactly how much you have to do for your next assignment.
Do I need to be technical to get started?
No. Connecting a lead source comes down to placing one secure link in the ad platform. You set up the rest by making choices on screen, on the principle that something happens as soon as a condition is met.
Can I send from my own email address?
Yes. You send your messages from your own account and your own domain, so recipients simply see your address. You decide the hours during which messages go out and how many are sent per day.
What exactly does outreach cost at Crumm?
Email outreach costs € 5 a month for your entire company, regardless of the number of users. Together with the Starter plan at € 5 that comes to ten euros a month. LinkedIn costs € 10 a month per connected account and the same amount applies to Instagram. All amounts exclude VAT.
Does this work if I do not have any customers yet?
Especially then. The hard part of the phase you are in is that you are doing everything at once and that acquisition is the first thing to get dropped. A system that captures and follows up leads costs you the least on the days you have no time for it yourself.
Keep your acquisition running on your busiest days
Start by capturing and scoring leads, and switch on follow-up once you know which story works.