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

friEND
girlfriEND
boyfriEND

You know what doesn't END?

A well-run campaign with a great offer targeting 5,000 net new prospects per month.

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

As expected, outbound marketers are freaking out about Google's AI Inbox update, with some calling it the death of cold email. I’m here to tell you not to panic.

Here’s why this won’t kill cold email as long as you’re half-decent at it, and willing to put the work in:

(1) First of all, this isn’t currently being deployed on Workspace emails (only personal). That means you literally don’t need to worry for the time being.

(2) For when that roll out does happen, Google will not have it easy. Enterprises don't want AI to read or index their data.

This has been why enterprise AI adoption has been so slow, and Google isn't exempt.

(3) Even if SOMEHOW, this got deployed to every Workspace inbox, people will find workarounds and loopholes within 7 days (just like we did for every other infrastructure change).

The ONLY people who can potentially suffer here are people who are weak at cold email and want a low-effort, high-results motion.

And they shouldn't be sending cold emails anyway.

If I told you to pick all AI-written emails out of your inbox, I bet you could do so with 90% accuracy. It brings up an interesting point:

AI in outbound is great, but so many people are going way too overboard.

People will use Claygent + another prompt to come up with crazy, “human-looking” lines that sound great on paper but rarely get executed well against an entire lead list.

You might get some right on the nose, but the majority of them will certainly sound a little “off”, thereby killing your campaign altogether.

The variance, even with quality checks, is a little too high (as of Jan 2026…because this will certainly change).

The “right” way to handle this right now is using it to find super simple variables (i.e. company case study name) and entering those variables into human-written sentences.

If you have any other use cases that actually* work, drop them below.

There is no bigger waste of time in outbound than the debate over warm-up pools and which ones to use.

Take it from someone who bought into the hype before (I literally tried to build a company solely focused on this, promising the same stuff a ton of vendors do today): Just use Smartlead’s warm-up pool and move on.

In fact, private warm-up pools can be even riskier than public ones, considering that Seeds can burn out (ask me how I know 🙄).

At the time of writing this, we have ~130,000 inboxes in the Smartlead pool and will continue to add as we need them.

In short: There are a million other things you should spend time worrying about regarding outbound. Your warm-up pool isn’t one of them.

PS - This was a part of Smartlead’s roundtable from last week. It was an awesome time, and I highly recommend watching the replay on YouTube if you couldn’t make it. Thanks to Vaibhav Namburi for having us!

undefined undefined

Hey, thanks for replying. 

Here's the guide:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ogdq83o7sRMARFopD_t_-nqHF0XIOPsD/view?usp=share_link

Leadbird

P.S. If you’re an established agency or SaaS with a GREAT offer and want leads — Leadbird can help

… and we’ll do it on a Pay-Per-Lead basis.

Book today: https://www.leadbird.io/book-a-call

Spintax Guide

Tool

Article

Message

yuri

90% of the time someone asks me about cold email infrastructure, I tell them to take a step back and consider what actually matters.

Yes, at scale and at the highest level of outbound, the infrastructure you use has a material impact on performance.

But (and I don’t mean to come off as arrogant in saying this), most of the time people ask this, they have issues with the fundamentals of their outbound operation that render the infrastructure question irrelevant.

Things like:

1. Company names not being formatted properly (ex: still having “LLC” or “Inc.” in the name).

2. Having emojis / special symbols in contacts’ first names.

3. Not properly cleaning and formatting prospects’ job titles.

4. Having a lead list that isn’t well-targeted.

5. Not having basic copy variance set up.

These are things that come much before advanced infrastructure, yet people seem to overlook.

My advice: Get all of the above and the rest of the cold email fundamentals down first before even starting to worry about advanced infrastructure.

You’ll save time, money, and headaches.

Something to keep in mind when you see lead generation agency owners flexing crazy Smartlead / Instantly screenshots on the timeline:

Anyone with half a brain knows how to get a campaign to a 10% reply rate and 60% positive reply rate.

It doesn’t come from being some type of cold email wizard.

It’s simply putting an extremely low-friction CTA in with some type of money-back guarantee.

And to be clear, nothing is wrong with that. We still do it for certain clients, where it makes sense for the offer.

But, flexing this to try to show prospects that these are typical results is just silly.

Sure, there may be some people that aren't super familiar with outbound that are impressed by this.

But, there's also a cohort of people who are very familiar with it and know exactly what led to that performance, thereby degrading your credibility instead of adding to it.

You’re better off showing “worse” results for a much harder campaign!

You, not a $32B company: I might burn my TAM!

Ramp, a $32B company: We must email every decision-maker on earth 10 times per year.

As silly as it sounds, it’s true: If you play your cards right, it’s impossible to burn your TAM with outbound.

Playing your cards right, in this regard, means coming up with fresh and unique angles to re-market to the same prospects.

Ramp has mastered this.

They have different reps reach out at different times with overall solid emails.

Though it feels like they’re always in my inbox, I’ve never once felt pestered, spammed, or annoyed.

They’re doing this tastefully, with personalization and relevance.

And if Ramp isn’t worried about burning their TAM, there’s a great chance you shouldn’t be either.

My advice to you: Figure out ways to reach out to the same prospects that weren’t interested or didn’t respond prior in unique ways, and you’ll never worry about TAM burn again.

I would love to tell you that the solution to all your lead gen problems is the intricate Clay workflow I spent 43 hours building, but that’s not true. For 90% of teams struggling to generate leads, the problem is much simpler:

A bad offer.

Your offer, above all else, has the biggest impact on whether or not you book calls from cold email.

To that point, I can’t tell you the amount of conversations we’ve had with clients that amounted to us trying to convince them to improve their offer and make it more suitable for outbound.

Because so many of them simply don’t say anything special or that peaks the prospect’s interest.

Here’s a real example we dealt with:

The client sold CRM implementation services.

They wanted to run with messaging along the lines of: “We help HubSpot users market better and get the full use of their CRM.”

…so can every other company in their inbox.

The right way to think about this (and how we did so for this client) was to instead sell an outcome.

So, we transitioned the offer to strictly companies that used HubSpot, and saying:

“{name] - most HubSpot users don’t have a nurture re-engagement flow. I’d love to help re-book 10-15 appointments onto your calendar by building you one.

Interested in speaking?”

This email has a much higher likelihood of being responded to than the prior one, because you directly promise an outcome instead of using vague corporate messaging.

Let me know if you have any questions on doing this successfully.

Alex Hormozi says he books 4x more appointments when he calls his leads immediately after showing interest.

If you’re sending outbound and want to systemize this so that you can do it at scale, follow this process:

Tech / vendors you’ll need:

- Masterinbox.com
- LeadMagic
- Salesfinity
- No Accent Callers

—

1. Build correct tagging within Master Inbox to identify positive replies.

2. Set up an automation to automatically enrich positive replies to pull those leads’ phone numbers via LeadMagic.

3. Build the simple automation to update the contact within Master Inbox and set two tag: “interested” and “phone number found”.

4. Set up the automation to push to a call list in Salesfinity for your rep (via No Accent Callers) to call immediately.

I can’t put the same “4x improvement” tag on this, but we have seen a much better appointment set rate after implementing a flow to call our leads faster.

Comment if you want me to make a video on building these automations / setting up the system.

If someone tells you they can get you consistent leadflow from outbound in 30 days or less, don’t listen.

We send over 2 million cold emails per month for almost 300 clients… trust me, it takes 60-90 days to properly get consistent lead flow coming from outbound if you’re starting from zero.

BUT

There are some things you can do to speed up the process that we are implementing across the client base.

Namely, there are 7 types of campaigns you can keep always on and running in the background, additional to your actual campaign copy. 

Though these won't put a hundred calls per month on your calendar, they are certainly worth running and do not take much input or upkeep at all.

I break down each of them in detail in the carousel below, so be sure to save it:

Always-On Campaigns

Google your name right now. What comes up?

Does your website show up?

If so, does it have a VSL?

Is it full of case studies and customer interviews?

What about your LinkedIn and X profiles?

Are they optimized and active?

Are you showing off your expertise?

This might sound overboard, but this is exactly what goes through a prospect’s head when you email them.

The first thing 90% of them do is Google your name.

If you can’t show that you’re a real person with a real business that solves real problems for real clients, you’re dead in the water.

Really, cold outbound is nothing more than a trust game.

You need to make it so that someone who doesn’t know you one bit automatically trusts you. And you do so by optimizing everything I talked about above.

If you don’t have those things in check, much of your outbound is just a waste of time.

Alex Hormozi famously says that if you want more leads, you should dedicate the first half of your day to getting in front of more people.

Whether that’s content, paid ads, or however else, you need to be getting in front of people.

Outbound, generally, will be both the cheapest and easiest to generate results from immediately.

And let me tell you after doing this first-hand: Alex Hormozi is right about this.

In college, I started an Instagram growth agency.

I did everything I thought I needed to do:

- Make a logo
- Put up website
- Form LLC
- Post blogs

And when all of that was done, I looked up and still had zero people paying me.

That’s when I started dedicating my entire day to messaging prospects and seeing if they’d get on a call.

The business hit $10,000/mo of revenue in the months that followed.

The point:

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of sales ops and revenue tech out there, but most of the time, all you need to do is get yourself in front of more prospects.

Shreya Batra

We manage deliverability for 130,000+ inboxes with Hypertide.io. At that volume, you can't afford to baby underperforming domains. Our 4-step process for handling deliverability issues:

Step 1: Flag problems early

We monitor inbox performance daily. If a domain is underperforming by 40%+ vs that client's average, it gets flagged automatically.

Step 2: Kill it without losing capacity

We delete the domain using Hypertide Layover. The domain gets removed from billing immediately, but sending still works for 18 days. This gives us breathing room without sudden volume drops.

Step 3: Replace while the old one's still running

During those 18 days, new infrastructure gets spun up and warmed properly. This works so that there’s loss in total sending capacity.

Step 4: Protect the replies

Once the old domain shuts off completely, Hypertide Relay kicks in. All replies from the deleted domain automatically forward to the new infrastructure. Importantly, there are no leads missed and no broken threads.

Quite importantly, we don't try to save domains that are already burnt.

A lot of agencies waste weeks trying to nurse underperforming infrastructure back to health. Using this system, we just assume domains will fail and build systems that swap them out seamlessly.

As a result, capacity never drops and your deliverability stays clean. Let me know if you have any questions on this.

Local lead generation is so underrated that we started asking all clients (not just ones with local businesses) if they’re open to it on the onboarding form, so that we can run this campaign.

No matter what anyone tells you, cold email is most definitely getting harder. Each day, we have to think harder about the best way to get in front of prospects in a way that stands out.

This local lead generation play is exactly it.

We:

1. Call out that we’re in the area.

2. Casually mention what we do and share how we did so.

3. Use a soft, casual CTA to gauge interest.

Yes, this is of course harder to scale in that there are finite local businesses you can sell to. But, in most cases and for most offers, this is worth trying.

If I were a local general contractor, for example, I know I’d be inclined to work with an SEO agency in my area as opposed to one on the other side of the country. There’s a local preference there that you can tap into.

If you have anecdotes on local lead generation working well for you, leave them below.

After spending $2M to send 30,000,000+ cold emails for 500+ clients, this is my number one learning about outbound:

Offer. Is. King.

You hear everyone say it, but nobody really internalizes it.

You can have:

- 3-4 blocky paragraphs
- 2-3 links
- Images
- OK-but-not-great targeting
- Basic infrastructure

…and still outperform the “best” outbound teams who spend thousands of dollars trying to optimize all of the above, as long as your offer is strong.

Strong offer = more replies.

More replies = less spam risk.

Less spam risk = more replies.

The cycle repeats.

Before you try to optimize for anything else, make sure your offer is strong to begin with.

I mean this diplomatically, but if you can’t get cold email responses from your ICP, it is not because inboxes are crowded. It’s likely one or more of the following factors:

1. Bad offer
2. Weak email
3. No social proof
4. All of the above

The simplest way to get responses is following this workflow, which attacks all of the above issues:

1. Come up with a no-brainer offer that the prospect would feel stupid saying no to (i.e. performance, money-back guarantee, etc.)

2. Use Apollo to find the email of the right job title to sell to at the company (might be CEO, might not be).

3. Do a baseline level of research (or use Clay) to write a line personal enough to the decision-maker.

4. Put it all together with a template like this:

{{name}} - saw {{personalized line}}.

Just curious, if I could {{generate result}}, would you be interested in speaking?

Only asking because we helped {{company}} do exactly that, and figured {{their company}} might want something similar.

Worth a chat?

If you do this right, you will get responses. Period.

I uploaded this video on November 18, 2024 saying the only 3 channels you need to get 50 calls/month and blow past $1M in revenue are:

- Cold email
- Cold calling
- LinkedIn

It was true back then, but is far more true just 13 months later.

The truth is, as much as nobody likes to admit it, cold email is getting harder. We’re no longer in the 2021 glory days, where seemingly anyone with a few inboxes could book calls from the channel.

Yes, it’s still viable (and still our bread and butter), but you’d be foolish not to diversify into cold calling and LinkedIn DMs (the right way) as you solidify cold email.

After working with 500+ clients and having 283 active right now, there are 3 things I wish I did on Day 1 of my agency.

(they would've made me much wealthier today)

1. Become an expert on my financials early.

This is so easy to overlook but ridiculously important.

At any point when asked, you should know your numbers to a T.

- What was last month's revenue?
- What was last month's gross margin?
- What was last month's net margin?
- What was last month's profit?

The more you can get in the routine of checking and understanding this, the better.

2. Make demos booked your north star.

You should wake up every day trying to improve that metric.

Every single day. Forget "marketing" and "growth" and "building the brand".

Every day, wake up and figure out how to put more meetings on your calendar, and you will grow.

3. Keep fulfillment as simple as possible while still being able to get the results you promise.

The more complex, the harder it gets to maintain.

Once you have these in place, and you can communicate your offer + results in a non-gimmicky way, you're on the right path.

If you have any questions on this, let me know.

We got to 0-10 clients with outbound, but what took us from 10-30 clients was something completely different: Referrals.

How we did it:

1. Put a question on onboarding form: "Is there anyone in your network that you think could benefit from this service?"

2. Client would often think of someone and put their name/email.

3. We would manually reach out saying "[name] is a customer of ours and said you might be a fit for out services - worth a chat?"

This worked because it was easy for our client to think of someone, and the person they thought of would likely think "well if they're using this service, there's likely something to it".

NOTE: This is far easier when you have a strong offer + social proof to lean on!

Me: I want to add cheesy openers to your cold emails.

Client: Absolutely not. That's way too unprofessional for our brand.

Me: What's unprofessional about it?

Client: Lines like 'I'm sure your inbox is busier than a bee in a flower shop'? That sounds ridiculous. What will prospects think of us?

Me: They'll think you're human instead of another boring corporate email.

Client: But we're a serious B2B company. We can't sound like we're joking around.

Me: How many meetings are you booking per week right now?

Client: Maybe 2 or 3.

Me: From how many emails sent?

Client: We're sending about 1,000 per week.

Me: So your professional emails that barely get any meetings are protecting your brand better than emails that actually get responses?

Client: Well, when you put it like that...

Me: Look, I get it. It feels weird. But these openers work because they cut through the noise.

Everyone else is sending the same I hope this email finds you well garbage.

Client: What if prospects think we're not serious?

Me: The prospects who judge you for a cheesy opener weren't going to buy from you anyway.

The ones who reply are the ones who appreciate authenticity.

Client: I just don't want to hurt our reputation.

Me: Your reputation is already being hurt by emails that get ignored.

Let's test it for two weeks. If it doesn't work, we'll go back to boring.

Client: Fine. But if my CEO sees this...

Me: He'll see the meeting bookings.

Dhruv Patel

Co-founder @ Saleshandy

Hey there,  

I'm a guy who wears many hats, and I like it that way! 

My marketing journey kicked off at a company where I managed a team of over 25 folks as the Marketing Lead and Operations Manager. 

But my itch for something more took me down the road of content and niche marketing. That's how I ended up co-creating Saleshandy, a place where I'm still enjoying the ride and helping the company grow.

I'm a marketing junkie and a business starter, and I get my kicks from companies that encourage teamwork and don't put up roadblocks to success. I live to meet and exceed what customers want. I keep a close eye on the results and always tinkering with my game plan based on what's needed. When things go south, I don't get bent out of shape; I see it as a chance to learn. I take a good, hard look at what went wrong, figure out why, and then cook up solutions based on the facts.

As a growth hacker and digital marketing buff, I thrive on the hustle and meet life with a never-say-die attitude. My constant grin shows my love for creating strong teams and my readiness to lend a hand at the drop of a hat.

So here I am, a Co-founder at Saleshandy, extending an invitation for you to join me on this wild ride as we take over the marketing world, one success story at a time. 

Let's get together and see how we can help each other grow. What do you say?

Co-Founder

Saleshandy is a cold outreach platform that helps B2B businesses automate and scale their outbound sales efforts. 

» I am the person responsible for
- majority of marketing stuff
- people management
- developing and implementing systems & procedures throughout the organization
- operations

I’m 32. Married. A daily 90-minute commute. A toddler at home. 

All while running a leading cold email outreach platform.

People usually ask me one thing:

“How do you manage everything?”

The honest answer?

I don’t.

> I don’t chase balance.
> I don’t try to win every day.
> I don’t pretend all weeks look the same.

What actually works for me:

• Hard boundaries, not perfect schedules

Some days work wins. Some days family wins. I simply decide which one it is.

• Energy over hours

I protect the few hours where I think clearly. Everything else is secondary.

• Fewer decisions

Same routines. Same defaults. Less mental noise.

• Letting go of guilt

You can’t be fully present everywhere. Accepting that changed everything.

Running a business isn’t about doing more.

It’s about choosing what not to do—consistently.

Take it from me.

If you pour everything into running the business,

Ten years from now you’ll have hundreds of proofs of success—

And countless gaps in your life you can’t explain to anyone else.

Co-founder @ Saleshandy | Automating cold emails to drive lead generation & sales

First big release of 2026: Saleshandy MCP is live!

Most of us start our day inside AI, so we brought Saleshandy right there.

You can now run your entire cold email workflow from the places you already work, 

ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, n8n, and more...using the MCP server.

It takes just a few clicks to connect Saleshandy with your AI assistant.

Once connected, you can do everything from creating multi-step sequences to building full apps using real Saleshandy data through tools like Cursor.

The possibilities are exciting!

Huge thanks to the team for making this happen.

Really excited to see what you all build with it.

What’s the first thing you’d try with Saleshandy MCP? 👇

If I had a dollar for every sales rep chasing the wrong metric in outbound, I’d already be on the Forbes Billionaires list.

I’m not kidding. 

Many still run after metrics like they’re the finish line. 

But unfortunately, that’s just part of the game. 

>Open Rate doesn’t mean your prospect knows you—it shows the effectiveness of your subject line. 
>Reply Rate doesn’t mean you’ll close sales—only a small fraction show real interest. 
>Click Rate doesn’t mean your prospect is sold—it only shows they were curious enough to click. 
>Spam Rate doesn’t mean your message is bad—it just shows who’s annoyed, or which ISPs are watching you. 
>Deliverability doesn’t mean success—it only tells you your emails landed, not that they mattered. 
>Unsubscribe Rate doesn’t mean failure—it often signals your list is cleaning itself, and that’s not always bad.

Don’t give your team a number to hit.

Give them a goal that actually matters: Real engagement.

The sole goal of outbound is to start a conversation.

Let’s keep the main thing the main thing.

I keep seeing outbound teams stuck in delulu.

They swing between two extremes:

• Blindly sending as many emails as possible
• Or over-personalizing emails for 20 people

Both think they’ve figured outbound.

Most haven’t.

Because outbound isn’t about volume vs personalization.

It’s about your TAM.

Volume-based makes sense when:

> I’m testing a new market or PMF
> My product has a short consideration cycle
> My deal size supports high-velocity sales
> I have proven templates that convert
> I need to fill an empty pipeline fast
> My market is broad and less sophisticated

Value-based makes sense when:

> I’m targeting enterprise or strategic accounts
> My product needs education and trust
> My deal size justifies deep research
> I’m in a competitive, saturated market
> I’m building long-term positioning
> My buyers are sophisticated and over-pitched

Nothing here is good or bad.

It’s not about what sounds right.

It’s about what works best for your market.

I don’t believe cold emails can always be taught through tutorials.

Sometimes…

memes teach better.

This carousel shows 6 golden cold email moments every cold email lived through:

If you’ve done outbound for a while,

you’ll probably nod at more than one slide.

It’s Friday.

So let’s keep it light.

But if one slide changes how you write on Monday,

it’s already worth the save.

Happy weekend.

6 Golden Cold Emails 

I would call this a principle rather than advice. Because it will help you survive in almost everything:

- Outbound
- Business
- Relationships
- Even life

 It is: Give before you take.

Most people say they want growth, but what they really want is output without input.

- Recognition without contribution
- Trust without proof
- Results without patience

But the sad truth is—
That equation never works.

Growth demands payment upfront.
 
 You give effort before you see momentum.
 You give clarity before you get alignment.
 You give value before people give you attention.
 You give trust before it comes back stronger.

This applies everywhere:

 In careers — you invest in skills long before titles show up.
 In leadership — you support people before they follow you.
 In business — you solve problems before revenue appears.
 In relationships — you listen before you’re understood.

So if you want growth, 

Ask yourself a harder question:

What value are you putting into the system every day that says what you’re trying to take out?

Because nothing meaningful is free.

Everything has a price,

And everyone has to pay it.

P.S. But this image tells a different story — my daughter ignoring the principle and going straight for my sunglasses.

In outbound, I’ve seen many teams panic after a few days of no replies.

But they’re reading it all wrong.

They try everything.
- New subject line.
- New copy.
- New sequence.

Nothing changes.

Because the issue wasn’t the email.

It was the assumption.

Not all silence means “not interested.”

Sometimes:
 • the timing is off
 • the message missed their world
 • the trust isn’t there yet

Understanding the type of silence makes all the difference.

If you count every quiet inbox as rejection,

You’ll never stop counting.

Outbound works when you respect where the prospect is—

not where you want them to be.

See silence as a signal, and outbound gets a lot easier.

The top 1% don’t expect replies. They engineer them.

Yes, replies are never luck or coincidence.

There’s a clear science behind them,

And it works in your favor when you understand it.

When outreach is designed without:

 • a clear reason to exist
 • a defined outcome
 • feedback loops

You don’t get signal — you get noise.

That’s why scaling outbound early feels random.
 
- One week it works.
- The next week it dies.
 
No one knows why.

Sometimes, frameworks like RAID help a lot.

They simply remove the guesswork from the equation.

Without guesswork, you can point to where something broke —

attention, intent, or measurement.

Now you can finally stop reacting and start correcting.

So the next time you refresh your screen for the 10th time, expecting replies from your outbound campaign,
 
Remember the first line of this post.

People ask me what my biggest cold email motivation is. It is this.

A simple experiment that brought home $13M.

You think the output is great?

Think again.

It is actually the input.
 
There was no clever copy.
 No personalization tokens.
 No growth hacks.

> a clearly defined audience
> a reason to reach out now
> a single, obvious next step

That’s it.

I know

 •  inboxes are noisier than ever
 • competition is brutal
 • deliverability isn’t optional anymore

But… believe me,

The fundamentals haven’t moved an inch.

Get the basics right & the rest will fall in place.

Proven by history already.

And you know, “History repeats.”

First cold email that made $13M

You can give all the logic in the world to your buyer… 
but they won’t care a cent about it. 

Because humans decide emotionally first, then justify with logic. 

Yet most cold emails are written for rationality: 

>Features. 
>Processes. 
>Explanations.

Your prospect doesn’t wake up thinking about your product.

They wake up with pressure, doubt, and 100 unfinished problems. 

That's why: Emotion opens the door; logic closes the deal.

Keep cold emails 70% emotional:

• Time it—after industry changes, losses, or gains.
• Reduce effort at every line.
• Lead with “no” before explaining.
• Focus on one emotion.
• Leave the emotional portion unresolved.

Emotion shows in: Subject line, first line, pre-pitch bridge, problem framing.

Keep it 30% logical:

• Remove doubt, don’t add reasons.
• Prefer direction over detail.
• Explain mechanisms only when asked.

Logic shows in: Value proposition, proof, differentiation, CTA.

Small tweaks make a huge difference: 

>Mirror your prospect, 
>Name the pain, 
>Lower emotional cost, 
>And stick to one emotion per email. 

If your email makes sense but gets no replies

You didn’t lose on logic. 

You lost on emotion.

The first thing I tell users NOT to do when targeting a global audience: Using the same email for the US and the EU.

Every time I say this, the conversation goes the same way.

“No, Dhruv, I edited the email before sending it.”

Me: What edits did you make?

Them: Changed the spellings for the EU.

And that’s it.

Here’s the real problem:
 
When a high-performing US email fails in the EU,
 
It’s not an infrastructure issue.

What changes isn’t just the language or demographics.

The entire ICP mindset changes.

And if you don’t understand that,

Every click on “send” quietly burns your cash.

Comment “strategies” i will send you customized cold email strategies for both the demographics.

Most of the people I have ever met are eager to fix others' flaws. But not theirs. 

But growth waits on the other side. 

Where you find the cost of your strengths.

Yes. the cost of your strengths AKA your flaws 

We all have & know what our strengths are. 

But we hardly know 

What are the costs of it? 

It took me years to find out mine. 

Here are four exercises I keep coming back to:

1. The “If I were replaced” exercise
 Ask: If I left tomorrow, what would break immediately?
 That shows your strengths.

 Then ask: What would suddenly feel lighter?
 That shows your flaws.

2. Energy audit
 Track what drains you for a week.
 Energy loss is often feedback your brain already has.

3. Feedback triangulation
 Don’t trust one opinion.

Take it from me, 

The higher you climb in your career ladder. 

The lesser feedbacks you get 

And that’s not good news. 

Feedbacks are the great way to grow. 

Start asking for it. 

4. Negative Externality lens

 Every strength creates a cost somewhere else.

Here is a simple example 

Strength: You stay updated on news and trends. 

Cost: You get distracted, tasks take longer, or miss face-to-face interactions.

Don’t pay your strengths with your flaws. 

If it is not you who fix you 

It is nobody 


P.S: not all flaws needs to be fixed. Few makes you unique & few makes you pay for your strength.

There are two categories where a cold email fails.

Let’s talk about the second one—the least talked about.

It fails outside the inbox.

It fails outside the brain.

There are thousands of blogs, lectures, and tips on how to make it to the inbox.

But what about the emails that do land there—and still fail?

They fail because the brain never lets them in.

So the real question isn’t:
 “How good is my copy?”

It’s:
 “Did their brain decide this was meant for them?”

To pass that test, you need three things:

1. Anchor to something concrete

If you can’t point to one real thing that recently changed for them, wait.

2. Create a mental speed bump

When something feels slightly unexpected, the brain slows down.

Overlap, shared context, or a specific angle buys you a second.

3. Show you noticed, not that you researched

There’s a difference.
- One feels respectful.
- The other feels invasive.

If it wouldn’t sound normal face-to-face, remove it.

Simply put:

If you want to increase the chance of a sale,

Impress the brain you’re aiming for.

That’s what changes the game.

Rowan Atkinson once talked about a quote  that stayed in my head all day.

The quote is:

“Life is a tragedy in close-up and a comedy in long shot.”
 — Charlie Chaplin

That’s it.

And it says everything.

Most tragedies feel like tragedies because of the shot.

When I was in school,

Math felt like a huge tragedy.

When I look at it now,

It feels like nothing.

Every “tragedy” in close-up becomes a turning point in long shot.

- The feature that failed.
- The product rebuild that felt like wasted time.
- The customer who left angry.

What changes when you zoom out is not the problem—
 
It’s the perspective.

- You stop catastrophizing.
- You realize this moment—
 
No matter how painful— is just one frame in a much longer story.

And often, the frames that hurt the most

are the ones that redirect you toward something better.

When you’re in the close-up, feel it.

Don’t pretend it’s not hard.

But also remember:

You’re not watching the whole movie yet.

The tragedy you’re living through

Might be the setup for the comedy you’ll laugh about later.

What “tragedy” are you living in close-up right now?

It's Day 3 of 2026, and my LinkedIn feed is flooded.

"10 Skills to Learn in 2026" 
"12 Books to Read This Year" 
"5 Goals to Achieve"

But I won’t suggest 10 or 5. 

Just ONE skill.. 

Cold email 

It is not new, not trendy

But here's what I know after 10 years:

Most people still don't understand the power cold email holds.

- They think it's dead. 
- They think it's spam. 
- They think it's for salespeople only.

Wrong.

Cold email is for:

- Founders who need their first 10 customers
- Consultants who need clients beyond referrals
- Recruiters who need candidates who aren't on job boards
- Partnerships people who need intros without warm connections
- Startup owners who need funding 

It's not a "sales skill." 

It's a business survival skill.

Trends that you follow will change. 

But the ability to generate your own opportunities?

That's timeless.

The real problem in outbound isn't low replies. 

It’s misreading what replies mean.

I’ve noticed something simple:

Replies are no longer a decision signal.

They’re a filtering signal.

People reply to sort their inbox:
yes / no
now / later
me / not me

That’s useful.

But it’s not interest.

Interest shows up differently.

You see it when someone:
- corrects you
- adds nuance
- pushes back thoughtfully
- takes time to explain their situation

Those replies take effort.

And effort is the signal.

This changes how outbound should be written.

Not to get a reply,

but to invite thinking.

Emails that work now:
- make a specific observation
- leave room to disagree
- ask something that can’t be answered with one tap

When someone has to think before replying,

you’re no longer doing outbound.

You’re starting a conversation.

The goal isn’t more replies.

It’s better effort from the right people.

That’s the shift most teams haven’t made yet.

You won't believe me for saying this, but you do need luck in outbound.

Luck in cold emails is not anything random.

It’s the side effect of showing up often enough, in the right places, with enough relevance.

Don’t treat outbound like lottery tickets.

> One big send.
> One version.
> One moment in time.

But buying decisions don’t happen on your schedule.

- Budgets open unexpectedly.
- Priorities shift quietly.
- Internal pressure shows up without warning.

The teams that “get lucky” didn’t predict any of it.

They just stayed visible long enough for timing to work in their favor.

Here’s the real split:

You can’t control when someone is ready.
 
But you can control how often you’re present when that moment arrives.

Consistency does three things most people underestimate:

 • It multiplies timing overlap.
 • It builds passive familiarity before intent exists.
 • It removes pressure from any single email to be perfect.

So the next time you see someone “getting lucky” in outbound,

Remember—they didn’t get lucky fast.

They stayed long enough to get lucky.

There’s one skill you can’t avoid—no matter your role.

Selling.

- Not sales targets.
-  Not cold calls.
- Not pipelines.

Selling means this:

Can you get someone to say yes to your idea?


Because that’s what decides outcomes every day.

A founder doesn’t win by being right.

They win by getting others to believe.

An engineer doesn’t ship the best solution.

They ship the one the team aligns behind.

A designer doesn’t lose to bad design.

They lose when they can’t defend good decisions.

If you can’t sell, you don’t lead.
 - You don’t influence.
 - You don’t move things forward.

I’ve seen average ideas win—purely because they were explained well.
 And I’ve seen great ideas die—because no one fought for them.

Ideas don’t fail on quality.

They fail on conviction.

Real selling isn’t manipulation.

It’s understanding what someone cares about—and connecting your idea to that reality.

You’re already selling.
  - Every email.
  - Every meeting.
  - Every conversation.

The only question is:

 Are you doing it deliberately or leaving outcomes to chance?

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