Your options for finding the next customers
Founders usually tackle this one of seven ways, and each fits a particular situation. This page puts them side by side: what each costs, what you get, what stays with you when it ends, and when it fits best.
The options
| Option | Typical cost, 2026 (US dollars) | What you get | What stays with you | Fits best when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keep doing it yourself | Your own hours | Whatever your week allows | Everything you learn | Your pipeline is small and you’re still learning who buys |
| Hire a senior sales leader | $160k to $260k base; $300k to $450k with variable pay | A senior owner of the function | Their relationships and the team they build, while they stay | The playbook exists and needs a leader to scale it |
| Hire a sales development rep | About $90k to $160k a year, fully loaded | Outreach volume | The pipeline they build, while they stay | A proven message and list already exist |
| A fractional sales leader | $5k to $20k a month | Strategy, structure and coaching, a day or two a week | The strategy documents and the hires they make | You need senior judgment and have hours to act on it |
| An agency or outbound service | $3k to $25k a month | Campaigns, or messages sent at volume | The assets and meetings delivered | You have budget and want volume quickly |
| Pay per meeting | $150 to $750 a meeting; more for senior buyers | Meetings on your calendar | The meetings | You convert most conversations and want more of them |
| Assemble the stack yourself | About $150 to $450 a month in tools, plus a technical person’s time | Whatever your team builds | All of it | You have a spare technical person and a quarter to learn |
| LoopGrow: the free kit | Free | The method, run in your own artificial intelligence (AI) assistant | All of it | You want to start tonight, on your own |
| LoopGrow: done with you | $25 working session; the engagement is scoped after it | The engine, built with your team over 3 to 6 months | The engine, the list, the method, and the person on your team who runs it | You sell into a tough market and want the capability to stay |
Costs are indicative ranges from published 2026 pricing guides, listed at the end of this page. Your market and location will move them.
What assembling it yourself takes
Here is the do-it-yourself version, piece by piece, priced from the tools I evaluated in October 2026, with what the free kit covers and what we build together.
| Piece | What it involves | Example tools and typical cost | In the free kit | Done with you |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Know who to look for | Fit rules for your market, and your assumptions ranked | Your AI assistant | Yes | Yes |
| Public signals | Tenders and the council reports behind them, filings, job postings, talks | Open data, Adzuna, search services: free to about $35 a month | By hand, in step 0 | Collected every week |
| Company signals | Hiring, funding and news, company by company | PredictLeads, from $40 a month | No | Yes |
| Warm paths | The people you know at each company | Your LinkedIn data export (free); The Swarm, $99 a month | No | Yes |
| Scoring and decay | Rank by trigger, timing and reach; fade old signals | A spreadsheet or code you build | Your assumptions only | Yes |
| The Monday brief | 10 names, why now, and a sourced opener for each | Built on top of everything above | No | Yes |
| Testing your message | Real founders or buyers score your copy blind | Prolific, about $70 a stage | No | Yes |
| Proof on your website | Case studies, short videos, where you’ve spoken | Hosting, $0 to $20 a month, plus production | No | Yes |
| Running it every week | Scheduling, monitoring, fixing sources that break | A server or an always-on computer | No | Yes, then handed to your team |
In tools, that comes to roughly $150 to $450 a month at full use. In time, my estimate is 4 to 8 hours a week from a technical person to keep it running, plus an hour from the founder to read the brief and send the messages.
The trade-offs, up front
- I work with 2 to 3 companies at a time, in different industries, so there is no competitive overlap.
- You send every message yourself. Nothing goes out automatically, and nothing goes out in your name without you.
- I won’t promise a calendar full of leads. Where the buyers know each other, ten good conversations do more than a hundred messages.
- The working session costs $25, and if it isn’t worth your hour, I refund double.
Do it yourself, or with me
Do it yourself. The free kit gives you the method: your own AI assistant ranks the assumptions your sales plan depends on, and you test the top three over two weeks. It costs nothing, takes about an hour to start, and everything you make is yours.
Done with you. We build the whole engine with your team, over 3 to 6 months, and you send every message yourself. It starts with a $25 working session, and the engagement is scoped from what we find there. When we’re done, the engine and the person who runs it stay with you.
Either way, start with the qualified prospects scorecard. Your results come with the free kit and the option to book a working session.
Sources
- Senior sales leader pay: thecroreport.com
- Sales development rep, fully loaded: alleyoop.io
- Sales development rep, fully loaded (second source): saleshive.com
- Fractional sales leaders: execroster.com
- Demand-generation agencies: tomba.io
- Outbound agencies: growleads.io
- Pay per meeting: www.leadriver.io