Lead generation is broken.

Too many companies:

- Try to generate leads themselves, but fail
- Hire a lead gen agency with bloated retainers who can’t deliver

Lead generation as a whole is always changing, so unless you’ve got a dedicated team
on it (that knows what they’re doing) — you can expect to overpay for underwhelming
results.

That said, in 2025 — you don’t need to try to generate leads yourself, or pay an
outsized retainers for subpar work.

With Leadbird, you:

- Don’t pay for overpriced retainers
- Only pay per meeting-ready-lead we deliver
- Get the expertise of career outbound salespeople

We achieve this for you through:

- Targeted lead list building
- Domain + inbox set-up and warm-up
- Proven cold email copywriting principles
- Done-for-you cold email campaign management

Book a free demo from the link in my bio to join over 115 active clients getting
high-quality, meeting-ready-leads every single month.

Talk soon,
Nick

Nick Abraham

Maybe I’m falling for ragebait, but cold email has let me:

(1) Drop out of college.

(2) Grow my own agency to multi 7-figures of revenue.

(3) Employ 30+ people around the world full-time.

(4) Buy my sister and Dad cars.

(5) Rent my dream apartment.

(6) Buy my first 5 properties.

(7) Work with 100s of businesses.

(8) Make lifelong friends.

(9) Give my future family a financial head start.

Just remember, for every one person that dunks on cold outbound, there's another person whose life was changed because of it.

I send 2M+ cold emails and 1M+ LinkedIn DMs per month for 1,000+ active clients across Leadbird and Cleverly

Gemini 3 cannot sell a $10k service package.
GPT 5.1 cannot sell a $10k service package.
Llama 4 cannot sell a $10k service package.
Opus 4.5 cannot sell a $10k service package.
DeepSeek-R1 cannot sell a $10k service package.

A great human seller can.

I posted the below tweet earlier this year. If I could edit it, I would say:

“If I had a son, I would preach that you can either be top 1% in whatever job you have or risk losing it to AI’.”

Because “AI is going to eliminate [insert role]” is surface level thinking, and too broad of a generalization.

It is, of course, going to eliminate roles, but not roles in their entirety. 

Instead, it will eliminate the bottom 99% of certain roles while accelerating the top 1% of others.

Sales is a great example.

AI can handle a lot of the outreach process, even including script writing. What it can’t do is work a deal the way a human would.

The same can be said for a lot of software dev work, in my opinion. Great engineers will never be out of work, but average/mediocre ones likely will.

In short: if you want to AI-proof yourself, become top 1% at what you do. Easier said than done, I know…but very much worth it.

I jokingly posted this and SO many people commented or messaged about Agency 3 and asked for an intro. This is a huge problem.

This post was a joke. No lead gen agency worth their salt would ever take a deal in which they generate leads for clients, and only get paid if/when the client closes them.

We can't control what the client does after we generate the lead.

- What if they simply don’t engage with them?
- What if the lead asks to follow up later, and they don’t?
- What if their sales team just can’t close for their product/service?
- What if their pricing is way off the market norm?
- What if their reviews online are terrible, and the prospects drop out pre-call?
- What if they have no social proof and can't build trust with prospects?

There is so much that is out of the lead generation agency's control. 

Moreover, the client will have no skin in the game and not value the opportunity if they have no risk associated 

The agency can do their job perfectly and even go above and beyond and still make zero dollars because of something on client’s side.

Just a word of warning!

Excited and grateful to share I’ve reached 20,000 followers here on LinkedIn!

Almost 3 years ago, with 3,000 followers, I started posting the most valuable content I could every day (sometimes 2x per day).

Since then, I’ve been able to:

- Meet lots of awesome people I now consider friends.
- Learn a ton about outbound, GTM, and marketing.
- Attract incredible clients we’re extremely grateful for

Whether you were one of the first 3,000 or a part of the next 17,000, I truly want to say thank you. None of it's possible without you.

To that point, I only ask of you is to comment what type of content you want to see more of moving forward!

Super excited to show off our new client portal that makes it far easier for clients to track replies!

Before, we had clients logging into Smartlead to check email replies, then switching to a LinkedIn inbox manager for DM responses, then tracking cold calls elsewhere.

The entire lead gen operation was fragmented across three interfaces that didn't really interconnect.

Clients would miss responses because they forgot to check one of the platforms. They'd get confused about which channel was performing better. 

The biggest sign of this was support tickets kept coming in asking where to find specific replies.

So, we effectively rebuilt our client portal, using MasterInbox as the common thread. Now when clients log in, they see everything in one feed (emails, calls, DMs) that looks completely native to our platform.

Most importantly, clients have commented on how much easier this is for them.

Not to mention, it helps us, too. We've eliminated ~80% of the "where do I find my replies?" support requests. 

As for performance, clients are responding to leads faster because they're not losing track of conversations across multiple tools.

We're rolling this out to all clients because the upgrade is that significant.

Of the 1,000s of client campaigns we've run this year, the best-performer in recent memory was for a yoga studio.

I am big on local lead generation, and this is a perfect example of it. 

This yoga studio hired us to reach out to other businesses to try to get them to book group classes, retreats, off-sites, etc.

So, we scraped lead lists of local businesses and wrote a hyper-local cold email campaign to go with it.

And though you might expect the best performing campaign to be for an agency with a great offer or a hot new SaaS product, this blew others out of the water 

The point is that cold email for local businesses is wildly underrated. If you have or know of a local business interested in generating leads via cold email, feel free to reach out.

We’d love to replicate this.

If you’ve ever pulled leads from Apollo or anything else using “Industry” filters, read this post to make them way more accurate:

They have miscategorized companies in the industry that aren’t relevant to your ICP.

We've been using a new method to get our refined TAM into one list.

See, most lead lists give you name, email, company, LinkedIn URL, and a generic "industry" tag. The problem is that those industry classifications are wrong a lot of the time.

You end up messaging wrong accounts or missing perfect fits.

We found a way to fix this using data already in your lists.

Every company LinkedIn URL comes with an "About Us" section where they describe exactly what they do.

Process:

- Take 3-5 dream clients.
- Go to their LinkedIn About Us sections.
- Pull out every relevant keyword - product terms, customer segments, pain points, industry language. Build a keyword bank.

This takes 20 minutes.

Now layer this on top of broad industry tags. Instead of just "Healthcare," filter for Healthcare companies whose About Us mentions your specific keywords.

Gets you from the neighborhood into the right house.

This is basically advanced semantic filtering without expensive AI tools.

Use the company's own words to qualify them instead of relying on generic industry buckets.

My agency has 283 active clients. If we don't get to 1,000 by the end of 2026, I'll view the year as a failure. There are 3 things we need to do to get there:

LEVER 1 – Churn Reduction

We want to cut our churn in half.

Our sales team don't lie to prospects, but much of the churn does come from misaligned expectations around lead generation, so we are investing a lot in making that extremely clear up front.

LEVER 2 – More Time On Growth

This sounds obvious, but few people do it in practice. It's so easy to get caught up in day-to-day operations and not spend enough time on top of funnel activity.

There's so much more we could be doing (YouTube, ads, events, etc.) here.

LEVER 3 – Make Sure Our Team Levels Up

To serve 1,000 clients, we need to make sure our team is operating at all levels.

We had them at off-sites in Dubai and Cape Town in the past few months, and we'll do another one next year.

More tangibly, we are trying to get them more ingrained in lead gen overall.

We are asking them to go follow other leaders in the space and consume their content on a regular basis.

To me, this is an undeniable way to level up.

This comes off the heels of rebuilding our client portal and making it crystal clear and easy to operate. If you have any questions or want to see more on this, let me know.

Every time my family or friends came over and used my washroom, they'd come out laughing at me.

Not because of something in the washroom, but because of something they saw in my shower.

See, back then I used to write the most important goals in my life down and stick them on the wall in my shower.

This way, I would quite literally be forced to stare at them day in and day out.

I've always been of the belief that seeing these types of things written out on a repetitive basis just makes your brain tick different.

And my shower notes were the perfect example.

Years ago, doing $1M of ARR was a complete pipe dream.

Today, doing $1M of ARR means something went horribly wrong.

I'm extremely proud of this and urge you to write down your goals in a place you'll be forced to read them daily (shower, desk, phone background, etc.)

One of the most common replies you'll get to cold emails at scale is "how much does it cost".

Generally, you'll either:

A) Give the price. Without further context or sales tactics, people automatically see this as a cost and have a hard time justifying the ROI. This usually makes it harder to get on a call.

B) Give a range. This is a bit better, but depending on budget, it still may be hard to paint ROI via email. You need to give a fairly broad range.

Now, very few businesses selling >$1000 packages are public about pricing.

I think that should change.

Your pricing should be publicly available somewhere, ideally on a dedicated page that does a lot of the selling for you.

This might look like:

1. Landing page with 8-minute VSL, full of social proof, with pricing in the middle.

2. Static pricing page, full of social proof + process walkthrough.

This changes your reply from:

"Sure, our pricing is XYZ"

to

"Sure, feel free to have a look here [link] for more information on that".

This way, instead of your prospect just seeing the amount of money you want them to pay you, they get a much fuller picture of the value you provide.

Job titles are lying to you about who actually does the work. 

If you're selling something without a clean buyer title, your targeting is probably broken.

Here's how we fixed ours:

Outbound breaks down when your product is ambiguous. 

Say you sell financial forecasting software. 

Who owns forecasting depends on the company (Finance, FP&A, Operations, Strategy, or even founders, etc.).

A "Finance Manager" could handle AR, AP, Treasury, or actually build forecasts. You can't tell from the title.

So we stopped guessing titles and started targeting the actual work.

Layer 1: Department filtering

Start with departments where your problem sits. For forecasting: Finance, FP&A, Operations, Strategy.

Layer 2: LinkedIn description keywords

Every user writes a description under their title:

- "Own the quarterly forecast"
- "Build headcount forecasts"
- "Drive variance analysis"
- "Maintain the revenue model"

These keywords self-identify who does the work.

Instead of targeting "Finance Manager" and hoping, target "Finance Manager who mentions 'forecast' and 'financial model' in their description."

The process:

1. Pick 1-2 relevant departments
2. Extract 8-20 keywords tied to your product
3. Filter people mentioning those keywords in descriptions
4. Hit people who self-identify as doing the work

Example query:

Department: Finance/FP&A/Operations

Description contains: "forecast" OR "financial model" OR "budget"

This surfaces only people who explicitly manage forecasts.

We've been running this across ambiguous products and have seen both higher reply rates and better conversations.

If I were in charge of business development at a local blue collar business like this and needed to win jobs with cold email, I would:

1. Scrape a list of local businesses with an office location.
2. Write the following email copy:

—

[name], just wanted to touch base. We're an HVAC company in the area at [address].

Curious - do you have a go-to person for any kind of AC/heating repairs?

—

You might get a couple of jobs from this, but that is not really the goal with this kind of work.

The "magic" is what happens after.

3. Enroll all positive replies into a weekly nurture sequence (case studies and value).

Do this locally for 90-120 days.

It's the most surefire way to make sure that when a business' AC/heating breaks, they think of you right away.

Scaled to thousands of businesses across a major metro area, you're looking at serious pipeline.

Plus, a VERY small portion (if any) of your competitors are doing this.

To that point, if your business or someone you know would benefit from a system like this, comment or DM me!

The perfect cold email has:

- Relevance = Reason for reaching out.
- Personalization = Part that only makes sense to them.
- Offer = Outcome you'll provide.
- Social proof = Proof you've done it.
- CTA = Low-risk ask that puts the ball in their court.

Not complicated!

We've had clients we book 100s of meetings for per month, and others who churned because "cold email doesn't work".

The difference in how they operate:

Ones booking 100s of meetings:

- Willingly give away free value
- Take suggestions on optimizing offer
- Understand it's a volume game
- Don't overanalyze campaigns
- Chase leads we send them religiously

Ones who are convinced cold email doesn't work:

- Refuse to give away free value because it'll bring "bad leads".
- Refuse to optimize their offer to make it cold-ready.
- Want to send to a "targeted" list of 76 accounts.
- Analyze campaigns in relation to "industry standards" they Googled
- Let leads sit dormant for days and weeks after we submit them

It isn't exactly rocket science. This isn't to say we're perfect at what we do with every campaign.

It is to say we operate based on the data we have, and our data shows that this works.

We're doing 60,000 cold calls per month for clients and ourselves right now. Our number 1 learning for what converts to appointments and what doesn't has nothing to do with cold calling tech or set up.

It strictly has to do with the caller's tone.

One of the big pitfalls of outsourced callers is that they come into the call with no tonality.

Typical "Hey, do you have 10 seconds to speak? I'd love to show you how we could..."

Callers will sound robotic because you are grading them on the amount of dials they do per day. So, they speed-run through the list 

The much better play to run is:

1. Ensure your caller has a curious, inquisitive tone.
2. Ensure they don't get into the routine of sounding like a robot.

It sounds like a simple fix, but it's really not.

This is the difference between booking appointments from cold calling and wasting a ton of money.

How it feels when you realize you can just send more cold emails to get more leads:

We’re sending 260k cold emails Thursday-Sunday this week.

So many sellers view holidays and weekends as time to pause campaigns. I just don't see the point in doing this…mainly for a few reasons:

1. Because so many sellers pause their campaigns, inboxes are way less crowded.

2. Often, you’re targeting someone senior with outbound. Senior people, even though less on weekends, are more likely to check email (even once per day) during the holidays.

3. Generally, people are in more relaxed, friendly moods on a Thanksgiving Friday than they are on a random November Tuesday morning. This bodes well for reply rate.

Disclaimer:

You can expect ~50% of your typical campaign performance in terms of positive reply rate during the holidays. Yes it's reduced, but it's not worth stopping sending altogether.

TLDR: Don’t pause campaigns this holiday!

If I had to increase positive reply to meeting booked rate for any B2B business, here are the exact steps I'd take:

(1) Set up an automation that enriches positive replies with all relevant info (LI URL if I don't already have it, phone number, etc)

(2) Send them a LinkedIn connection request post-positive reply.

(3) Cold call them after that as well.

(4) If the meeting still isn't booked, I'd bump the cold email reply, mentioning I called and left a voicemail. Then, I’d follow up one more time after that.

(5) If they STILL haven't booked, I'd set up a weekly nurture newsletter for all prospects that fit this mould. Each email would have a CTA to book a call.

The point is that you reach them on all platforms.

If you need to set this up:

- Find out what data you have available after each list scrape.

- Set up waterfall enrichment to find what you’re missing after a positive reply (phone number, LI profile, etc.)

- Outline a process for you/your sellers to walk through post-positive reply.

- Use your CRM or beehiiv to set up a weekly newsletter nurture sequence (52 emails comprised of social proof + value).

The more you reach them, the better chance you have. It's not that difficult, but a lot of companies struggle with this.

- client with $100,000 LTV

Client: We only got 3 leads this month.

Me: And?

Client: We are going to have to churn.

Me: Why?

Client: We're clearly not getting enough volume for this to work.

Me: Ok, let's run the numbers. Your average LTV is $100,000 right?

Client: Yes.

Me: Okay, so, if we charge you $300 per lead, we can generate 100 leads that you close 0% on, and you'd STILL be at breakeven with us.

Client: Yeah, but we don't close at 0%. We close at 10-15%.

Me: Exactly. Let's even cut that in half and take 5%. If you pay us $300 per lead and close at 5%, you'd pay $6000 in lead generation costs for $100K in rev.

Client: Oh.

Me: Do you see why you don't need a lot of leads for this to work?

Client: Yes.

We have 60,000 monthly cold calls worth of data to show that prospects absolutely still pick up the phone.

Yet, still, deniers will say that it’s not worth their time, or that nobody picks up the phone, or my favorite: “When you pull the list, you’ll end up with office numbers and not personal ones!”.

(for the record: It is incredibly easy to pull personal mobile phone numbers from lead lists).

My point is that you absolutely shouldn’t listen to people who’ve never given a channel a fair shake about whether or not it works.

If you did:

1. You’d never send a DM because “inboxes are crowded”.
2. You’d never send a cold email because “it doesn’t work”.
3. You’d never make a cold call because “nobody picks up the phone”.

In reality, cold calling and quite literally all other channels “work” if executed correctly and for long enough.

Heading into 2026, outbound marketers will have to multi-thread more and more, meaning it’s likely going to be time to pick up the phone.

Just remember: It does work.

C17 Lab

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Clay

Certified Enterprise Partner

Smartlead

Instantly.ai

Square

Head | Channel & Product Partnerships

SIXT

Director

Booking.com

Head | Portfolio Acquisition

CEO at Morning Leads | We make it unreasonable for prospects to ignore you • Top Certified Clay & Smartlead Agency •

To make an ungodly amount of money, you’ve got to grow your business. 

You can only grow your business in two ways.

1. Get more customers

2. Make them worth more

To get more customers, you need to get more leads.

Getting leads is simpler and easier than you think.

1. Make really good stuff ➜ Your offer

2. Give it away for free ➜ Your lead magnet

In short, you want to increase someone’s conviction that they will receive value in the future if they respond to the message you send.

All things being equal, when you double your leads, you double your business.

C17 Lab’s whole mission is to get prospects to show interest in what you sell and double your business.

Enzo Carasso 🧲

I'm a Top 1% sender on Smartlead - by volume AND performance

Last month alone: 


→ 2.7M cold emails sent 
→ Average 20% positive reply rate across millions of cold emails
→ 4,100+ leads generated 
→ 600+ meetings booked with emails and phone (using BetterContact)

Ask me anything.

Founder @ C17 Lab | We Engineer Unstoppable Pipelines | c17.ai

My accountant hates when I do this, but I let certain clients run campaigns a little bit longer so they can see the ROI before clearing invoices.


Why? When you know your system works, you can afford to prove it first.

Outbound is the hardest acquisition channel - and that's precisely why it's valuable. When done right, it gives you the ability to turn your top of funnel on and off at will.

Here's the reality: prospects exist on a spectrum of awareness and trust.

𝟏 = Most Informed | 𝟓 = Least Informed

𝟏. Brand/Content: They know you. They booked a call knowing what you sell and what problem you solve.
𝟐. Warm Intro: Someone vouched for you. They booked a call because they trust the referral.
𝟑. Warm Outreach: You know them, they know you. Familiarity exists.
𝟒. Paid Media - They discovered you through enough ads exposure. They booked a call because of your offer/lead magnet caught their attention.
𝟓. Cold Outbound - They've never heard of you before receiving your 75-word message in their inbox. They booked a call because of the offer you made.

Cold outbound sits at #5. The furthest point from a sale. The longest cycle. The most friction.

But in their first 57 days, we booked 84 meetings and our client closed 2 deals. 82%+ qualification rate. 77.38% show rate. 4.5 leads per day.

The difference? An offer designed specifically for cold audiences.

Most companies try to sell the same way to cold prospects as they do to warm. It doesn't work like that.

When you design for uninformed buyers with outbound in mind, you accept that sales cycles will be longer. Prospects need more proof, more hand-holding, more work.

But if that's the price for controllable pipeline? It's worth it every time.

You've seen these OpenAI trophies all over your feed.

OpenAI doesn't give these out for free.

Take a guess - how much did I have to spend to receive this award?



Drop your number below. 👇

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The Battle

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