Michel Lieben 🧠

Founder / CEO @ ColdIQ | Scale Outbound with AI & Tech 👉 coldiq.com

I’m (Michel) the Founder & CEO at ColdIQ, a sales prospecting agency (+ we compare the latest sales tech, too!).

We worked with 100+ B2B organizations (including SaaS & Agencies!) and are using Clay, Prospeo, FullEnrich, Instantly, Lemlist, Ocean.io - alongside other great sales tools - to run outbound campaigns that flood 🌊 our (and our clients’) inboxes with interested prospects.


We can help you:

• If you’re a B2B business leader who doesn’t have the time to handle your prospecting engine or to hire and manage salespeople… You can outsource your lead gen to us, and we’ll transparently show you the exact way we run your campaigns. (We’ll provide SOPs, too… if it works so well that you want to build your in-house team).


• If you’re a sales leader or an outbound agency owner: We’ll help you set up the exact systems & tools we use to run automated ‘trigger-based’ campaigns that convert like crazy. 


• And… if you simply want to improve your B2B sales automation skills or learn to run these campaigns yourself, we’ll teach you by building a campaign from scratch together with you —from ‘idea’ to ‘running campaign’ (we’ve done it more than 50 times already, and the rumour says people ❤️ed it).


We've launched hundreds of campaigns, so you don't have to.


Thus - if you: 
- are a B2B service/solution provider making > $50k/month
- provide solutions with Lifetime Value > $10k
- want to shortcut your outbound success


We can help.

Send a DM, and I'll share more details.

Alternatively, reach out to michel[at]coldiq.com 
or via the website 👉 coldiq.com 


__________



And if you're looking to build your top-of-funnel tool stack... 
Check our curated lists of the best outbound tools here 👇

👉 coldiq.com/tools 👈
👉 coldiq.com/ai-sales-tools 👈

Performance-based B2B lead generation 💥 | coldiq.com
→ We help you scale your prospecting activities by implementing outbound sales systems in your business. We take care of sourcing leads, researching your ICP, crafting the sales messages, automating sending and ensuring the high deliverability of messages. We let you focus on what brings money into the business: closing deals.

The anatomy of a ~$7M ARR acquisition funnel:

+ $534,000 ARR added so far in January

Step-by-step breakdown ↓

1️⃣ Lead Generation

We get 40,000+ monthly visits on ColdIQ's website.

Our best traffic sources are: 

A. SEO (~12,000 visits)

More specifically:

- Standard articles = typical SEO-optimised articles (this still works, while everybody mostly focuses on AEO)
- Meta Pages = we build some exhaustive resources (e.g: Tools Directories) that rank well on Google.
- Programmatic SEO = we use AirOps to deploy templated pages at scale.

Useful tech: AirOps, Ahrefs, Webflow


B. LinkedIn Posts (~10,000 visits)

As a team (250,000+ combined followers): 

20+ separate post a combined 150+ times per month around prospecting, AI & GTM.

Useful tech: Taplio, Scripe


C. Paid Ads (~4,000 visits)

We run ads across LinkedIn, Meta & Google.

We budget around $10,000/mo to experiment across these channels.

Useful tech: Fibbler, Usermaven


D. Cold Outreach (~3,000 visits)

We constantly run prospecting campaigns based on various plays:

- Value-based lead magnet campaigns
- Success stories lookalike
- Inbound-led outbound
- Social re-engagement

The goal isn't to generate traffic, but at scale, it does come back to our site.

Useful tech: Clay, lemlist, Instantly.ai, Apify, Common Room, PredictLeads, Prospeo.io, Wiza, FullEnrich.


E. Others (~11,000 visits)

Rest is a mix of YouTube, Webinars, Referral, Newsletter & non-attributable Direct traffic (which probably comes from the above channels as well).

Useful tech: vidIQ (YouTube), StreamYard (Webinars), beehiiv (Newsletter).


2️⃣ Lead Capture 

To convert this traffic into meetings, we have:

- one-field signup forms that automatically route & enrich prospects to the right person, via Default.

- email marketing sequences, built inside Customer.io, to push leads to meetings.

- de-anonymization technology, via Midbound | Vector 👻 | Instantly.ai | RB2B, to re-engage qualified visitors.

- free GTM mini-tools, built via Cursor & Claude, to capture email addresses.

- a lead magnet e-book that pops up after 1 min of browsing the site.


3️⃣ Lead Conversion

Most of our deals are sales-led.

They close via Google Meet conversations.

Usually, in 2-3 calls, given the package size ($5,000-10,000/mo).

Attention records our calls.
Leads are stored inside Attio.
We send proposals via Qwilr.

... and we process monthly payments via Stripe.

Ran out of space, so couldn't go as deep as I wanted.
Lmk if you need clarification on any of the below steps 👇

P.S: Any channel that's crushing it for you... 
that we should implement inside our funnel? 👀

Founder & CEO at ColdIQ | Tomorrow’s GTM Systems, Built for you 👉 coldiq.com

Valley’s GTM machine books more meetings than 10 SDRs with just 1 person.

Zayd, their CEO, is convinced every GTM can replicate it 👇

1. Content Machine

- Zayd does bi-weekly content interviews on Riverside & turns these into shorts.
- They record all his calls using Fathom.ai / Fireflies.ai and mine them for content.
- He posts 5x per week on LinkedIn & leverages tools such as Taplio & Bluecast for inspiration.
- Their LinkedIn company page mainly comprises social proof posts (e.g, live reactions of new users discovering their product).

He takes screenshots with Shottr and turns them into good-looking graphics.

His personal account focuses on a few content pillars, namely: his founder journey & GTM industry insights.


2. Signal-Based Outbound

Every week he extracts:

- His profile viewers.
- His company page followers. 
- His post engagers (personal & company).
- His website visitors (via Valley, RB2B, & Vector 👻).

Valley autonomously qualifies & tiers each prospect (high vs. medium vs. low fit), removes competitors and enriches contacts.


3. Personalized Messaging

For every high-fit lead, Valley:

- Conducts additional research
- Writes relevant messages.
- Delivers > 30% replies.

This amounts to 40+ positive replies every day in their LinkedIn inbox.


4. Lead Orchestration

When leads reply positively, but end up ghosting, they’re pushed to Slack, with their contact details, via a Zapier automation.

Then, Alex Nelson, Valley's Founding AE, calls to check if there’s still interest.


5. Deal Closing

- They send one-pager proposals via paage.io, which tracks what part of the proposal prospects spend most of their attention on.
- Payments are automatically processed through Stripe.

This entire setup books them > 150 qualified meetings per month.

....and can be reproduced by most B2B growth leaders!

P.S: What would you advise Zayd and his team to get above 200 monthly qualified meetings?

Silicon Valley gets all the AI Agent headlines.

But have you seen what’s being built in Europe?

Here are the agents I’m closely watching
…most specifically to help with GTM:

1. Attio

Their agent autonomously ingests calls/emails, auto-extracts insights, populates CRM fields and triggers workflows based on pre-set conditions.

Example use-case: After a sales call, auto-updating deal-relevant information (value, prospect).


2. Apify

Their agents, or “actors,” autonomously navigate websites, bypass anti-bot measures, and extract data.

Example use-case: Extract conference attendee lists to re-engage them later.

3. Lovable

Their agent builds full web apps from natural language. It writes code, sets up databases, deploys & iterates based on feedback.

Example use-case: Building free mini-tools to capture email addresses.


4. ElevenLabs 

Their voice agent handles inbound calls 24/7, qualifies leads, books meetings & detects emotions across 32+ languages.


5. lemlist

Their agent score leads against your ICP, navigates websites for personalization & generate multichannel sequences in ~3 minutes.

Example use-case: Letting AI prepare a multi-channel outreach sequence from scratch for human review.


6. Linkup

Their search API gives other AI agents accurate, real-time web access. Not an agent per se, but an API that powers them.

Example use-case: A prospecting agent would query LinkUp to check whether a prospect has just raised funding before writing personalised outreach.


7. Dust

Custom agents that connect to Slack, Notion, Google Drive & your CRM to autonomously perform analyses across all sources.

Example use-case: Asking the agent to help you prep for a sales call, then the agent pulls CRM notes, recent Slack threads, and other helpful docs into a brief.

8. n8n

Open-source workflow builder with AI building capabilities.

Example use-case: Creating custom, agentic GTM workflows.


Other EU-based agents to watch:
- Make
- Tidio
- Modjo
- arcads AI
- ZenRows
- Pipedrive
- Jiminny
- Typeform
- Synthesia
- Amplemarket
- NiCE Cognigy
- Salesforge.ai 🔥
- Jason AI (Reply)
- La Growth Machine
- Enginy.ai (formerly Genesy)

P.S: Any agent I should be looking at?

How to write top 1% cold emails:

(Frameworks we use for our $6.5M+ ARR agency customers)

1. AIDA Framework by Monika Grycz 💌 

2. AI Campaign Ideas by Dujam Dunato 

(inspired from Eric Nowoslawski)

3. Right person for Opportunity by Kenny Damian

4. Similar challenges by Patrick Trümpi

5. Observation | Call-Out | Proof by Nick Abraham

6. Trigger | Implication | Pain by Aaron Reeves

7. Trigger | Process | Symptoms by Tal Baker-Phillips

8. Champion Play by Brian LaManna

9. Rhetorical Question by Leif Bisping

10. Content Assets by Ethan Parker

11. "Quick calculations” by Thibaut Souyris

What's your favourite cold email template?

Share it with us 👇

P.S: We compiled the copywriting frameworks we used to book 14,000+ B2B meetings for > 250 orgs in a (pretty) big Notion document.

Do you want it? Let me know below and it’s yours :)

Write Top 1% Cold Emails

AirOps scaled from $2M to $15M ARR in 11 months.

Here's every tool that made it happen:

Their Head of Growth, Eoin Clancy and their Co-Founder Matt Hammel were generous enough to reveal their complete GTM tech stack ↓

1️⃣ ADS & CONTENT

AirOps's mission is to help brands boost their presence on AI Search / LLMs.

Naturally, the primary lever to accomplishing that is content. 
And their stack features:

- Descript, a transcript-based video editing solution, to fuel their webinar and content processes.

- Circle, a community/cohort platform that they leverage to run their 'content engineer' group.

- Figma for design, which now offers robust AI capabilities that make visual creation quicker.

- AirOps, their own platform, to monitor their brand presence in AI search and automate content creation workflows + identify which content gaps to fill to earn citations in LLMs.

For LinkedIn, they use Fibbler to identify which companies engage with their thought leadership.


2️⃣ OUTBOUND

Their outbound tech stack is streamlined but features some of the top prospecting tools in the market:

- lemlist to coordinate multichannel outbound campaigns across email & LinkedIn with personalisation.

- Clay for mapping target accounts, enriching data via multiple providers, and triggering sophisticated outbound workflows.

- Common Room to consolidate buying signals across channels, score contacts/accounts, and drive intent-based activation.

- Trigify.io to monitor ICP relevant social signals and trends across key networks.

- Smartlead to scale bulk email outreach while delivering high volumes of email in the primary inbox.

- Attention to capture sales calls, & power internal workflows, enabling them to extract insights from their satisfied customers.


3️⃣ PRODUCT

They use a few software programs for production data, which feature:

- Hex, an AI-enabled analytics workspace for exploring production data, dashboard & launches.

- Amplitude, a deep product analytics tool, to monitor new users' onboarding journey and for product insights.

- Metabase, a self-serve business intelligence solution for dashboarding and reporting.


4️⃣ WEBSITE & ANALYTICS

Their website is hosted on Webflow, which offers a CMS & site builder that integrates seamlessly with AirOps and their broader content stack.

For tracking & attribution, they use HockeyStack.


5️⃣ HIRING / COMMS

Finally, for team hiring & communication, they rely on:

- Juicebox, an AI recruiting platform for leadership-led sourcing & candidate engagement.

- Loom for async video communication, project walkthrough, and to maintain teams aligned.

That's most of it.

I was actually surprised to see how efficient their stack is.

Just over ~10 GTM tools to scale beyond 8-figure ARR in just a year.

That's remarkably lean if you ask me.


P.S: Anything you'd add to accelerate their growth even further in 2026?

Most companies bet their LinkedIn strategy on the Founder.

We turned 24 employees into LinkedIn influencers:

Which led to: 

- 581 posts
- 43 473 reactions
- 28 130 comments
- +34 023 new followers

But most importantly:

- +27 new clients
- +$153,000 in MRR

… in less than 90 days.

And prospects kept telling our sales team: “We see you guys everywhere”.

Here’s how we made this happen 👇


1️⃣ We ran an internal LinkedIn challenge for Q4

Your team might want to post on LinkedIn. But if their job responsibilities don’t include “LinkedIn”… good luck.

We ran a competition & came up with a scoring system with the following prizes:

🥇 $5,000
🥈 $2,500
🥉 $1,500

… and $500 for every person publishing > 20 times over the quarter.


2️⃣ We made it as effortless as possible to post

Successful LinkedIn posts have a “recipe”.

It’s typically a combination of:
→ Well-structured, breathable writing
→ A proven angle or trendy topic
→ A strong hook
→ Nice visuals

But: 

Brainstorming hooks can be hit-or-miss.
→ I encourage my team to reuse variations of mines that outperformed.

Identifying proven topics isn’t easy.
→ We put Taplio & Scripe at their disposal to help the team find outliers.

Designing nice visuals takes time.
→ We put designers at their disposal, so they can focus on the ‘writing’ vs. needing to work on the ‘packaging’.


3️⃣ We invested resources in training the team

Making this work required 1:1 sessions in which we:

- Rewrote entire posts & hooks.
- Brainstormed post ideas
- Built a content calendar

As well as group sessions in which we:

- Ran team-wide sessions sharing best practices.
- Brought LinkedIn experts (Lara Acosta & Pierre Herubel) to share their knowledge with our team.


4️⃣ We found people who wanted to grow their brand

We’d ask applicants whether they wanted to grow their brands.
But also, many new joiners heard from us via LinkedIn.

If WE attracted them, they were more likely interested to grow.

Kenny learned about ColdIQ from a post by Monika.

He was already posting on his second day.

He started below 1,000 followers in 2025.
He’s about to reach 10,000.


5️⃣ We led by example, & every success made the others easier

We granted $500 prizes to team members who published 20+ times.
But, I published > 60 times in the same timeframe.

If you’re going to ask your team to post,  do it yourself as well.

Being at 60,000+ followers makes me more believable when I’m telling my team that I’m convinced they can reach 10,000.

But we also have 9 team members above 6,000 followers:

- Mich: 63,000+
- Alex: 57,000+
- Melissa: 43,000+
- Ivan: 19,000+
- Yevhen: 16,000+
- Soheil: 12,000+
- Monika: 10,000+
- Kenny: 9,000+
- Mai-Lan: 6,000+

Every successful internal LinkedIn growth story builds conviction for the rest of the team.

… and I’m pretty sure we’ll see many similar ‘team posting‘ stories in 2026.

If you want to be among these success stories…

Our team can help, just reach out :)

I tried 200+ AI GTM tools in 2025.

Here are the categories I'm bullish on for 2026:

1/ Workflow Builders

Why?
↳ They orchestrate advanced workflows for marketing & sales teams.

Example use-case: Running a personalised outbound campaign via Clay, on autopilot.

Software you can use:

→ Clay
→ AirOps
→ Default
→ Relevance AI


2/ AI Video Tools

Why? 
↳ They repurpose & edit videos autonomously. Some even generate videos from scratch. They can be used for short-form clipping, ads or even creating short movies.

Example use-case: Generating 150+ UGC assets in < 120 seconds to A/B test as Meta Ads.

Platforms you can use:

Video Generation:
→ Pika
→ Runway
→ Synthesia
→ Google Veo
→ OpenAI Sora

Ad Generation:
→ Icon
→ arcads AI

AI Editing:
→ Descript
→ OpusClip


3/ AI Coding Tools

Why? 
↳ They enable you to write code in plain English. They can be leveraged to build complex workflows (or better… build mini-tools for lead generation).

Example use-case: Build a phone number finder to collect email addresses.

My personal favourites include:
→ Cursor
→ Claude Code

Other platforms include:
→ Warp
→ Cline
→ Replit
→ Lovable
→ Windsurf


4/ AI Content Ideation Software

Why?
↳ They help you find viral ideas to inspire high-performing content.

Example use-case: Using vidIQ to find outlier YouTube videos & repurpose the idea as a LinkedIn content piece

Platforms include:

For LinkedIn..
→ Taplio
→ Scripe
→ Kleo

On YouTube...
→ 1of10
→ vidIQ
→ Viewstats
→ Spotter Studio

On Instagram...
→ Sortfeed


5/ MCPs

Why?
↳ They let your AI agents take actions across your software stack. You can use them to perform tasks inside your most-used tools, without having to open them.

Example use-case: Prompting Claude to review your sales calls of the day, research the leads, and cancel for the unqualified ones... without even opening your calendar app.

Platforms include:

For prompting actions...
→ Cursor
→ Claude

To connect apps without native MCP integrations...
→ Zapier
→ Composio
→ Pipedream
→ Docker, Inc


6/ AI Sourcing Agents

Why?
↳ They source precise lead lists in natural language or simply given a few prompting instructions.

Example use-case: Building a list of Marketing Directors who work at AI-native SaaS orgs in New York... by simply prompting the tools in plain English.

Platforms include:
→ Exa
→ Clay
→ Apify
→ Tavily
→ Relevance AI

I ran out of space, but there's more in the carousel 👇

P.S: What GTM trend are you betting on in 2026?

AI GTM Categories

OK- this is going to sound ridiculous.

But, I’ve made well over $2M from posting infographics on LinkedIn.

… and Ada Beltrán created most of these for me.

So here’s the thing:

My LinkedIn journey started with ‘text-only’ publications.
(Like everyone, I guess).

But early on, I started adding some visuals that I’d make myself.

I’d spend 3 hours creating a 7-page carousel.
For it to not even look pretty.

But crazy enough, this ugly visual was getting me 2-3x the likes & the impressions.

So I figured: “if I can write the exact same thing, but get 3x the engagement by just adding an image… why not do it every single time, right?!”

And so this was the beginning of a journey that led me, & then my team, to flood LinkedIn with infographics of all sorts.

20M+ impressions later, it looks like these visuals are still going strong.

My best explanation for why this performs so well is that ‘text-only’ posts take up very little space in the feed.

What this means is that you only have the first 2 lines of your ‘hook’ to entice people into clicking the “see more” button.

But when you publish a 1050 x 1380 image, it takes up the entire space on the feed. People can’t not see the image, and you can actually use it as a second hook by writing a big title on the image. And if it’s detailed enough, it can stand on its own as a post…

But then, everybody started publishing infographics as well.

So I did something even more ridiculous, which was:

Posting ANIMATED infographics.

So here’s the thing:

An animated infographic serves the same purpose as a static one does.

But it holds attention even more, especially if you speed it up, as it loops on itself, making it look like people are watching it over & over (in LinkedIn's eyes, I guess).

So if you want to tap into extra impressions without much more effort, have a look at the infographic below, breaking down how to create animated infographics (#infographiception).

Then, take your best-performing text post ever.
Add a nice visual to it that ‘respects’ the rules laid out below.

And I’ll bet you’ll be thanking me for how well the post performs ✌️

What GTM tools power CEOs at $10M+ ARR?

Their stack costs less than you think 👇

I asked all the 7-figure CXOs & GTM operators I know about the tools they used.

Here’s what they answered:

TOOLS MOST OFTEN MENTIONED:

- Clay (included in 71% of the stacks)
- n8n (48%)
- HubSpot (39%)
- Instantly.ai (35%)
- HeyReach.io (35%)
- Apollo (35%)
- LinkedIn (32%)
- Attio (32%)
- Prospeo.io (29%)
- Lovable (29%)
- lemlist (29%)
- Ahrefs (26%)
- Loom (23%)
- Fathom (23%)
- Calendly (23%)
- FullEnrich (19%)
- Trigify (19%)
- Google Analytics (19%)
- Airtable (19%)
- Zapier (19%)


PEOPLE STACKS FEATURED:

- Charles Tenot (CEO at lemlist | $40M+ ARR)
- Eoin Clancy (Head of Growth at AirOps | $15M+ ARR)
- Jonathan M (VP of GTM Momentum | $13M+ ARR)
- Glenn Miseroy (CEO at Expandi | ~$9M ARR)
- Benjamin Douablin (CEO at FullEnrich | ~$7M ARR)
- Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (CEO Artisan | ~$7M ARR)
- Michel Lieben (CEO ColdIQ | ~$7M ARR)
- Frank Sondors (CEO at Salesforge | $5M+ ARR)
- Hugo Fredon (Co-Founder at Prospeo.io | $5M+ ARR)
- Kai Brandt (CEO Genesy | $3M+ ARR)
- Jules Davies (CEO Scalerrs | $2M+ ARR)
- Eva Johanna Egg (CEO Scripe | ~$1M ARR)
- Nick Masters (Co-Founder at Vector)
- Pierre Herubel (Co-Founder at ContentPath)
- Nikola Sokolov (CEO at Influencer.club)
- Roq Xever (Founder at PredictLeads)
- Kathryn Wu🤝 (Co-Founder @OpenMart)
- Eli F. (CEO @Midbound)
- Jérémy Grandillon (CEO at TC9)
- Noam Nisand (Founder at Leed Services)
- Ada Beltrán (Founder at Dara Studio)


More stacks: coldiq.com/tech-stacks ✌️

Any results surprise you? 

*Note: The total sample is 62 people. As a GTM Agency Founder, I know plenty of others in the exact same line of business, which strongly biases results. This isn’t intended to be a large-scale statistical study, but more so an indication/discovery of what’s out there.

P.S: Want us to add you on here? 
Send a DM with your tech stack :)

Tech Stacks of the Top 1% GTM Operators

The best B2B data is the one your competition can’t find

...and you can source it for less than $29/mo ↓

With just an Apify subscription & a bit of creativity:

Whether you want to target…

→ Prospects complaining about your competitors (by monitoring Reddit, Inc.).

→ Companies outgrowing their current tools (by monitoring G2 reviews).

→ Companies launching new products (by monitoring ProductHunt).

→ Technical buyers (via GitHub)

→ Agencies (via Clutch)

... there's an easy-to-setup workflow for it 👇

P.S: What's your favourite data sourcing use-case?

7 data sourcing use-cases

Introducing ColdIQ's GTM Free Tools:

Try every growth use-case, for Free 👇

There are 1000s of GTM software solutions across 10s of thousands of use cases.

Trying these out usually entails:
- Signing up for a bunch of random solutions
- Trying them out (with a free trial if you're lucky)
- Singling out the right solution for your use-case
- Repeating the process over & over.

So we wanted to solve that.

By building a centralised place that doesn't require credits or signing up, and that lets you experience tech for:

- Enriching leads
- Sourcing signals
- Finding phone numbers
- Finding email addresses
- Uncovering org. tech stacks

... & more.

You can already test out the following solutions to test out against our GTM use-cases:

1. A Free Email Finder
2. A Free Email Verifier
3. A Free Phone Finder 
4. A Free Spam Checker
5. A Free Lookalike Finder
6. A Free GTM Strategizer
7. A Free Tech Stack Finder
8. A Free Email Copy Optimizer
9. A Free Intent Signals Sourcer
10. A Free Campaign Ideation Tool
11. A Free LinkedIn Post Previewer
12. A Free Outbound ROI Calculator
13. A Free People or Job Title Finder

Along with step-by-step guides on how to properly leverage this tech.

It's here: coldiq.com/free-tools ✌️

P.S: Which Free Tool would be helpful to you? 
Let us know, and we'll get on it :)

taplio