Rant: A guy selling $300/mo CRM setups told me referrals are 'dead' and I can't stop thinking about it
I grabbed coffee in Cincinnati two weeks ago with a guy who runs a small B2B lead gen shop, and he told me straight up that referral based growth is dead for service businesses under $1M. He said he fires any client who won't commit to $2k/mo in outbound tools, and he's booked out 5 months. I've run my whole little consulting thing on referrals for 3 years, 14 clients total, and I wanted to argue with him but I couldn't really. Maybe it's just me, but I think he's half right and half selling something, and I can't tell which half is which. Anyone here actually killed referrals on purpose and gone all in on paid outbound, and did it work or did you just burn $6k finding out?
Got the same pitch from a guy in Columbus and yeah, half of it is just him selling retainer packages. Burning $6k to find out outbound is a grind is real, referrals still close faster and cheaper for me.