I get pitches almost daily for systems to help me as a solopreneur increase sales. Falling back on my training as a coach to be curious, I have sat through several of these pitches to see if they have value or could potentially work for me. The hard truth is most of these systems do nothing more than what a spreadsheet and a notebook could do (except the Solution Dragon system of course! LOL).
This past weekend I was contacted by someone who (self) claims to be a best-selling author with a system that makes people into “billionaires.” (the ‘b’ is not a typo). After a quick Google/AI search, I found his whole brand — the thing he charges for, writes about, and puts his name on — is human-to-human connection. You know, ditch the mass-messaging. Talk to people like people.
His opener was lowercase, generic, and it read like it had gone out to five hundred people that morning. It asked if I “consult on the side.” The consult on the side wasn’t what gave it away — the lowercase, generic, sloppy content and grammar did. And to be fair, none of that would have bothered me on its own. A cold, unresearched message that’s upfront about being unresearched and cold is just how some outreach works when you don’t know someone yet — nothing dishonest about that. What bothered me was that his whole system is built to make a cold message look personal. That’s not a research gap. That’s lipstick on a pig, dressed up as connection. (That distinction — honest-cold versus fake-personalized — deserves its own piece, so check my blog in the future.)
I don’t consult on the side. Consulting is the practice.
His pitch didn’t just miss — it missed in a way that proved the opposite of what he was selling. His system used a few key words to pique my interest — personalization at that level worked, initially. But it backfired. If he’d actually taken 1 minute to look at what I did before writing a one-liner to me, the outcome probably would’ve been different. The sales tactic of using a quick, unresearched message for his system about “human connection” is the same generic outreach it appears he tells his clients to abandon.
I named it. I probably shouldn’t have, but I did. Not with an edge — just directly, by pointing out that his message was doing exactly what his content and system claims to change or fix.
His first reply didn’t touch what I pointed out. It also, and more importantly, skipped past the boundary I had drawn entirely in my first response, which was that I was not interested in purchasing a system. Instead of taking the opportunity to plant a seed for future networking and moving on, he blew past the boundary I’d given and went straight into revenue numbers and a scheduling link, as if my boundary didn’t matter and as if I needed his system to be successful.
Ignoring a boundary is the part worth sitting with.
I get it. When it comes to sales we all learn that you shouldn’t take no for an answer. However, when changing a ‘no’ to a ‘yes’ – you don’t blow past a boundary. Instead, you find other common ground to keep the connection alive as a future networking prospect.
As part of my exchange, I flagged a bad opener that exposed the contradiction between what he claims and how he operates, and I’d done it after telling him plainly I wasn’t interested in his system. And the response to that wasn’t “I didn’t see your perspective of things not lining up, let me look at that” or even “I don’t agree, thanks for your opinion” — it was more of the same pattern, just louder. More proof, delivered as if it were a rebuttal.
I closed the loop a second time. Told him the reply had confirmed the point rather than answered it. What he sent back wasn’t a defense of why his system works — it was an accusation: that I was “struggling and weak.”
Here’s the thing, coming from someone who’d just ignored a stated boundary to chase a sale for something I said I didn’t want, the accusation landed as a confession, and any chance of a future connection — that seed for networking or a business relationship down the road completely evaporated.
Here’s the principle: how someone responds to being told no — or to having their messaging called out as contradictory — tells you more than their original pitch ever will. Any “no” is information. So is polite feedback that an outreach methodology doesn’t match a core stated value of theirs.
Someone who’s actually built their business on the values they preach will likely hear constructive feedback as data — even if to say “thank you” and then move on. However, someone who’s built it using stories based on those values because the sale / profit is all that matters will only hear it as an obstacle to route around on the way to the sale. He didn’t chalk it up as data — he just got frustrated that a prospect who he believed needed his system had called out the inconsistency.
This isn’t really about one bad message exchange. We all get bad cold outreach. It’s about the gap between the brand you’ve built and the behavior underneath it — and how fast that gap becomes visible to anyone paying attention. You can survive a clumsy pitch. You can’t survive people noticing when your messaging and the values of human connection as your core practice don’t align. Once they see it as an inconsistency, they will look for it everywhere in everything you do. If something is clumsy or inconsistent — own up to it and move on.
For those of us building our own practices or small businesses — as owners, coaches, consultants, solopreneurs whose name ultimately is the brand — the stakes are higher than they are for a large company with a marketing department to blame or that has a budget to do damage control. For small business, there’s no separation between the people running the business and the pitch. If your outreach contradicts your stated philosophy, the contradiction becomes what prospects and clients remember, not your philosophy or “system”. To circle back, on my exchange above — I have to say, for me his mismatch in messaging only came off as desperate and weak.
So, before your next outreach message goes out, ask yourself the question I wish that person had asked before hitting send:
Does this outreach message match how I operate and what I’m actually offering?
If this hit close to home, let’s talk it through. Book 15 minutes with me — no pitch, just a conversation.
Know someone building their own practice who’d get something out of this? Forward it or share it — that’s how the right people find their way to a conversation that helps.
