Spendflo’s 14-Month Cold Outbound Experiment: When to Kill a Channel That’s Not Working

Spendflo’s 14-Month Cold Outbound Experiment: When to Kill a Channel That’s Not Working

Why perseverance in GTM isn’t always a virtue—sometimes the best decision is walking away.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Siddharth Sridharan, CEO and Co-Founder of Spendflo, a SaaS spend management platform that’s raised $15.4 million, shared a story most founders won’t tell: how they invested fourteen months building a cold outbound machine, gave it everything they had, and ultimately shut it down entirely.

This isn’t a story about failing fast. It’s about having the discipline to recognize when a channel isn’t working for your specific motion, and the courage to reallocate those resources even after significant investment.

Cold Outbound Worked Early

For Spendflo’s first million in revenue, cold outbound was part of the mix. “For the first million of revenue, it was broadly referrals and a lot of cold outbound,” Siddharth explains. In those early days, cold outbound gave them something crucial: control over their pipeline.

Referrals were working, but they happen on their own timeline. You can’t just decide to get more referrals next quarter. Cold outbound filled the gap, giving Spendflo the ability to generate pipeline on demand while they learned about their market and refined their ICP.

But what works to get your first million doesn’t necessarily work to get your next ten million.

The Decision to Invest Heavily

After that first million, Spendflo made a deliberate choice. They’d seen cold outbound work early, so they decided to really build it out—to see if they could turn it into a scalable, repeatable channel.

“We tried really hard to build out that team and put everything in place, all the systems, and it’s a lot of investment that you need to actually put in to make cold outbound work,” Siddharth shares.

This wasn’t a half-hearted experiment. They hired the team. They implemented the systems. They invested in the infrastructure required to make cold outbound work at scale.

Fourteen months of genuine investment.

Why It Stopped Working

The landscape was changing. “We realized it doesn’t, at least for, because of the, hey. With Google and Microsoft changing their email kind of spam rules, with phone numbers getting harder to collect, it’s just become really hard to make that work,” Siddharth explains.

Email deliverability was becoming a nightmare as Google and Microsoft tightened spam filters. Getting accurate phone numbers was getting harder. But here’s the harder truth: sometimes a channel doesn’t work not because you’re doing it wrong, but because it’s the wrong channel for your specific motion.

The Fourteen-Month Question

Why fourteen months? That timeline reveals something important. You need enough time to build the system properly, hire the right people, and iterate on messaging. Six months isn’t enough.

But there’s a point where more time won’t change the fundamental economics. If fourteen months of focused investment isn’t delivering the results you need, it probably won’t work at month eighteen either.

The discipline is recognizing that point and making the call, even after significant investment.

The Sunk Cost Trap

Most founders fall into the sunk cost trap. You’ve invested fourteen months. You’ve hired people. Walking away feels like admitting failure. So you keep investing, hoping the next quarter will be different.

But sunk costs are sunk. The question isn’t “how much have we invested?” It’s “knowing what we know now, is this the best place to allocate our next dollar?”

For Spendflo, the answer became clear. Cold outbound wasn’t delivering at scale. Other channels were working better. They shut it down.

What They Learned

The fourteen-month experiment wasn’t wasted time. It taught Spendflo crucial lessons about their market, their ICP, and messaging. They learned which types of companies responded and which ignored them. They learned what objections actually mattered.

More importantly, they learned that their ideal customers—mid-market finance leaders dealing with SaaS procurement chaos—weren’t effectively reached through cold outbound. These buyers needed relationship-based selling and face-to-face interactions. Cold outbound optimizes for volume. Spendflo needed to optimize for relationship depth.

The Reallocation Decision

Shutting down cold outbound freed up significant resources—budget, time, energy, and mental overhead. Those resources got reallocated to channels that were performing. Event marketing was working. Their account-based approach was delivering results.

“The first version of this is me and Rajiv, like showing up to events and then hosting dinners ourselves with nobody showing up,” Siddharth recalls about their early event efforts. “And now we have waitlist for our events.”

That evolution came partly because they reallocated resources from channels that weren’t working to channels that were.

The Framework for Killing Channels

Here’s what Spendflo’s experience teaches about evaluating whether to kill a channel:

Give it enough time to work. Six months isn’t enough—you need time to build the system and iterate. But there’s a point of diminishing returns.

Measure honestly. Don’t measure activity. Measure outcomes—qualified pipeline, closed revenue, CAC payback. If the economics don’t work after genuine investment, they probably won’t.

Compare to alternatives. It’s not whether the channel is working in absolute terms. It’s whether it’s the best use of your resources compared to other options.

Make the call. After honest assessment, if it’s not working, shut it down and reallocate. Sunk costs are sunk.

The Permission to Walk Away

The hardest part about killing a channel isn’t the analysis. It’s the emotional weight of walking away from something you’ve invested in heavily. It feels like admitting defeat.

But there’s no prize for persevering with channels that don’t work. The goal isn’t to make every channel work. It’s to find the channels that efficiently reach your customers in the way they want to be reached.

Spendflo’s cold outbound experiment wasn’t a failure. It was a disciplined test that produced a clear answer: this isn’t the right channel for us. That clarity is valuable. It let them stop wasting resources and double down on what was working.

Sometimes the best GTM decision is knowing when to walk away. Fourteen months of honest effort is enough to know if a channel works. After that, perseverance isn’t a virtue—it’s just stubbornness.