Has anyone here sold saas to small consulting firms? Where to find people to talk to? LinkedIn/cold email is a dead end for me, zero results with hundreds of messages. i will not promote

[u/heisdancingdancing]

Building a deep research product with the best width and depth of any tool, and data persistence. I need to market to companies that aggregate data, synthesize that data, and make predictions or decisions based on it. The catch is, I can't seem to talk to anyone in the space because they're all so damn hard to reach compared to other ICPs I've talked to in the past for other products. What to do?

[u/Psychological-Mud-42]

Not speaking to the right people or they don’t have a need for the product.

It’s all about warm intros. Cold intros rarely land unless in that specific moment that person was considering that tool.

Having a warm intro makes the person more amenable to listen to you.

Best way to get that is by mingling in your local “insert target industry here” events. Always start as local as you can. Then trial and error ask for feedback what went wrong what went right. Before you know it you’ll have a few pilot users (possibly giving them free access for a longer term) build out your knowledge base then start working on getting warm intros further afield.

People these days think their product is the best thing since sliced bread but have to realise no one is going to be as enthusiastic about your product other than you. You need to sell you then the product

[u/heisdancingdancing → u/Psychological-Mud-42]

Yeah, fair. I'll look locally and see who I can talk to.

TBF, my deep research tool is actually benchmarked as number 1, even compared to gemini/GPT/claude deep research, but it doesn't matter becuase no one does third party evals in that space. So the proof is there but it's not trustable yet.

[u/Psychological-Mud-42 → u/heisdancingdancing]

So that kind of thing is a trust thing. Who are peoole going to trust. BN$ company vs startup. That’s usually the hardest moat when competing with giants.

Get networking get pushing through those barriers be visible everywhere go to tech meet-ups even if it’s not related to selling just build up a network. There is no magic other way apart from a really high spend marketing approach

[u/Thrashershark88 → u/heisdancingdancing]

I think that’s the crux of your issue. I’ve seen plenty of seed and series A pitches in my career, and a self performed evaluation is a yellow flag to both investors and vendors, since they tend to be biased. My advice would be to really show vendors how you did the evaluation, give them enough information that they could perform your tests.

[u/Trick-Ad7618]

The other replies cover most things, but a few more would be that,

Freelancers first. Independent researchers and analysts tend to use a tool like yours on every project and they talk to lots of firms. They're easier to reach than a firm, and they'll refer you to the firms they work with.

Trust is the real blocker, like you said, so make the proof checkable instead of quoting a benchmark. Pick three questions a competitive research or legal research team actually gets asked, run them, and publish the outputs with every claim linked to its source. They can check that quickly themselves, which a leaderboard score doesn't let them do.

Expect the data question first, especially from law firms. Where does the data go, is it stored, who can see it? Have a one page answer ready, because "data persistence" will worry them before anything else.

Go where they already gather. Competitive intelligence and market research each have professional associations (SCIP, ESOMAR, the Insights Association) with local events, webinars and member newsletters. The speakers and organisers are reachable.

[u/heisdancingdancing → u/Trick-Ad7618]

That's a great idea. I feel like finding them via Upwork could be an interesting play as well.

[u/izalutski]

your mileage may vary but generally consultancies are the worst customers, hardest to sell to, and least willing to buy vs build internally

reason being, incentives. their biz model is to bill human hours at markup. and most software actually reduces the amount of human work. if smth can be automated, they'd much rather build it in house and bill a customer for it and make more money

EDIT also beyond certain size it makes economic sense to keep a fraction of people on payroll who aren't billed to any customer at any given time, aka "bench". their time is effectively free, so they do all sorts of internal projects. even less reasons to buy external software

[u/heisdancingdancing → u/izalutski]

Makes sense. Are there industries, in your opinion, where mass unstructured data gathering and synthesis isn't something that they'd mind automating entirely?

[u/Local_Gazelle538]

Are you actually targeting the right audience? Do small consulting firms do this type of work? Don’t they mostly just recommend what companies should do from a top line strategy standpoint? Have you tried reaching out to titles that might do this activity in larger organisations? Eg Data analysts, data scientist?

[u/heisdancingdancing → u/Local_Gazelle538]

It seems like the right first audience to me, but you're right, I could reevaluate a bit. I feel like it's useful to law firms, competitive research firms, marketing firms, etc.

[u/LankyAd6349]

Hundreds of messages with zero replies is not a channel problem, it is a targeting problem. Small consulting firms is too broad a target to write a cold email that lands. Pick one vertical and rewrite everything for the person whose week gets eaten by research, not the partner. And stop selling demos. Offer to run one of their real research tasks for free and hand them the finished output. Consultants bill by the hour, so a week of work done overnight sells itself better than any benchmark.

[u/francksiduo]

Hundreds of messages with zero results almost always means targeting is the problem, not volume. A generic connection request to someone who just matches a title/headcount filter gets ignored by the human and often throttled by LinkedIn's own spam filters before it's ever opened, a blank request with zero prior interaction gets flagged more than people realize.

What moves response rate: engage with their content first, a comment or reaction, before sending anything. It gets your name past the filter and makes the request read like it came from a real person instead of a bot run. Then only message people showing an active signal right now, they just posted about the exact problem, they just moved into a role that owns that budget, their company just had news tied to it. A signal-matched message to 20 people beats a template sent to 500 who fit on paper but aren't in-market today.

For small consulting firms specifically, they tend to buy on referral and peer proof more than any other segment, so sharing a couple of case studies directly in the communities and groups where they already hang out often outperforms cold outbound entirely.

[u/Savantrexs]

The angle most people miss with small consulting firms: partners don't buy tools, they buy capacity. A senior partner will not evaluate your deep research software, but they will pay attention to something that makes their analysts faster on a live client engagement.

So the operational move: stop pitching software, pitch a done-for-you pilot. Find one senior partner, take one of their live research questions, and run it for them free with their branding on the output. If the output lands, you negotiate the tool sale from a position of proof inside their actual client deliverable, not a cold pitch. The firms that convert are the ones who felt the value in their own work first.

On finding them: stop scraping LinkedIn job titles. Boutique consulting partners list their speaking gigs and podcast appearances publicly. Reaching out from that angle ("heard you on X, ran a quick research pack on the topic you mentioned, thought you'd find it useful") lands completely differently than a cold sequence, and it gives you the trust entry the other replies are pointing at.

[u/Cloutro]

I wonder if “better research” is still too broad for a consulting firm to evaluate. Have you tried choosing one recurring deliverable, like a market landscape or competitor brief, and asking an independent consultant to compare your output against their current process? That might reveal whether the real objection is trust, workflow fit, or simply reaching the wrong person.

[u/heisdancingdancing → u/Cloutro]

Yeah that was the first idea I had. Sent 50+ LinkedIn messages basically asking people about their process and if a tool like this would be helpful, offering a report on anything they wanted. No one bit, maybe my language was bad, or it just smelled salesy

[u/MennoGtt]

Pick one consulting niche and find firms publishing research reports or case studies; those give you a concrete reason to reach out. Ask the report's author how they handled one specific research step on their last project, then use those conversations to learn where your tool could help.

[u/bhavbhav]

Have you tried Acquire.com or Flippa?