Reach a buyer yourself

You have a profile a buyer can trust (if not, start with the Starter guide). Now the real thing: reaching an actual US buyer and starting a conversation.

This guide is the honest, do-it-yourself version. Pick a small batch — say ten to twenty real buyers — and work them by hand. You’ll learn two things at once: how this actually works, and how much work it actually is. Both are worth knowing before you decide how to run the US market.

1. 1Find the right buyersSearch LinkedIn for the people who decide on your product: the titles from the reachability guide — category managers, distributors’ buyers, sourcing and private-label managers, brand owners. Add your industry and, if you can, the US. One thing to know: a free account can only run so many searches a month before LinkedIn slows you down (the commercial-use limit). For a batch of twenty, free is fine. Write your short list down — real companies, real names.
2. 2Warm up before you askDon’t send a cold request into silence. First, look at the buyer’s profile — they often see that you did. If they’ve posted something relevant, read it, maybe leave a genuine comment. Now, when your request arrives, you are a name they have already seen once, not a total stranger.
3. 3Connect, but don’t pitchSend the connection request with a short note that shows you know who they are and why you’re reaching out — one or two lines, about them, not about you. Here’s the useful truth: in one large 2025 study of mass outreach, requests with no note were accepted a little more often, but requests with a short note got noticeably more replies afterward, about 8 in 100 versus 5 in 100. So the note isn’t there to get you accepted. It’s there to start a real conversation. And whatever you do, don’t pitch in it.
4. 4The first message: be a person, not an adOnce they accept, send a short, warm message. Still no pitch. Still no link — a link from someone a buyer just met reads as spam, and LinkedIn tends to bury it anyway. The whole job of this message is to become a real person to them. That’s it.
5. 5The message that carries the reasonWhen there’s a little rapport, send the one with substance: the specific reason a buyer like them would want to talk to a maker like you. This is where your product, your quality, your fit for their shelf actually comes in. Now there is a reason to reply.
6. 6Follow upthis decides itAlmost everyone stops after one message. That is exactly why almost everyone thinks outreach doesn’t work. It takes about 8 touches to land a first meeting, and in an analysis of 12 million messages, adding just one follow-up raised replies by about 66%. Don’t send “just checking in.” Come back a week later with something new each time — a fresh angle, a proof point. Space it out. Keep going until you get a yes or a clear no. Both are good answers.
7. 7Move channels when it’s warmReaching one buyer isn’t only LinkedIn messages. Use email for the detail a short message can’t hold. A phone call is powerful — but only once they know you. Only about a third of people answer a call from a company they’ve never heard of, so never cold-call. Call a buyer who has already seen you five times, and it becomes one of your strongest moves.

Measure yourself honestly

So you can tell if you’re doing well, here is roughly what mass outreach gets, from three large 2025–2026 studies. Your careful, well-targeted, one-at-a-time outreach should do better — but it will be slow, and it should be.

If you’re landing near or above those numbers on a small, hand-worked batch, you’re doing it right.

What you’ll learn by trying

On ten or twenty buyers, you can do all of this yourself. You should — it teaches you the terrain, and it works. The trouble starts when you look up and see the real room. Your product doesn’t have twenty buyers in the US. It has hundreds. Each one needs this same patient, personal, week-after-week attention, in fluent US English, on US hours — while you are still running a factory twelve time zones away. That is not a spare-evening job anymore. It is a full-time one, in a place and a time you can’t be.

Knowing how to do it and being able to sustain it are two different things. That gap is the whole reason this is hard, and it’s worth seeing clearly before you decide how to run it.