Mohan ‎Muthoo 💬 🇬🇧 🌍

Spring Drive

Founder

Instantly.ai

Instantly Certified Expert 🏅

Smartlead

Smartlead Certified Expert 🏅

Clay

Certified Clay Expert 🏅

Apollo.io

Official Partner 🏅

automate rev.ops.

Program Mentor

Timely

Full-cycle outbound account executive, selling CRM SaaS to small businesses.

Outbound Account Executive

INFUSEmedia

- Managed a team of BDRs across the EMEA region.
- Built and led training and development for individual reps 
- Built cold outbound strategies and tactics to execute effective campaigns across the team

EMEA BDR Team Lead (Manager)

- Refined and executed cold outbound sales development focusing more heavily on Enterprise accounts.
- Fastest ever firm promotion from BDR to Senior BDR
- Only BDR published on company website

Senior Business Development Representative

- Managed and executed cold outbound campaigns across a range of industries in the EMEA region, from SMB to Enterprise accounts.
- Focus on cold calling, emailing and social selling
- Broke the firm record for most meetings booked in a first month as a BDR

Business Development Representative

doovice

- Wrote copy for cold outbound social sales messages landing a 50%+ conversion rate for UGC
- Recruited and led a team of 10+ volunteer marketing and sales reps at universities across the UK
- Used outbound selling strategies and tactics to generate organic promotion that led to 5,000+ unique monthly visitors within 4 months (no paid marketing)
- Managed back-end CMS and content editing

Founder @ Spring Drive | Driving Growth for B2B SaaS/AI | Multi-Award Nominated | 4th Ever Official UK Clay Expert | 👉 springdrive.co

Hey there 👋 

I'm the Founder at Spring Drive - we Book You B2B Sales Meetings so you can Scale your Business without Hiring More Reps 🛠️

We've worked with B2B service agencies, Y-Combinator backed startups, globally recognized SaaS brands featured in Forbes and the Apple Store, B2B ecommerce companies, and everything in between.

We have a ton of case studies and accolades, having been nominated twice for our work (Finalist in the Standout Use of AI category at the UK Digital Excellence Awards, and for the GTM10 Awards), plus been recognized as Official Expert Partners by numerous top companies in GTM and Outbound.

Head to 👉 springdrive.co 

OR

DM me, I will reply 💬

Mohan ‎Muthoo 🇬🇧

I am looking for a GTM Engineer to join Spring Drive. 

Could that be you?!


You'll be trained by me personally getting the inside scoop on how to create successful campaigns as a Smartlead, Instantly.ai, & Clay Official Expert.

If you have experience using Clay, are meticulous and organized with an eye for detail, and are looking to build a career as a GTM Engineer, this could be for you.



Interested?

Find the application link in the comments.

Mohan Muthoo

I had a chat with Kellen Casebeer, Founder at The Deal Lab, a few weeks ago to discuss the future of personalization in outbound.

When it comes to this subject, Kellen is one of those people I just listen to really carefully.

He thinks about this in a deeper way than most who are following 'classic' structures.

He made some really interesting points I think everyone can learn from:


- Markets cluster themselves around beliefs and its always easier to sell someone what they already believe in.

- Thinking not just about using personalization but WHAT personalization you're using


There's a few more v interesting insights from him in the video below.

I think real operators who want to stand out need to think in a more sophisticated way about messaging and Kellen is one of those people to follow for exactly that.

Thanks Kellen was great to talk as always.

B2B SaaS companies - listen up.

Here's how Spring Drive is different to Apollo/Zoominfo/Clay/Lemlist.


I get this question a lot and it's actually quite concerning because it reveals something deeply interesting about the market.


Apollo, Zoominfo, Clay, Lemlist etc - these are TOOLS.

They provide YOU with the ability via a platform to DO certain tasks.

They're superb.

But they can't do those tasks for you.

They aren't actually *building* campaigns and delivering you real pipeline.


Apollo and Zoominfo provide data.

Clay allows you to work data (enriching etc)

Lemlist allows you to send emails.


But these tools cannot:

Find the right leads, pull them, do the segmenting, come up with creative outreach strategies, write the copy, manage the inbox, reply to queries, book onto your calendar, strategically iterate on the A/Z tests, etc etc


Spring Drive is an agency offering an end to end service where we do the work of delivering you pipeline, using such tools in the process.

I get companies complaining that these tools 'aren't delivering results'.

Like what...they are tools, you have to deliver the results with them.


This is like buying a frying pan and a kitchen knife and then being shocked when you come home that evening to find they haven't cooked you a fried egg.

You good?


You need a chef.

We are the chef.

Anyone tested out SmartProspect yet?

With data sourcing changing all the time, this is interesting.


Smartlead just released SmartProspect which basically means we could get tons of verified leads already in our sequencer without having to pay for the usual databases.


I'm looking at it now and it's very promising, but wanted to test coverage given that ultimately we want to ensure we aren't going to miss any part of our TAM if we use it.


I did a test of CEO:

SmartProspect - 2.1M people

Apollo - 1.9M people


Then I did a test of HR Director:

SmartProspect - 225,753 people

Apollo - 203,156


Then I did a final test of Head of Sales:

SmartProspect - 152,147

Apollo - 174,555



This is not to say that SP is *better* than Apollo - Apollo is a great database.


But I'm very pleasantly surprised at the coverage SmartProspect has - and of course the added benefit that it's right inside the sequencer is pretty neat.

Great work Vaibhav and team.

Increase B2B SaaS sales by 25% with one cold email trick.

CTA Framing. Here's the guide:

Most CTAs are lazy and generic (and smelly): 

Want to see a demo?
Interested in learning more?
Are you hearing me you owl?

Not ideal.

These feel like copy-paste. Your prospect knows it.

Here's some examples of reframes for you:

a) Do you want to see a case study?
b) Do you want to see the case study that outdid every other client we've ever worked with?

It's curiosity ladsssss.

Here's another:

Let's say you're contacting a Marketing lead at a Data Analytics SaaS.

a) Would you like a PDF on the top ways to get leads with Google Ads?
b) Would you like our PDF on how the 3 biggest data analytics companies in North America generate 50-100 leads each month with Google Ads?

Specific.

Curious.

A little bit arousing.

You get it.

The difference is stark.

This can genuinely make the difference between a 15% positive reply rate and a 30% positive reply rate.

Which would double your pipeline.

Double is pronounced "doobleh" btw.


DO YOU DO THIS OR NOT THEN GUYS?

Booking meetings every day for a B2B SaaS at Spring Drive

And it's cold outreachhhhhh


Yes that's right, it's not dead - despite what you might hear on the radio!

If anyone got that joke i'd love to know.


Anyway, the right Resonance Strategy can mean massive pipeline value - daily, weekly, monthly.

Just pick the right partner and give it time to cook.

Your lead magnets suck - if they're not getting tons of positive replies.

Here's the 4 tenets to transform them into ones that people love.

In a lil video.

Just a lil vid.

We 'compel' prospects to book meetings with our B2B SaaS clients.

Their words, not mine. Here's how:


Balance theory.

You need to assess your assets in the context of your market to understand how to become compelling.

Assets
- Social proof
- Lead magnets
- Offers
- Pain data
- Personalization

You need to cross reference these and ask yourself, do any of our assets here STAND OUT in the CONTEXT of our market?

Genuinely though.

If you think your ebook on how to improve ad performance is stand out to ecom founders in the US, you don't understand your market at all.

Most people do not build stand out assets at all.

They simply do what they think LinkedIn is telling them will work.

"let's use this trigger and add pErSoNaLiZaTiOn'

seriously...?

If have genuinely intelligent personalization that hardly anyone else is likely to be using and its relevant...

Then yes, hammer it son.

9/10 - this is not the case.

At Spring Drive we use our messaging strategy framework and experience to spend a lot of time ideating insanely stand out ideas for our clients that we can A/Z test heavily.

That's how we get results whilst everyone else is testing personalization and triggers and getting confused as to why nobody cares.

Don't believe the hype.

Balance theory.

Screenshot below from a client campaign at Spring Drive.

Okay guys I'm going to share this one because it's very decent even though I don't normally do these posts.

Smartlead are doing a Black Friday Flash Sale for both Smartlead and Non-Smartlead users:

 - 100% free Admin Google & Outlook mailboxes for the first month.

- No Minimum order size

- The email infrastructure setup is done for you.

- US IP Mailboxes

Doing outbound properly means a robust infrastructure and that can add up, so this is pretty neat.

Also btw, this is absolutely the time to stock up on a ton of inboxes too because everybody should be warming up infra over december to launch hard at the start of Q1.

Cart time.

To convert a lead to a booked meeting, you need a Pipeline Variant.

Here how to do it in 3 steps:


When a lead replies positively, there's still work to be done to book them to a meeting.

But most companies just follow up asking them for a meeting.

Hounding them like, like a, a, hOUnd dog.


The issue with this is you're not making them *want* a meeting.

Which should be your goal.


Nobody wants to give you their time - you have to convince them.

The prospect will think: 'well i'll just check them out online and gauge if I care based on that'


So you need a distinct strategy in place for why they should attend a meeting.

I call this the Pipeline Variant.

And I expect royalties.


Ask yourself:

'What can you give/show them in a virtual meeting that they cannot reasonably expect to find online?'


This dramatically increases booked meeting numbers.


The concept is maintain some balance - don't give everything away in the email, precisely so you can hold something back to book the meeting.


Ideas include:
- audits (have to be framed correctly)
- building their custom setup together on a call
- showing them proprietary data unavailable anywhere publicly

Get creative and you can really get people wanting to put time aside for you.

About to tell prospects about your B2B SaaS's features?

 WAIT - read this first.


I think we've moved passed generalized outcome statements in outreach.

Focusing on the end result, in many cases, leads to trite messaging like:

'10x your revenue' or 'saves you 15 hours per week'.


The market is too mature for that now (in 90% of cases).

But the fallback for many companies is to say, well, let's tell everyone about our amazing features.

This is even more common in complex SaaS tools where summarizing its core value is actually quite difficult because there's just so many ways it can help.

The issue there of course is that, guess what - nobody actually cares about features, inherently.

They do, in fact, care about outcomes.

hmm, tricky.


So what do you do to book prospects into more sales meetings?


Specificity.


You should still focus on outcomes and results, but they HAVE to be framed with specificity.

Look at these examples:


"Our tool saves you 10 hours per week manually sending invoices" - 2/10 (Bad).


"Our tool saves you 10 hours p/w sending invoices with our AI sequence generator" - 4/10 (still pretty bad, just AI washing)


"Our tool uses AI to cross-reference your clients with the right retainer values and puts together a 7-step email sequence to chase payment with easy-pay links embedded, reducing payment time to under 5 days and boosting cashflow".

Now we're talking.

It cuts through both features and outcomes with far more sophistication.

It visceralizes for the prospect precisely what outcome they're getting.

And how it does that, at the same time.

The outcome. The experience. The opportunity cost. The time saved.

All embedded in a line built around specificity.

Will you book sales meetings with AI-led B2B SaaS outreach messaging?

It depends on this 1 question:


A lot of B2B SaaS companies are, understandably, integrating AI into their tools as part of their product offering.

Makes sense.

I'm talking front-end customer use, not back-end for the company.

But, the wave of AI washing over the market is gaining pace rapidly.

And the messaging will get trite if it hasn't already.



So, to know if adding that AI feature into your messaging will work

Ask yourself this:


Does the AI function you've added solve something which was not possible or feasible before, or which was possible but costly (time or money) 

AND 

which customers were trying to do anyway because it was that necessary to them?


The final part is really crucial.

I see a lot of AI functionality which is really adding negligible value.

"Here's something you didn't truly care about, but you can do it now really quickly and cheaply with AI"

Day 1: omg that's so cool

Day 2: yeah it works decently

Day 3: i really need to get back to focusing on what matters to running the business


It's fun to play around with, and then nobody truly cares about it.


These can be great lead magnet use cases - don't get me wrong.

But pipeline conversions will likely suffer without a robust strategy behind the feature.



Just something to think about.

Earlier this year we were selected as a Finalist at the UK Digital Excellence Awards.

For a cold email campaign. This was it:


We were shortlisted as a Finalist along with 2 other companies for the 2025 UK Digital Excellence Awards under the category Standout Use of AI.

This was for one of our outbound campaigns that generated over 130 leads and 2 closed deals for a client in the first 4 weeks.

Part of the reason we were selected was a conditional logic workflow using AI to find relevant information on prospect websites, scoring them, and then using AI to format the wording so they could be inserted seamlessly into an email and sound completely human.

We did this with Clay.

And we continue to run great campaigns that generate pipeline for clients at  Spring Drive.

But here's something you should know - not every offer is built for cold email.

If you're targeting IT decision makers? Forget about it.
Only targeting Enterprise domains? Use is manually with multi-channel.
Got no social proof for a results-based service? Forget about it.

And ALWAYS A/Z test.

Booking sales meetings for B2B SaaS daily at Spring Drive.

With Resonance Strategy.



Want to know how? DM me.

(screenshot chat with a client of ours below)

You should not use cold email to grow your B2B SaaS/AI.

IF this is true:


Cold email is still in my opinion of the most powerful ways to scale revenue fast.

For many companies, cold email is the difference between 5 closed deals a month and nothing.



But if any of the following are true, you might not be a good match:


1. Your ICP is IT focused

IT generally hate sales outreach - we turn down companies that mostly target them.


2. Your TAM is small.

It's just harder to create sustainable pipeline from.

Fancy workflows you see getting 20 leads from 280 contacts looks great - but these campaigns usually do not replicate at scale month over month.

You might have a great month or two - then you're lost.

We like to work with companies that have at least 80k prospects minimum in their TAM.



3. You're afraid of rejection

Being told 'don't contact me again' in sales is like getting a bruise in sport.

If you're scared of getting a bruise, sport isn't for you.

Giants like Salesforce built billion dollar companies off the back of sales teams getting rejected constantly.

They just built systems to close the deals that did come through...

And didn't get shaken when someone said no.



4. You're not committed to A/Z test and be creative

If you haven't tested something in the market, you don't know what will happen.

The best results are usually the most recent - because you only getting better from a/z testing and iterating over time.

Companies that want to see amazing stuff from day 1 usually suffer because they never give themselves the opportunity to reach pipeline momentum.


But, if these don't apply, you could be getting 10-30 meetings every month and closing deals, scaling your B2B SaaS easily just with cold email.

Leads vs Meetings - do you know the difference?

A warning to B2B SaaS companies:


If you're considering hiring an agency to deliver you 'leads' - be sure you know what that means.


I once told a company I'd expect we'd deliver around 10-15 meetings a month for them, and they replied:

"But the other agency said they would deliver 30 at around the same cost?!"


I asked them...'Meetings? Or leads?'

Them: 'what do you mean? They said 30 leads.'

Me: 'A lead is someone who has replied with interest - they haven't yet agreed to a date and time to meet with you. They may not agree at all. How many meetings are people agreeing to from those leads?'

Them: 'Oh right yeah, I think its positive replies. Leads.'


Nothing wrong with leads as value btw - but you should always ask an agency you're considering working with: 

'what do you mean by a lead?'

Different agencies use the word leads in different contexts, but the value can be massively different.

Just a gentle notice.

Very gentle.

Cold email rewrite time...

How a simple offer got complicated.

Here's how Spring Drive helps B2B SaaS & AI companies drive growth.

In a nutshell:


We run outbound email and LinkedIn campaigns for you that drive growth, either via sales pipeline or PLG motions.

We do this with best-in-class GTM Engineering and our own Resonance Strategy framework that we constantly iterate on.


We've got a ton of case studies, reviews & testimonials, expert badges, award nominations, and global recognition for our work.


We work on a retainer but you can start with us on a pilot first.


We work with both Founder-led teams as well as sales and marketing teams, supporting Founders, reps, and AEs, by delivering pipeline for them to close.


If you're a B2B SaaS or AI company that wants to drive revenue without spending more on ads or hiring and managing more reps, you can find out more at springdrive(dot)co.

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.

I turn 31 today. My business made $557,000 last month. But before that, I failed 7 businesses in a row:

Here’s what I tried building... 
and why I'm convinced each 'fail' got me closer to a 'win'


1. I started a clothing brand with my friend Thibault Selderslagh.

👎 We barely managed to sell 15 t-shirts. We had to order minimum 400. So we ended up with 385 t-shirts... now collecting dust somewhere.

👍 But, I learned how to create websites during this process.

↳ ... a skill I used to create the V1 of my website ColdIQ.


2. I co-founded a raffle lottery in the UK 🇬🇧

👎 I invested 40,000€ of my personal savings. We only managed to sell £1,000 worth of lottery tickets.

👍 But, I learned to run ads while desperately trying to sell these tickets.

↳ ... a skill we now use to book 50+ monthly meetings via ads. And that we offer as a service to clients (with some closing > $1M as a result!)


3. I tried to become an Instagram influencer.

👎 I found a hack that grew my account to 29,000 followers. Then it stopped working, and I've lost followers ever since. I never made a dime from the platform, nor did I get offered any free brand product.

👍 But, I learned about social media & algorithms.

↳ ... a skill that got me to be a LinkedIn influencer instead (😆). But more seriously, this led to 15,000,000+ impressions & 1,000+ inbound meetings for my company.

(And we now offer it as a service too... send a DM!)


4. I ran a sports betting affiliate website.

👎 I grew it to $6,000/mo, until it dropped to 0 overnight because of regulation changes in Belgium 🇧🇪

👍 But, I learned a lot about monetizing affiliate brand deals.

↳ ... a skill that allows us to generate > 5-figure per month in passive affiliate revenue.


5 & 6. I started an MMA Betting blog AND a Crypto blog.

👎 None of them made a single $1.

👍 But, I learned SEO & Copywriting

↳ ... skills that are responsible for driving 100s of thousands of visits to ColdIQ's website.


7. I launched a Facebook Ads agency

👎 I booked 15 meetings, and didn't manage to close a single client.

👍 But, I learned cold email in the process.

↳ ... a skill that turned into a service we currently deliver for 70+ clients, amounting to > $500K in MRR.


Takeaway?
You win, or you learn.

And each failure turns into a lesson that lets you try again... better.

So keep pushing!

P.S: What's the worst business idea you've tried... and what did you learn from it? 👀

Failing 7 businesses before growing one

How I would find my first 10 clients if I had to restart from 0:

It's how I've hit > $6.5M+ ARR in 3 years 👇

1. I'd find a ‘free’ way to get my brand out there.

In the beginning: 

You have lots of time.
You have little money.

So you want to start with a time-consuming channel that doesn’t require much funds.

This could be:
→ Writing blog articles.
→ Creating LinkedIn posts.
→ Recording YouTube videos.
→ Being active in niche communities.

I tried them all.
The one that worked best for me was LinkedIn.

It’s what I recommend to all my friends in B2B to get started.


Software you can use:
- Design: Canva or Figma
- Content Ideation: Taplio or Scripe 


2. I'd direct this ‘visibility’ to a short landing page.

Your brand efforts will gather interest.

Interested visitors will check your site or your social profiles.
You want them to understand asap how you help.

The most effective way I found to do so, is to record a 5-min video sales letter, breaking down your offering.

Some people won’t buy straight away.

For them, I’d suggest creating a lead magnet to grab their email addresses
… and nurture them with valuable content over the long term.

For the ones that didn’t provide their emails, you can use visitor identification software to de-anonymize them (in the US).


Software you can use:
- VSL Hosting: Wistia
- Landing Page: Webflow or Framer
- Visitor Identification: Midbound or Instantly.ai


3. I'd reach out to warm ‘high-fit’ leads.

Many prospects will engage with your content but won’t try to schedule a call

Still, they might be interested.

In this case, I’d suggest reaching out to every prospect who’d make an ideal client but hasn’t messaged you yet.

I recommend writing your first 25-50 messages by hand, before trying to automate.

This could look like:
“Hey {{name}}, seems my post on {{topic}} resonated with you. Are you working on {{potential initiatives}}? Happy to swap notes if that’s helpful.

Whatever you write… the magic of manual notes is that it forces you to re-read & improve your messaging every time.

This allows you to uncover patterns…
Which will be invaluable once you scale your sending.


Software you can use:
- Email Outreach: Instantly.ai
- LinkedIn Outreach: Expandi
- Multichannel Outreach: lemlist
- Email Finding: Wiza, Prospeo.io, LeadMagic or FullEnrich.


4. I'd repeat the above steps for 3 months straight before considering giving up. 

This 100% works.
It sounds simple, but it’s challenging to keep working hard when things are uncertain.

Working hard is difficult on its own.
But working hard, when doubting that there’s a point, is even harder.

To make it work, you must somehow convince your brain that you’re not doing this for nothing. Even when you get 0 results in the first weeks, or months.

Repeat these steps enough times.
And you’ll inevitably improve.

Improve enough…
And soon enough, you’ll reap the rewards of your hard labour.

Good luck ✌️

P.S: Who's starting something new in 2026? 👇

Claude can now build advanced n8n workflows from a single prompt.

Just use this Claude project setup, and it will handle 90% of the work 👇

This completely changed how we build automations at our $6.5M ARR agency…

Here’s precisely how we run this:

1. Write a basic prompt describing your workflow. 

Claude (Sonnet 4.5) will read it, break it down & output an n8n JSON file that can be imported.

2. Claude takes care of the complex implementation.

That is:
- Filed mappings + expressions
- Data flow between nodes
- Trigger configurations
- Conditional branches
- Sticky notes for docs
- Error handling

Beware: there are usually a few small items to debug, and it won’t add your API keys for you. But everything else is handled.

Now, what’s included in the system:

1️⃣ Full Claude Project Setup

The system infrastructure that transforms Claude into an n8n workflow builder. 
(Just need to copy paste & you’re ready to go!)


2️⃣ Over 70 n8n Documentation Pages

The official n8n GitHub documentation from which we extracted syntax, capabilities & node references. 

That’s how Claude knows how to build functioning workflows.


3️⃣ Templates & Frameworks

Templates + Frameworks you can copy-paste for use cases like lead routing and social listening.


4️⃣ Real-life Examples 

Our actual prompts vs. the workflows Claude ended up building.
(So you can see what worked well, and what did not).


5️⃣ SOPs to always stay updated with the latest Docs

Step-by-step guide to pull and compile n8n documentation every time there’s a new feature.
(Which is every week in AI world)


Once again, this is democratising complex workflow buildouts.

Starting from scratch or piecing together documentation used to take a lot of time.

“How to build n8n workflows?” has always been a bigger challenge than “what n8n workflow shall I build?”

This flips the questioning on its head.

Spend most of your time thinking about which automation moves the needle for your business. Not how you'll build it.

...and leverage Claude to get 90% of the way there.

If you want to get the entire system, including the documentation package & guide to set it up yourself, comment “PROMPT”, “n8n” or “CLAUDE” and I’ll DM it to you!


P.S: Kenny Damian is our n8n 🐐 at ColdIQ, and the man behind the agentic workflows we build for our > $10M ARR clients. If you want to get access to these value drops before everyone else… you NEED to follow him!

Silicon Valley is the hub of GTM unicorns.

But have you seen what’s going on in Europe?

Giants are being built in countries with just 11M inhabitants 🇸🇪 🇧🇪

And it’s happening all over the continent.

Here are some of my favourite EU success stories:

1. Odoo 🇧🇪

Founded by Fabien Pinckaers, Odoo quitely grew to 40M€ MRR and is now valued at well above $5B.

They did that by breaking all the rules:

→ A generous Freemium model.
→ Kept it open source & community-powered.
→ Built 100s of apps, instead of just ONE block.

All the while: 

- his board was trying to get him fired.
- spending 7 years near bankruptcy.
- losing 16M€ from overnight

Today, it’s 6500+ employees & 750M€ in revenue in 2025.

I’m especially proud of this one, as a fellow Belgian 🇧🇪!


2. Lovable 🇸🇪

Founded by Anton Osika & Fabian Hedin… it’s the loudest success story of the year.

Lovable hit $200M ARR last week, one year after hitting $1M ARR.

At ColdIQ, we use it to build free tools for lead generation purposes.

Testing out prototypes required technical people. 
Most of our team is able to spin off a ‘free email finder’ or a ‘custom client dashboard’ in a day.


3. lemlist 🇫🇷

The French success story that should be studied by everyone in GTM.

Founded by Guillaume Moubeche, now led by Charles Tenot.

It includes lemlist, Taplio & now Claap under one umbrella.

Some things to takeaway:

- A 300K+ combined followers, employee-wide LinkedIn content strategy.
- Unseen build-in-public transparency by their Founder & the entire team.
- Bold acquisitions (i.e: Taplio, Claap) so their app ecosystem covers every GTM function.

At ColdIQ, they're our #1 choice for all our multichannel prospecting campaigns!


4. n8n 🇩🇪

They’ve been a staple in automation teams for some time…

But with the rise of AI agents… they became a category of one.

More modulable than their competitors, more powerful, less expensive… it’s an essential component of modern AI + GTM tech stacks.

It’s saving our team hours of work everyday!


Other GTM success stories across Europe:

🇨🇿 Apify
🇫🇷 Aircall
🇫🇷 arcads AI
🇫🇷 Argil
🇫🇷 Dust
🇫🇷 FullEnrich
🇫🇷 Hyperline
🇫🇷 Prospeo.io
🇬🇧 Attio
🇬🇧 ElevenLabs
🇬🇧 Synthesia
🇲🇰 HeyReach.io
🇪🇸 Genesy
🇪🇪 Pipedrive
🇦🇹 Storyblok
🇳🇱 Expandi
🇳🇱 Framer

… and the list goes on!

P.S: What EU SaaS is on your radar at the moment?

Most companies bet their entire LinkedIn strategy on the Founder.

We get the whole team involved:

Last month, this allowed us to sign 14 new deals, totalling ~$70,000 in MRR for our agency. Plus, another 16 customers won for our educational program.

It’s a win-win.

For the team:
→ They grow their brand, a precious asset they own… and that will benefit them whatever they decide to pursue.

For us:
→ They send visitors to our site and generate qualified leads every single day.

Everyone shares around their domain of expertise: 

- Ivan talks about ABM, LinkedIn Ads & Funnels.
- Millie shares tips on Founder-Led branding.
- Monika shares her best cold email rewrites.
- Kenny shares his latest n8n workflows.

… and the combined posting volume makes it challenging not to come across ColdIQ on your LinkedIn feed.

2026 will be the year of Employee-led branding.

Don’t miss this shift.

I just crossed 60,000 followers. LinkedIn got us to $6.5M+ ARR.

Here's every tool I used to grow my following:

1. Content Ideation

→ Taplio (go.coldiq.com/taplio)

I use their in-app feed to find outlier LinkedIn posts in my niche.

You can input keywords such as: "ai sales", "outbound" or "GTM" and then filter for posts that:

- include the above 'searched' keywords
- were posted within a month ago
- had 300 likes or more

I then reverse-engineer the structure, hook & CTAs of these high-performing posts to improve my own.

→ Scripe

Also great for content ideation. 

It lets you aggregate posts by author, which is another helpful way to find 'viral publications' or 'outliers' on a given topic.


2. Copywriting

→ Grammarly

As a non-native English speaker, I make lots of spelling mistakes. 

I use Grammarly's extension to correct my writing in real-time.

Doesn't sound too crazy, but this could be the most helpful application in my LinkedIn tech stack.

→ Claude

I use Claude to generate hook variations, repurpose past content & brainstorm new angles.


3. Visuals & Design

→ Figma / Adobe

My LinkedIn strategy relies a lot on visuals.

When made well, they multiply the reach of your publications up to 10X.

Our designers use either Figma or Adobe's suite to design our carousels & infographics.


→ Canva

My first-ever carousels published on here were made on Canva.

It is the most beginner-friendly app to create social media visuals.


4. Video Creation

→ OpusClip

I use Opus's AI features to automatically create short-form videos from my long-form content.

The output isn't as great as that of a professional editor...
But it's cost-effective.

And multiple AI-edited videos got me 50,000+ views on LinkedIn (while only taking me 2 minutes to generate).

→ Screen Studio

Screen Studio is my favourite Mac Screen recording app.

It's great to make video walkthroughs or tutorials because it automatically zooms/focuses on the parts of the screen you're actively working on.

It makes video outputs look much more fancy than they'd be otherwise.

→ Ezgif

I use Ezgif to create .GIF files out of my short audioless video content.

If you're planning to publish a < 15-second audio-less video on LinkedIn...

I'd recommend speeding it up and converting it into a GIF file.

I'm not 100% sure why, but it outperforms in terms of reach & engagement.


5. Content Planning

→ Notion

My central content hub.
It's where I collect ideas, draft them, and prepare my posts.

Notion also serves as my content calendar.


That's the entire stack I used to go from 0 to 60,000+ followers.

It's also the tech stack I plan to get past 100,000.

What tools did I miss?

Let me know 👇

P.S: If you want to grow your account, sell a B2B product, but don't have time to post... send a DM. 
We'll do it for you ✌️

From 0 to 60,000+ LinkedIn followers

We’re about to hit $7m ARR. Here’s the GTM workflow that signed us 70+ high-ticket clients: 

Step-by-step breakdown ↓

1. Our team publishes 250+ LinkedIn posts every month.

- We use Taplio to identify posts that outperformed.
- We study the hooks, formats & visuals of these outlier LinkedIn posts.
- We solve our prospects' pain points in our content pieces.

↳ This works so well, I want to do more. Hopefully reaching 500+ monthly posts across the ColdIQ team.


2. We spend $10,000+ a month promoting our most effective publications via LinkedIn Ads.

- We study what posts generate qualified meetings.
- We analyze which ICP books from the posts.
- We boost said post in front of said ICP.


3. We identify anonymous visitors & reach out likers/commenters who didn't schedule a call.

- On ColdIQ’s site: Instantly.ai & Midbound de-anonymise our visitors.
- On LinkedIn: Clay captures our social activity.


4. We route all our warm leads to Clay.


5. We use LLMs to Tier, Segment & Score prospects.

- Claygent automates research at scale on our inbound leads.
- OpenAI prompts segment out leads.
- We contact warm leads via LinkedIn, Email & the phone.


6. We enrich the contact information of our filtered leads.

- We use Prospeo.io, LeadMagic, Wiza to find emails adresses.
- We use Prospeo.io, FullEnrich to look up phone numbers.


7. We send DMs, emails & call ‘warm' prospects.

- We make our outreach concise & valuable.
- We use lemlist for multi-channel outreach
- We use Instantly.ai for email outreach.

- Expandi is another great option for LinkedIn outreach.


8. This workflow booked us 1,500+ meetings in 2025 & closed > $3M ARR already.

- It helped us grow to > 35 FTEs
- It helped us reach > $6.5M in yearly revenue.
- It helped our clients close $500K+ in revenue at > 3-10X ROI


P.S: Anything you’d improve in the workflow below to get us to $10M ARR?

I tested way too many AI Sales tools.

Here are the categories I’m closely watching in 2026:

1/ Workflow Builders

Why?

↳ They help you build advanced, multi-step, automated prospecting workflows.

Example use-case: Running a signal-based Clay campaign that scores leads, segments them into several tiers, adds an AI-personalized first line… and pushes contacts to your favourite sequencer. For 1,000+ leads. On autopilot.

Examples include:

→ Relevance AI
→ Outbond
→ Clay
→ n8n


2/ MCPs

Why?

↳ They enable AI agents to take actions by connecting to your tools. Without you needing to manually open them.

Example use-case: Connecting Claude MCP to Google Calendar so that it… 

[1] checks how many sales calls you have today
[2] researches each prospect
[3] provides relevant talking points for the qualified ones…
[4] cancels meetings with unqualified leads. 

All that, without opening your calendar app.

You can prompt via tools such as:
→ Cursor
→ Claude
→ VS Code
→ Mistral AI

And connect to your apps using:
→ Docker, Inc
→ Pipedream
→ Composio


3/ All-in-One Sales Platforms

Why?

↳ They consolidate every essential cold outreach feature within one platform.

Example use-case: Warming up domains, building a lead list, monitoring relevant signals, enriching contact data & automating email outreach (Instantly.ai) or multi-channel outreach (lemlist) without any other prospecting tool. In essence, running your entire prospecting campaign in one place.

Examples include:

→ Instantly.ai
→ Expandi
→ Artisan
→ lemlist


4/ Sourcing Agents

Why?

↳ They source data autonomously, given a set of prompts.

Example use-case: Sourcing a list of Sales Leaders, based in SF, in VC-based startups that have > 5X’d revenue 2 years in a row within the last 3 years… by simply telling Exa, in plain English, that this is the list you’re trying to build.

Examples:

→ Relevance AI
→ Outbond
→ Claygent
→ Tavily
→ Apify
→ Exa


5/ Conversation Intelligence

Why?

↳ They record meetings & extract relevant insights from your business conversations.

Example use-case: Reviewing your latest 100 sales calls via Attention’s agent to figure out the most frequent objections your sales team gets from prospects.

Examples:

→ Momentum.io
→ Fireflies.ai
→ Attention


6/ Signal Platforms

Why?

↳ They monitor intent signals to help you uncover prospects in buying mode.

Example use-case: Monitoring previous product buyers (champions) in Common Room, to pitch your solution when they move to a new company (that doesn’t use your product yet!)

Examples:

→ Common Room
→ TheirStack
→ Outbond
→ Clay


7/ AI SDRs

Why?

↳ They automate your prospecting entirely.

Example use-case: Letting Valley write your outreach, qualify your leads, monitor replies & answer on your behalf.

Examples:

→ Artisan
→ Valley

P.S: What AI Sales software category are you betting on in 2026?

AI Sales Categories for 2026

LinkedIn got me past $6M ARR. But Jake Trinder, the mastermind behind Instantly.ai & Clay's channels, argues YouTube is better.

His proof? He grew multiple channels from 0 to > 7-figure revenue from YouTube.

So we did a side-by-side comparison 👇

1. Core Focus

→ LinkedIn: Booking meetings by publishing relevant snackable content.

→ YouTube: Building trust & booking meetings via in-depth educational videos.


2. Key Rules to Win

LinkedIn: 

A. Find outlier/viral/proven publications using tools like Taplio.
B. Consistent high-quality posts relevant to your ICP.
C. Frequent engagement actions with your audience.
D. Optimized profile (banner, title, featured section).

YouTube:

A. Nail combination of thumbnail + title before recording.
B. Focus on quality. YouTube = "Winner takes all"
C. Deep research on titles, thumbnails & trends.


3. Posting Time & Frequency

→ LinkedIn: 3 to 7 posts per week. Same posting time every day.

→ YouTube: 1 video per week. Posting when audience is most online.


4. Top Software

→ LinkedIn:

- Content Ideation + Analytics: Taplio
- Visuals: Figma, Canva, OpusClip
- Writing: Claude, Grammarly

→ YouTube:

- Content Ideation: 1of10, Viewstats, vidIQ
- Production: Adobe Premiere Suite
- Recording: Tella, OBS Studio


5. Expected Reach

→ LinkedIn:

- Audience = B2B focused (i.e: sales, marketing, HR & tech buyers).
- Prospects browse the feed to educate or entertain themselves.
- Over 310,000,000 monthly active users.

→ YouTube:

- Audience = Broad, top-of-funnel (creators, entrepreneurs, founders).
- Audience is actively searching for the content you're creating.
- Over 2,500,000,000 monthly active users.


6. Engagement Expectation

→ LinkedIn: 

- Decent conversion rate. 'Easy' to produce content scale.
- You can reach out to post engagers (DMs).
- Leads are nurtured daily.

→ YouTube:

- High conversion rate from long-form content.
- Audience can binge-watch channels.
- Can't contact viewers directly.


7. Challenges

→ LinkedIn:

- Can take weeks/months before generating any leads.
- Staying consistent is hard.

→ YouTube:

- Lots of upfront work to get 1 good video out.
- Consequent investment in studio setup.
- Talking to a camera can feel weird.


If you had to pick one platform to scale your business, which would you choose?

P.S.: If you need help with YouTube, reach out to Jake. He's the best at growing B2B brands on there. If you need help on LinkedIn, send me a DM :)

Founder: “There are so many sales tools, how do I even pick?”
Me: "I run outbound for 75+ companies. Start here 👇"

(Pick just 1-2 tools per category)

1️⃣ Databases

Accurate data sourcing is the foundation for successful outbound.

You need at least one very reliable data platform.

Some of my favourites include:

1. Clay (starts at $149/mo)
↳ They aggregate 100+ data providers in one place, including as intent platforms and AI agents.

2. Openmart (from $149/mo)
↳ My favourite database for SMBs & local businesses.

3. LinkedIn Sales Navigator (from $99/mo)
↳ The O.G B2B database.

4. Exa’s websets (from $49/mo)
↳ List building agent that retrieves niche data based on plain English prompts.


2️⃣ Enrichment

Your sourced lists will often miss contact data (i.e: email addresses & phone numbers)

To enrich these, I recommend a combination of:

- Wiza (starts at $49/mo)
- FullEnrich (starts at $29/mo for 500 credits)
- Prospeo.io (starts at $39/mo for 1,000 credits)
- LeadMagic (starts at $99.99/mo for 10,000 credits)


3️⃣ Agents

AI agents best prospecting use-case is automating lead research.

Depending on use case, I'll use:

1. Relevance AI (starts at $19/mo)
↳ Ideal to build custom agentic workflows.

2. Claygent (starts $149/mo)
↳ Within Clay, best agent to perform at scale research on your lead lists.

3. n8n (starts 24€/mo)
↳ One of the most flexible, powerful & cost-effective workflow builder.


4️⃣ Signals

You can’t know for sure that companies are in-market for your services.
But you can make an educated guess by monitoring buying signals. 

Some reliable platform to source these signals include:

- Clay (starts at $149/mo)
- Common Room (starts at $1,000/mo)
- Trigify.io for social signals (starts at $149/mo)

lemlist also recently release a ton of signals within their all-in-one platform.


5️⃣ Outreach

Next up, you’ll want to contact your leads, while maximising the likelihood of your messages getting delivered.

Some great options include:

- Instantly.ai for email outreach (starts at $37/mo)

- Expandi for LinkedIn outreach (starts at $99/mo)

- lemlist for multichannel outreach (starts at 69€/mo)


6️⃣ Closing

Tech doesn’t replace a great seller, but they can help by:

1. Facilitating deals data logging, storing & cleaning: Attio (starts at 36€/mo)

2. Recording meetings,taking notes & gathering sales insights: Attention.

3. Capturing lead interactions, and routing insights to Salesforce: Momentum.io (from $69 per user per month)

4. Automating inboud routing: Default (starts at $500/mo)

5. Building clean proposals: Qwilr (starts at $39/mo)


P.S: Have you tried a great sales software recently?

Which one it is? 👇

Sales Technology Stack

The best B2B data is the one your competition doesn't have:

...and you can find it for less than $50/month ↓

Thus, if you want to extract data...

→ Via a marketplace of thousands of pre-built scraping workflows: Apify (go.coldiq.com/apify)

→ Through AI agents researching the web on your behalf: Apify, Clay, Relevance AI, Exa, Outbond.

→ Without exiting LinkedIn: Prospeo.io, lemlist, Expandi.

→ On dedicated pages: Instant Data Scraper, ZenRows.

→ By crawling search engines: Firecrawl, Perplexity.

...there's a tailor-made solution!

What's your go-to software for data scraping?

Data Scraping Software (2025)

How I get > 30% replies via LinkedIn DMs

By doing the opposite of the 100+ weekly pitches I get:

CONTEXT

I sent 5M+ outbound messages for my $6.5M+ ARR Agency.

Nowadays...

Answering DMs costs me more time than running campaigns.

I'm the CEO at a 33-person company.
(I can't imagine how much outreach execs in big orgs get)

That said, I know most execs check their inbox.
And many reply.

Here's how I decide whether I'll respond or not...

And how I changed my own outreach because of this ↓


✅  DMs offering free work

Some DMs offered a free landing page rewrite or samples of already-made work.

I ran prospecting campaigns and pitched free custom lead lists.
(These were getting me more positive replies than I could handle)

My recommendation: Imagine your prospect is an existing client. What's the first thing you'll do for them? Do it already and send it over!


✅ DMs asking to be referred

Let's say you:
1. Send a message based on a current initiative of ColdIQ
2. Searched who is in charge of this initiative.
↳ I'll gladly refer you to said person

PS: You can automate this 'play' via Clay by combining intent signals & retrieving a leader/manager in a specific department.


❌ DMs asking for time on the 1st touchpoint

Meetings are my personal hell.
I'm fighting every day to eliminate as many of them as possible.

If you're "just asking 15 min of my time" to pick my brain, I won't answer.


✅ DMs from ‘known’ people

An unfair truth in cold outreach: $WHO sends a message matters even more than WHAT the message is.

If you're a well-known executive, I'll most likely reply.

I saw this firsthand as I grew my LinkedIn to 60K+ followers...

The exact same message would perform better, without changing anything.

Pro tip: If you sell B2B products, build your brand on LinkedIn.


❌ Generic templated outreach

The only way to make impersonal, generic outreach work is to send at a massive volume (millions of messages).

LinkedIn doesn't allow such volume.

So you'd be better off doing this by email.
Or better yet... not at all.


✅ DMs sharing valuable insights

Jihad explained this better than I could under one of my posts:

"
The best "free work" isn't actually work → it's insights.

I send technical audits of prospects' platforms.
→ 5-minute analysis
→ 3 specific optimization opportunities 
→ No strings attached

Example: "Your checkout flow has a 23% drop-off at payment verification. Here's why + 2 quick fixes."

- Takes me 10 minutes.
- Shows immediate value.
- Demonstrates expertise without asking for anything.

The key: Make it so valuable they'd typically pay for it.

Generic "free consultation" = everyone does this.
Specific actionable insight = rare.
"

Solving prospects' issues before they pay you a dime is the fastest way to gain their trust.


🔘 Videos or Voice Notes

I listen to voice notes or watch videos.

It annoys people.
But if they're well done, they'll grab attention.

What's a DM you receive you could NOT ignore?

Share it 👇

30% LinkedIn DMs

AI agents are replacing human employees.

Funny enough, they operate in very similar ways:

The smartest agents don’t work alone.
They work in teams.

Some behave like assistants.
Others as managers.

And as with any sort of team, there are different ways to structure their collaboration.

To illustrate this:
We can look at how 3 multi-agent setups would handle the same task…

For example: Scheduling a quarter business review with an important client.


1️⃣ Hierarchical setup

A manager agent assigning tasks to its agent team members.

1. The manager receives a task = Schedule a business review.

2. It tells a subordinate agent to check potential times to meet with the clients.

3. Another agent checks product usage from the client. "Has usage recently dropped? Is engagement still strong?"

4. A 3rd agent drafts an email based on client availability & product usage: 

"Hey Achilles, it's been a while - wanted to ensure you're using the product to the fullest. How about a quick chat next week, Wednesday?”

5. The manager reviews everything and sends the email.


2️⃣ 'Human-in-the-Loop' 

A smart assistant tapping your shoulder when needed.

1. The agent drafts the business review email and finds some available times.

2. But… it sees the client gave negative feedback 2 weeks ago.

3. Before sending the email, it asks you: “Do you want to review the email before I send it?"

4. You make small tweaks, and you send it.


3️⃣ 'Sequential' setup

Like a factory or an assembly line where each person does one task and hands it off to the next.

1. 1st Agent asks: "Is a quarterly business review due?" based on the client's last meeting time.

2. 2nd Agent pulls client's usage data.

3. 3rd Agent drafts a short email.

4. 4th Agent sends the email to book the meeting.


So, when should you use which?

As a rule of thumb:

- Hierarchical setups work well for complex, multi-step tasks.

- Human-in-the-loop setups are recommended for high-stakes, sensitive tasks.

- Sequential setups for ordered workflows with clear dependencies.


P.S: What's one process in your team that would run better...
with some smart agents working behind the scenes? 👇

taplio

The Battle

Mohan ‎Muthoo 🇬🇧

Michel Lieben 🧠

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taplio

The Battle

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Michel Lieben 🧠

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