I reached out to ~200 recruiters and asked they fill my survey on their job, 5% replied and completed. I offered them $50 each for completion - half of them refused.

Im an tech recruiter. What’s your product and target audience? Why is it better than LinkedIn? Agencies dump a shit ton of resources in tools for their recruiters, approaching a recruiter is basically at a waste of time because they have no buying power. You don’t even mentioned what your product is in this post.

If you’re doing Cold Dms or any sort of Cold Outreach, you need to immediately show your value proposition to your prospect.

Instead of “hey I can do xyz for you”, you say “you’re struggling with ABC problem, I’ve got a solution to fix it for you”

The goal is to sell the call in the DM not the service itself. Secondly, when doing cold outreach, you will get a lot of ppl who would straight up ignore u but volume is key!

I don’t mean to diminish the research you’ve done, but my guess here is you still need much more.

“Hey, what problems do you face?”

This is your problem. Say I receive this, here are the things I know already:

I don’t know you.

This is likely a waste of my time, and probably money if you’re contacting me. (law of large numbers)

I know that you don’t know what problems I face. (you’re asking)

Therefore, there’s almost zero likelihood that you have a product that solves my problem. (You’re doing market research at best)

Even if you are competent to deliver a solution for somebody, the question itself means you don’t in fact know that I’m even your target market.

So, you cant approach someone who doesn’t want to be approached and hand them a burden (a vague DM).

You need to A) already understand what problem they are facing and B) already have a product to solve the problem. This is pretty baseline just to have a dialogue that isn’t a complete waste of time.(you say you have this, but it doesn’t sound like the product is being put first.) If you’re trying to approach a target cold, who isn’t interested to begin with, you also need C) provide them with the solution. A trial, a demo, improvements based on real industry data, etc.

I also had to reread your post, possibly the most important factor you sneak right in at the end. You acquired 3 users. You acquired 3 users! It worked, that’s a win. And they’re now your biggest asset. Presumably, if you did what you did ten times over, you’d acquire another 30 users. It sounds like your complaint is conversion ratio, but this can also just be overcome with scale.

Those 3 users are your ticket to ride. If your product is worth what you say it is, let those 3 prove it. Positive word of mouth advertising is just about the highest efficiency marketing possible. If they’re impressed, they’ll mention it to their peers. Get feedback from them. Give them discounts if you need to to solicit feedback. Act on the feedback. If they’re happy, offer them discounts for referrals.

Temper your expectations. Everything takes longer than expected.

Are you approaching people in person or online, via email and dm?

Oh. I see. Cold dm.

You might want to try good old fashion in-person approach.

DM is too personal and being faceless and online is a scammers haven.

In my business if I cold called people, I would get zero response.

I have to actually do the work of figuring out how to get to them.

I find resorting to cold calling and messaging to be very unsophisticated.

Well, that’s the part where you usually either get over several years of “learning by doing / trial and error” or you pay to get the mentoring (including the first part but you save yourself several years of unnecessary “figuring out yourself”).

Let me help you out a little bit.

Everyone loves to buy but no one likes to get sold to.

That means that you need to figure out a way where the first thought of the person is not “Ah, another person who wants to sell me something”.

So you need to start a conversation by showing interest and also leading the conversation with follow-up questions. Be curious, ask questions, and add your own thoughts and opinions to it in such a way that the opposite person vibes with you (stay authentic!).

While building up your relationship and trust, you adjust your questions to find valuable information that will lead the conversation toward your goal.

If you asked enough questions, you can put a discovery question (a first test closing) with a question like “Well, if you could find a product/service that has X, Y, and gives you Z, would you be interested in it?”

If the answer is “yes”, you can pitch your product/service and continue in that direction.

If the answer is “no”, you can continue the analysis like “Oh, interesting, what exactly is missing out so you would be interested in something like that?” and keep continuing like “What else does it have to provide?”

Conclusion: People will have excuses like “No time”, “No interest”, “No money”, etc. just as a sort of protection mechanism but none of them is a problem if you have something that really fits the person’s needs.

I have a box here, it costs 1000$, would you buy it?

Let me ask again: I have a box that contains a 1-carat diamond, it cost 1000$, would you buy it?

You probably wouldn’t buy it on the first question but the second one suddenly changed everything. Suddenly you *see* the value behind it (in the box) and are willing to pay the price.

That’s your goal in sales.

What is something valuable for your client and how can you deliver that to your client?

Stop spamming people.

The problem is that many courses for entrepreneurs, specially for SaaS products are doing the same over and over. Recruiters get like 500 calls a day with those same canned questions. I do not believe any more in the new “sales strategies” nor in the “numbers”. You need to do the growth hack used by the Chinese population, and they are already more than 1 Billion!