Classic sales is dead. Everybody says so.

Classic sales is dead. Everybody says so.

Product-led everything. Self-onboarding. Self-service. Let the product do the selling. No humans needed.

I used to believe a version of that.

Hell, I still do. I love the idea! Making that idea come true is a whole other story, though.

My original vision for Herodesk was pretty simple: a great product team, a solid marketing setup, and the customers would just... come. Sign up themselves. Set things up themselves. Figure it out themselves.

Turns out, that's not really how it works. At least not for our customers, with our product, in the market we are in.

We hired two Sales Executives (Signe and Daniel) plus our Customer Success Manager (Jakob) on January 5th this year.

Two months in, I can now report back on whether that bet paid off (a lot sooner than I anticipated, but the answer is already clear).

Short answer: yes. By a lot.

In February alone, Signe and Daniel closed 20 new deals and booked more than 40 meetings with potential customers.

They started the month knowing almost nothing about Herodesk. They had a few weeks over Christmas to read up on us before day one. Yet by the end of month two, those numbers are way beyond what I expected.

They're working two types of leads.

The first is warm outbound: when someone signs up for a free trial, we call them. We welcome them, offer a walkthrough, help with onboarding. Sounds basic. But it works.

The second is classic cold outreach. Building a good target list, doing the homework on each prospect, and calling them with a tight 30-second pitch on what Herodesk is and why it's relevant for their business.

That second part is what most people would tell you is completely dead.

And yet, the vast majority of people we call respond positively. They want to hear more.

Here's what I keep coming back to: not every potential customer is on Instagram or Facebook. Not everyone sees our ads, however good those ads might be (and right now, our Meta campaigns are performing really well).

There's a big chunk of small and medium-sized businesses that are just... busy. Running their shop. Not scrolling through their feed looking for software solutions.

When we call those businesses with something genuinely relevant to them, they listen. Because it's actually useful. And because there's a real human on the other end of the phone who can explain it properly.

That matters more than I initially thought.

There's a broader point here about our ICP that this whole experience has confirmed.

Small and medium-sized businesses don't just want to buy software. A lot of them want to understand what they're buying. Why it makes sense for their specific situation. And then get proper help getting started.

They want a person they can call. They want onboarding that's actually for them, not a series of tooltips and a Loom video.

Yes, that's high-touch. Yes, it costs more relative to the average deal size.

But when I think about the lifetime value of a customer who genuinely understands our product and got set up properly from day one, the math looks very different.

I'm planning for customers to be with us for 5, 6, even 10 years. Measured against that, the cost of getting them started well is tiny.

And customers who start well, stay. Churn stays low. Referrals go up. It compounds.

So to everyone saying classic outbound is dead, that cold calling B2B SaaS is a waste of time, especially at our price points (500-1000 DKK/month): I don't think you're right. At least not for this segment.

We're two months in with a team that was brand new to Herodesk in January. The results are already better than I expected.

I can only imagine what the numbers look like in six months as they get even sharper and the product keeps improving.

My original dream of building a company that was just marketing plus product, with customers magically appearing, was nice in theory.

But the reality is better. We've found something that actually works, and we're just getting started.