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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

"We already emailed them"

That's EXACTLY why you should be emailing them again.

At any given point, roughly 3% of decision makers in your TAM are actively looking for your solution.

That means even if you do everything right with your lead gen efforts, a good portion of your TAM simply won't buy right then and there (see: “email me next year” replies).

From there, you're given two choices:

1. Mark them as permanently "not interested" and move on.
2. Re-market to them with new messaging every 30 days from there on out.

If you mark leads that don't want to buy right now as "permanently not interested," you will eventually run through your TAM.

If you reach out to leads who don't want to buy right now, every 30 days with fresh messaging, you will be top of mind when they do want to buy.

This is also why it's effectively impossible to burn a relatively large TAM. (Taylor Haren does a great job of explaining this).

The point is, don't be scared of holding on to the same leads. Just make sure your offer is strong, and the messaging is unique each time.

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

The Clay team keep on giving.

Today I received a super cool gift from them.


A very cool toolbox, a book on nourishment (i assume soul-wise otherwise I may know too much), and a few other goodies too.

I remember back in summer 2024 when they vetted our client accounts and awarded us Official Expert status - we were the 4th ever in the UK.


Before then I also remember Arturo Orozco jumping on Zooms with me at like 1am helping me when I got stuck with an enrichment.

(I know there are others, but for me that's why Arturo will always be the OGTME)

It was really great to feel like our work gave us a sense of partnership with Clay.

and let's be honest i've been slapping that on everything from my linkedin to my lunchbox ever since. 

But it's not without good cause.


Clay has been at the pillar of the great results we've driven and continue to drive for clients at Spring Drive.

I know some of you out there are still umming and erring about Clay - but honestly, if you're serious about levelling up your GTM motions - whether that's inbound, outbound, or revops - get on it, fast.



Big thanks to the team Varun, Lele, Bruno, Peter, Anjali and everyone else at Clay - and see you all at a Clay Club soon!

💛

Oh this is a BIG one for multi-channel outreach.

Smartlead + HeyReach.io just teamed up.


Smartlead and Heyreach are both leaders in their space (email and linkedin outreach respectively).

Part of what I like about them is they niched and got really granular on those channels, rather than staying general.

But it also meant that if you wanted to run outreach on both, it could be messy managing leads across both tools.

Super finnicky lol.

Anyway, you can now build email and LinkedIn campaigns inside ONE SINGLE sequence using the Heyreach and Smartlead integration.

If someone replies via one channel you can now automatically route them through the other, so no accidental crossovers that shouldn't happen.

No duct-taped automations to try and see where the lead is across both tools.

This is a massive timesaver and also makes multi-channel campaigns so much easier to manage.

At Spring Drive we run both email and linkedIn for clients so this is a great feature for our back-end operations.

Great work teams Vaibhav Namburi Nick V.

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.

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.

B2B SaaS teams - run a competitive messaging analysis. 

You will book more meetings.


Most outbound messages get lost in a sea of sameness.

Same offers, similar social proof, same tired trigger data openers.


Competitive advantage in outbound isn't about being better at the standard approach.

It's about finding an angle that others aren't providing at all.

What angle are they avoiding?

The reason why this matters is because outbound is a competitive market.

It's more like sport, not art.

The hard about this is it isn't formulaic - it requires strategic though and (ironically) a creative streak.



Right now so many teams are looking for the 'tool' that will save them.

Like come on m8. 

Tools are the kitchen utensils for a chef.

If i had to pick between Gordon Ramsey cooking a steak with basic utensils vs an average chef cooking with the best cookware in the world...

Isn't it obvious whose steak will taste better?


Prospects want a tasty steak - they don't care what tool you used to cook it.



I think teams should sit around their message variants and have a genuine conversation and ask this questions:

If I was midway through my lunch and I saw this email, would I put my sandwich down to reply?



And that's a STRATEGIC question, not a COPY question.

In other words, if the answer is NO it looks pretty generic, you need to ideate:

- More creative lead magnets
- Reconstructed outbound packages
- Compartmentalized offers
- Psych angles for clarity (like analogies and framing)

Etc.

Comment your email copy below.

Best email gets a free outbound 1-1 session with me.

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.

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.

Don't write that pain statement in your cold email.

It's not going to work - because pain statements are dead.


IT PAINS ME TO SAY THIS.

Sorry had to make that joke.


Okay but basically, most pain statements today are so generic that not only does it not help your message, it's actually counterproductive.

You immediately set the frame that you are another sales pitch, and people click out.

Part of the problem is that most teams are writing generic problem statement - not pain statements.


Problem statements:

'Need better ROI?'

'Want to scale faster?'

'Spending 8 hours a week on admin?'


These are so vague and generic that you're failing to actually visceralize anything for that prospect.


Pain statements:

'Are you still manually entering financial data across multiple Google sheets?'

'Many {role} find they have to book extra appraisal meetings with managers because their performance improvement plans only get met 60 per cent of the time'.


The difference is 2 things.

1. These are hyperspecific in a way that VISCERALIZES the actual annoying af activity you can solve


2. Problem statements are general things the company needs to solve. Pain statements are the day to day frustrations the prospect has in trying to solve those problems.



The first just don't hit anymore - and MOST messages I see are still writing them, rather than true modern pain statements.


Questions?

Comment below.

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.

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.

A lot of cold emails fail because they're vague about results

Here's the rule on specificity to actually book meetings:


If they understand WHY you're better, they're more likely to BELIEVE it.


'We helped companies increase revenue' - okay but how?

'We improve conversion rates' - okay but how?

'We streamline operations' - what does that actually mean?




Specificity isn't just about personalization.

It's about being hyper-specific in how you explain your value.

Instead of: 'We help SaaS companies grow faster'

'We helped Acme Corp increase their trial-to-paid conversion from 12% to 18% in 90 days by rebuilding their onboarding email sequence'

The first claim is so vague that it doesn't really make me believe in you as a solution - primarily because I cannot understand what the solution is.



This is why 'results' statements are just so poor these days.

'We'll 10x your revenue'

WILL YOU JAMES? WILL YOU.

Okay, i'm calm.


You've got to start specifying the mechanism of your differentiation.

It's not 'We'll 10x your revenue'

It's: 'Our data platform has 39% more verified emails, which across 10k contacts could be another 4k leads, and potentially 2-3 more deals won per month'.

Okay, now I get it - and I can *believe* you might actually do this.


There's a copywriting element to this, which is because it naturally requires more verbiage (could have said words but yeah) you need to be succinct.


Does everyone get this?

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