30 Messages, 2 Meetings, 1 Sale: What I Learned About Selling My Expertise

This article chronicles my experience transitioning from building a SaaS product to selling consulting expertise in smartphone refurbishment operations.

Market Research & Lead Generation

I used multiple tools to identify prospects—LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo.io's free tier, and refurbed.com scraping. ChatGPT assisted with company analysis and translation.

Despite substantial outreach effort, the results were underwhelming. Out of around 30 contacts, I got two meetings and made one sale. Manual LinkedIn outreach proved time-consuming and felt unsustainable.

Market Limitations

The refurbishment industry proved too narrow. I discovered that there just aren't that many independent refurbishers in Europe that are big enough to hire external consultants. And profit margins were insufficient to justify consulting fees.

Strategic Pivot

Rather than focusing on refurbishment-specific problems, I recognized that my expertise transfers to broader operational challenges. Manufacturing and assembly operations share similar inefficiency patterns.

The evolving challenge: identifying where manufacturing operations expertise creates genuine market pain worth solving.

Key Insight

Selling expertise requires more than outreach—it demands finding industries where operational problems are both acute and profitable enough to warrant external solutions.