StartupGTM.com | I help b2b founders hack traction | Profitable founder (YC)

Transforming a startup from early to repeatable sales is HARD.

If you’re a B2B founder with early sales, then you've done many things right to win your first customers.

BUT - to raise a round A, your startup will need to have a product that's ready to scale because it can be 𝙨𝙤𝙡𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙙𝙡𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙡𝙞𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙮.

To get repeatable sales - there are four blockers. 
 
You'll need to change each one from "not working" to "working": 
 
1️⃣ Consistently creating a 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 of conversations with customers 
 
2️⃣ Converting these conversations into a 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 of first meetings 
 
3️⃣ Converting these meetings into a 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 of trials 
 
4️⃣ Converting trials into a 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 of deals. 
 
These blockers need to be removed 𝙨𝙚𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 - i.e. one by one. 
 
💡 𝗙𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗖𝗥𝗔𝗖𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂'𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝘁 𝗥𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧 𝗡𝗢𝗪. 𝗗𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀.

—

I'm a former co-founder and CEO at ApolloShield - a profitable YC startup.

I work hands-on with B2B founders on turning their early sales into repeatable sales through a combination of disciplines:

1️⃣ 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀: Understanding the market, identifying target customers, and analyzing competitors.

2️⃣ 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴: Defining how the product fits into the market and crafting compelling messages to appeal to the target audience.

3️⃣ 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗲𝘀: Developing strategies for selling the product, including choosing sales channels and partnerships.

4️⃣ 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵, 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝗘𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Creating and executing campaigns to build brand awareness and generate leads.

5️⃣ 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀: Managing discovery and commercial discussions with clients and partners to get their business.

5️⃣ 𝗢𝗻𝗴𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗜𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗱𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸: Gathering customer feedback and continuously adapting the product and strategies accordingly.

6️⃣ 𝗜𝗧 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀: Building support systems to holistically orchestrate and manage your GTM efforts.

7️⃣ 𝗥𝗮𝗽𝗶𝗱 𝗜𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Developing a method to move forward quickly, iterate and get market feedback - doubling what works and tossing what doesn’t.

🚀 Let's connect and accelerate your startup together!

Nimo Shkedy

Michel Lieben 🧠

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

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

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


We can help you:

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


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


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


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


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


We can help.

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

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


__________



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

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

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

Can you run your entire GTM with Claude Code?

We're answering that tomorrow.

We use Claude Code for:

Paid media.
Outbound.
Reporting.
CRM ops.

All through AI agents we built in-house and deployed across 70+ B2B clients inside our $7M ARR agency.

On February 26th, we're opening our terminals and showing everything. 
Live.

What we'll cover:

Outbound
→ ICP scoring & signal-based lead prioritization on autopilot
→ cold email sequences built from real performance data
→ AI reply handling in under 2 minutes

ABM/Ads
→ automated campaign creation, reporting & optimization
→ AI agents managing LinkedIn, Meta & Google ads
→ paid media run entirely from the terminal

RevOps
→ campaign diagnostics that took hours, done in 60 seconds
→ live dashboards pulling every data source into one view
→ bidirectional CRM sync: Attio, Lemlist & Instantly

What you'll leave with:

→ how to build your first Claude Code GTM agent from scratch
→ the architecture behind 32 skills, 12 agents & 2,108 files
→ which GTM use cases actually deliver ROI today

We'll demo the agents live.
Then break down the architecture so you can build your own.

Hosted by Ivan Falco (Head of Growth) & Kenny Damian (Head of GTM) at ColdIQ.

February 26th - 1:30 PM EST

In case you missed the event....

Here's the link to the webinar recording - https://lnkd.in/eqNfrT7b

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

Yesterday, > 1400 people watched Kenny Damian build an entire outbound campaign using Claude code.

He wrote a few prompts in the terminal, fed it a list of companies, and then...

Claude Code took over:

1. It scored and prioritised the entire company list against our ICP

2. It found verified email addresses through Apollo’s API

3. When Apollo didn’t have coverage, it automatically pulled in additional enrichment providers to fill the gaps

4. It wrote personalised copy templates on its own (based on our best-performing outreach)

5. Then it uploaded the entire campaign: leads, sequences, and copy... straight into Instantly.ai

It took fewer than 20 minutes.

This was just one of three demos we ran.

Right before that, Ivan Falco showed us how to automate ad campaign creation & 'warm' social prospecting.

Unfortunately, I can't upload the entire video here due to LinkedIn's file size limits.

If you couldn't attend: 

Here is the recording and the full playbook bundle (frameworks, SOPs, templates) so you can try this yourself -

https://lnkd.in/eD-WAHyU

Imagine only cold emailing leads who WANT to buy from you…

The closest way to do so? Leveraging buying signals:

The idea is that these signals help you:
- find relevant reasons to initiate contact
- re-activate existing prospects at the perfect moment
- surface new challenges to address in your messaging

… and much more.

There are several categories of signals:

1️⃣ First-Party Signals

↳ = Intent data gathered from your own business ecosystem.

These are prospects who already know you, actively taking steps like:

- utilizing your product
- browsing your website
- subscribing to your email list
- interacting with your brand on social platforms

Platforms that help you capture these signals include:

1. LinkedIn Signals: Clay, Expandi.io, Trigify.io, Jungler

2. Website Visitors: Instantly.ai, Clay, Midbound, Vector 👻

3. Product Usage: Common Room, Mixpanel, Pocus, PostHog

4. Call Transcripts: Attention, Fireflies, Claap

5. Gated Content: Distribute, Gamma


2️⃣ Second-Party Signals

↳ = Intent data sourced from your ecosystem, shared by partners.

Generally, prospects who have engaged with:

- your brand on a partner platform (e.g: checking out your listing on G2)
- your company, while employed at a different organization
- a partner of yours with an overlapping customer base

Examples include:

6. Champion Tracking: Clay, Common Room, Unify, UserGems 

7. Affinity Signals: Crossbeam, Reveal, The Swarm 🔆, PartnerStack

8. Ad Engagement: Fibbler, ZenABM, Factors AI

9. Software Marketplaces: G2, Capterra, ColdIQ


3️⃣ Third-Party Signals

↳ = Intent data sourced from external providers.

Thus, public signals indicating companies might benefit from your solution.

Examples include:

10. Technographic Data: Clay, PredictLeads, HG Insights, BuiltWith, Similarweb

11. Funding Announcements: PredictLeads, lemlist, Clay, Crunchbase, Owler, PitchBook, 

12. Web Data Agent: Claygent, Parallel Web Systems, Tavily, Common Room, Unify, Linkup, Perplexity, Manus AI

13. Job Openings: Common Room, PredictLeads, Clay, LoneScale, Mantiks, TheirStack, Lemlist

14. Custom Scraping: Apify, Firecrawl, Claygent, Instant Data Scraper

15. News Monitoring: PredictLeads, Google News, Exa

16. Ads Activity: Apify, Adyntel, Ahrefs

17. Firmographic Data: Prospeo, Wiza, Exa, DiscoLike

18. Lookalike Search: PredictLeads, DiscoLike


P.S: What’s your preferred tool for monitoring buying signals?

We recently crossed $7M ARR.

Here’s every tool we use to run our business:

1️⃣ Content Engine

LinkedIn generates 100+ leads for us every month.

This includes my account: Michel Lieben [67,000+ followers] 
+ other team members [300,000+ followers combined]. 

I use:

- Taplio for content inspiration & ideation.
- Notion for content planning & calendar.
- Scripe to draw inspiration from specific creators.

I crossed 2,200 YouTube subscribers from 15 videos. 

I use:

- Tella for async video production.
- vidIQ for content discovery & ideation.

We ship 2 articles/week and attract 100,000+ visitors quarterly.

30% now comes from SEO, thanks to free mini-tools we built for lead gen, & programmatic pages we created at scale. 

We use:

- Claude Code to build these out.
- AirOps for programmatic SEO.
- Ahrefs for keyword research.

We have ~10,000 active newsletter subscribers with 40%+ open rates. 

We use beehiiv to send our weekly issues.


2️⃣ Outbound System

We deliver Outbound & GTM services to 80+ B2B clients.

Our entire outbound engine runs on Clay for:

→ Enrichment
→ Personalization
→ Prospect research
→ Workflow automation
→ Signal-based targeting

We also use Claude Code for list building, email copywriting, and automating campaign creation.

Plus specialised tools for:

- AI Agents: Relevance AI, n8n.
- Outreach: Instantly.ai, lemlist, Expandi.
- Lead Sources: Prospeo, Apify, Exa, Openmart.
- Contact Data: Wiza, FullEnrich, Prospeo, LeadMagic.
- Intent + Retargeting: PredictLeads, Common Room, Vector 👻, Fibbler, Midbound


3️⃣ Operations Stack

Our team includes 35 FTEs & ~12 Fractional Freelancers.

We use:

- For internal automations: n8n, Claude Code

- For internal database & documentation: Airtable, Notion, Supabase

- For team communication: Slack, Google Meet, Norrsken Barcelona (office by the sea 🌊)


4️⃣ Inbound Funnel

We book ~100 qualified B2B meetings monthly. 

We use:

- Default (lead routing)
- GA4 + Wistia (analytics + VSL)
- Usermaven (analytics & attribution)
- Webflow & Vercel (website hosting)

For re-engagement:

- Customer.io (email marketing)
- Kondo: Superhuman for LinkedIn DMs (LinkedIn inbox management)


5️⃣ Sales Stack

We closed +$1,000,000 in new ARR last month. We use:

- Attio (CRM)
- Qwilr (proposals)
- Attention (AI meeting notes)


6️⃣ Billing & Finance

We’re integrating Hyperline for billing our productized offerings. It handles quoting, invoicing, and payment collection in one.

On top of that, we use:

- Ramp (expense & treasury management)
- Stripe, Revolut, Mercury (billing + banking)


P.S: What’s one tool we should absolutely try?

I tried way too many AI Sales tools in 2025

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

1/ Workflow Builders

Why?

↳ They allow you to create advanced, multi-step, automated prospecting workflows.

Example use-case: Running a signal-based Clay campaign that ranks leads, segments them into several tiers, adds an AI-personalized first line… and then pushes contacts to your preferred sequencer. 

Examples include:

→ n8n
→ Clay
→ Outbond
→ Relevance AI
→ Enginy (formerly Genesy)


2/ MCPs

Why?

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

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

1. Checks how many sales calls you have today
2. Researches each prospect
3. Provides relevant talking points for the qualified ones…
4. Cancels meetings with unqualified leads.

All that, without opening your calendar app.

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

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


3/ AI Coding Tools

Why?

↳ They enable you to write code in plain English. These can be leveraged to build complex workflows.

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

My personal favourites include:
→ Cursor
→ Claude Code
→ OpenAI Codex

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


4/ All-in-One Sales Platforms

Why?

↳ They consolidate all essential cold outreach capabilities into one software.

Example use-case: Warming up domains, assembling a lead list, monitoring relevant signals, enriching contact data & automating outreach within a single platform. 

Examples include:

→ Instantly.ai
→ Expandi
→ Artisan
→ lemlist


5/ Sourcing Agents

Why?

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

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

Examples:

→ Parallel Web Systems
→ Relevance AI
→ Claygent
→ Linkup
→ Tavily
→ Apify
→ Exa


6/ Conversation Intelligence

Why?

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

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

Examples:

→ Momentum.io
→ Fireflies.ai
→ Attention
→ Claap


7/ Signal Platforms

Why?

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

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

Examples:

→ Common Room
→ PredictLeads
→ TheirStack
→ Clay

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

AI Sales Categories (2026)

Most companies bet their LinkedIn strategy on the Founder.

We turned 24 employees into LinkedIn influencers:

In the span of 90 days, it led to:

581 LinkedIn publications,

adding up to:
> 43,000 reactions (likes, supports, loves)
> 28,000 post comments
> 34,000 new followers

Craziest part about all this is that I'm convinced most B2B teams can replicate this playbook 'pretty' easily.

👉 Here's how: youtu.be/d-gqMuvDQFQ

I asked 62 GTM leaders running $1M+ orgs what tools they use.

One tool showed up in 71% of stacks:

MOST MENTIONED:

- Clay (71%)
- n8n (48%)
- HubSpot (39%)
- Instantly.ai(35%)
- HeyReach.io (35%)
- Apollo (35%)
- LinkedIn (32%)
- Attio (32%)
- Prospeo (29%)
- Lovable (29%)


FEATURED STACKS:

Nikola Sokolov (CEO, influencers.club) - 54 tools
↳ Clay, Instantly, HeyReach, n8n, HubSpot +49

Charles Tenot (CEO, lemlist) - 40 tools
↳ Clay, n8n, Apollo, Ahrefs, HubSpot +35

Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (CEO, Artisan) - 25 tools
↳ HubSpot, Gong, Lovable, Ahrefs, Artisan +20

Benjamin Douablin (CEO, FullEnrich) - 19 tools
↳ HubSpot, Instantly, HeyReach, n8n, FullEnrich +14

Eoin Clancy (Head of Growth, AirOps) - 17 tools
↳ AirOps, Lemlist, Clay, Common Room, Attention +12

Kai Brandt (CEO, Enginy (formerly Genesy)) - 17 tools
↳ HubSpot, Claude, Ahrefs, Lovable, Loom +12

Pierre Herubel (Co-Founder, Content Path) - 15 tools
↳ Clay, Claude, Attio, Lemlist, Webflow +10

Roq Xever (Founder, PredictLeads) - 15 tools
↳ HubSpot, Clay, Claude, Cursor, Lusha +10

+49 more stacks broken down on our "tech stacks" page.
(Link in the comments)

P.S: Any tools surprise you?

27 APIs to turn Claude Code into a lead generation machine:

1. PredictLeads

Example use case: use PredictLeads' API within Claude Code to monitor signals on target accounts such as hiring surges, funding rounds & tech installs.

2. LeadsFactory

Use case: find people by job title by providing a LinkedIn company URL as an input.

3. Exa

Use case: Describe your ICP in plain English and let Claude Code search the web semantically to find matching companies.

4. Jina AI

Use case: feed Claude Code any URL via Jina's API to convert the page into clean readable text (so that you can then extract prospect info, pricing data or company intel & mor)e.

5. Wiza

Use case: feed Claude a list of leads and Wiza's API finds verified emails and phone numbers.

6. Prospeo

Use case: build lead lists, find emails & find phone numbers via Prospeo's API

7. FullEnrich

Use case: run Claude Code's enrichment step through 15+ data providers in a waterfall to find verified emails and phones that single-source tools miss

8. Apify

Use case: let Claude Code run pre-built scrapers for social media profiles, company pages, Google Maps & other platforms.

9. Trigger.dev

Use case: let Claude Code kick off long-running GTM workflows (batch enrichment, multi-step sequences, CSV processing) that run reliably

10. lemlist

Use case: connect Claude Code to your multichannel outreach tool to automate outbound campaign creation.

11. Instantly.ai

Use case: let Claude Code push enriched leads into cold email campaigns.

12. Google Analytics

Use case: ask Claude Code to pull your website traffic, conversions and channel data to gather insights on your GTM activities.

13. DataForSEO

Use case: let Claude Code pull SERP rankings, keyword volumes and competitor data to fuel your SEO content strategy without touching a dashboard

14. Logo.dev

Use case: let Claude Code fetch any company's logo by domain to fill your sales decks or branded visuals.

15. fal

Use case: ask Claude Code to generate ad creatives, social visuals or video assets on demand using 600+ AI models through a single API call


...ran out of space here, but there are 12 more in the slides 👇


P.S: What's your favourite GTM API for Claude Code?

Top 27 GTM APIs for Claude Code

44 data sources to find prospects in any niche...

...and 7 different ways to source this data:


1. Leverage sourcing agents

Use platforms like Airtop, Clay, Exa, Perplexity, Manus AI or Relevance AI and describe in plain/natural language what you're looking for.

Their agents handle the rest.


2. Use 'standard' B2B databases

Use filters such as “job title”, “location”, “employee count”, “headcount growth” within standard databases like Prospeo, Wiza, Apollo, LinkedIn & DiscoLike 

…or using niche databases like Openmart, influencers.club… 

to find your target data.


3. Target by technology

Use APIs like PredictLeads, or platforms like TheirStack, BuiltWith & BuyerCaddy to find companies using a specific technology.

Their use of this tech should suggest they’re a great lead for you.


4. Target companies showing buying intent for your offering category.

Monitor companies’ activity, including:
- Job openings
- Funding events
- Social engagement
- Tech/software changes

Via tools like Clay, PredictLeads, Common Room, and Trigify.io to infer potential buying willingness. 


5. Custom data extraction

Extract data from popular websites, specific pages, or any site using Apify actors or tools like Instant Data Scraper, Firecrawl, ZenRows & Airtop.


Once you sourced your target people & companies, you’ll want to:

→ Find their email addresses & phone numbers with point solutions (e.g: Prospeo, Wiza, LeadMagic) or…

→ Find their contact data via data waterfalls (e.g: FullEnrich, Clay, Enginy (formerly Genesy), Outbond)

More details included in the carousel below ↓

P.S: Who's your go-to to source accurate B2B data?

44 Data Sources

My cold outreach process that generated 25,000+ leads in 2026

(and got us to $7m ARR with our agency)

1. Build a few relevant audience segments

There are some ‘easy’ targeting wins when you run cold outreach for the first time.

- Companies engaging with your brand
- Companies similar to your best clients
- Companies showing buying intent in your category


2. Map your total addressable market (TAM)

That is, every single company that fits your client criteria.

You can use B2B data sources like: Clay, Wiza & Prospeo to build your account lists according to your chosen criteria (company size, geography, industry)


3. Research your target accounts & segment them into tiers.

- Tier 1 should be your dream clients or perfect fits (similar to your best clients).
- Tier 2 should be good fit clients (similar to orgs you helped).
- Tier 3 should be orgs you believe you can help.

You can prompt AI models within Clay to tier/score accounts, or do it within Claude Code by creating a .md file that includes your scoring criteria to be compared against your account list. 

APIs or tools like PredictLeads, Common Room come very handy here as well.


4. Try reaching your entire TAM every 3-6 months

- For Tier 1 leads: mix manual AE outreach + multichannel engagement = phone (use Nooks) + LinkedIn + email.

Pro tip: make sure to write the first 25-50 messages manually. 
Do the unscalable at first; this is how you’ll uncover patterns you can scale later on.

- For Tier 2 leads: automate multichannel outreach with AI (use Clay + lemlist)

Pro tip: make sure every message is valuable, relevant + personalised to each recipient. Think: “what can I send to my prospect that’ll be helpful to him, even if they ignore me”

(Here I like to think of what’s the first thing I’d do if I were to sign them as clients, and I do it already… for free).

Example: Building a free ‘niche’ lead list for target accounts, with companies/people data of their ideal clients.

- For Tier 3 leads: engage leads at scale with a proper deliverability infrastructure (use Instantly.ai).

Use tier 3 leads as an experimental playground to test out various copywriting frameworks. (Let me know if you’d like to see some high-performing ones; we collected our own list.


5. Respond to positive replies asap.

The faster your replies = the higher your meeting rate.
More meetings = more sales.


6. A few bonus tips:

- The lead list // targeting is the most important element to succeed at cold outreach. Spend most of your time on list building.
- You’re interrupting people’s day whenever you’re reaching out cold. Keep that in mind, make it a ’nice’ interruption (not always possible, but try your best!)
- Implement a proper deliverability setup. The biggest killer of email outreach is messages that land in spam.
- Warm your target accounts. If you have budget, build a target list & run LinkedIn ads to them, so that they won’t be 100% cold when they receive your outreach.


P.S: Anything you’d add?

300+ hours testing Claude Code vs. Cursor to run our GTM...

Here’s my 'final' vibe marketing stack at $7M ARR:

1. Conductor (free)
- My go-to interface to run Claude Code & Codex's latest models.
- UI is much nicer than a terminal + it lets you effortlessly toggle between Codex & Claude Code.


2. Claude Code ($100/mo)
My central hub for all API & MCP calls.

We leverage it for lots of GTM activities, beyond outbound:

→ Creating mini-tools for lead generation.
→ Data scraping + enrichment workflows.
→ Deep SEO analysis via Google Analytics MCP.
→ Entire ad campaign + outbound campaigns creation.
→ List building through Wiza, Prospeo, FullEnrich & Exa's APIs.

...

3. OpenAI Codex ($20/mo)
I barely touch it, honestly.

Mostly for the occasional build that Opus couldn’t crack.

It plugs natively into Conductor, so maintaining access at $20/mo is an easy call.


4. Cursor ($60/mo)
- I began with Cursor. Loved the UI, so I was running Claude Code inside it.
- I used it to design/build some really sharp landing pages.

...but Conductor now covers everything I need with both Claude Code & Codex baked in, with an even slicker UI so… I'm cancelling Cursor.


5. Vercel
- We host all our mini-apps & our site here.


6. GitHub


7. Lovable
- Relied on it early for prototyping & our first mini-tools.
- Solid starting point, but CC is simply stronger for what we’re doing.

--

APIs (where it gets interesting)

Claude Code is an incredibly handy way to orchestrate API calls.

No need to grasp how APIs function; you just feed it your platform’s API documentation, and it sorts out the connection by itself.

Here are some GTM APIs I wire into it:

- PredictLeads: Company intelligence data (covering hiring signals, tech stacks, and funding details).

Example use case: Calling its API from Claude to reveal target companies’ tech stacks.

- Exa: Generates lead lists in natural language.

Example use case: Call its API to “Find Series A fintech companies in Europe”.

- LeadsFactory: “Find people API”

Example use case: Leveraging it within CC to locate people by job title, given a list of domain URLs // LinkedIn company URLs.

- Google Analytics MCP: This produced one of the most insightful custom SEO reports I’ve come across. It surfaced gaps we had overlooked for months in a matter of minutes.

- Apify to tap into custom scraping actors.

- Openmart: Local B2B database.


What’s the craziest way you’ve used these “ai coding” platforms so far?


P.S: I recorded a video going through these tools & why/how I use them. It's right here: youtu.be/b9tygqQiBS8

$7M ARR Vibe Marketing Stack

This GTM workflow helped us hit $7M ARR

It consistently books us 100+ meetings per month:

1. Our team publishes 150 posts per month

- 24 people publish LinkedIn content in our team
- We incentivise w/ competition & cash prizes
- We write around our prospects' pain points
- We use Taplio + Scripe to find inspiration
- We study hooks & visuals from outliers

↳ We’re launching a new competition for Q2 2026. The goal will be to get > 300 posts/mo.

2. We promote successful posts via Thought-Leader Ads

- This generates extra views at ~$40 CPM.
- We boost posts that generated meetings.
- We check who booked from these posts.
- We boost posts in front of this ICP.

↳ We also use LinkedIn Ads to pre-warm accounts for outbound. Thus, all channels work together.

3. We re-engage leads that interacted with our ads, site or content.

- On the site: we use Midbound & Vector 👻 for website de-anonymization.
- On LinkedIn: we use tools like Trigify.io & Jungler to catch social interactions.

4. We route all qualified leads to a Clay table.

5. These leads are scored/segmented & tiered.

- Claygent does ‘advanced’ inbound research.
- LLMs prompts segment leads into tiers

- Tier 1 leads = manual outreach
- Tier 2 leads = multichannel outreach
- Tier 3 leads = automated email outreach

6. We enrich valid emails & phone numbers for prospects.

- Wiza, FullEnrich, LeadMagic & Prospeo find us contact data.
- These enrichments are performed inside Clay.

7. We re-engage leads via 1 or several channels, depending on tiering.

- We use Instantly.ai, lemlist, Expandi or Nooks for sales engagement.
- We try our best to send valuable, relevant messages.

8. This workflow booked us 1,500 meetings last year.

- We’ll probably beat that in 2026.
- This allowed us to reach $7,000,000 ARR and 36+ FTEs
- Clients are closing 6-figure deals within 90 days, running the same workflow.

Want this system built for you? 
Reach out in the DMs or via our site :)

How to write cold emails like the top 1%:

(Frameworks we use at our $7M+ ARR agency)

1. "Right Person for Opportunity" by Kenny Damian

2. "Pain | Agitate | Solve" by Soheil Saeidmehr

3. "Trigger | Implication | Pain" by Aaron Reeves

4. "Content Assets" by Ethan Parker

5. "Quick Maths" by Thibaut Souyris

6. AIDA by Monika Grycz 💌

7. Similar Challenges" by Patrick Trümpi

8. Champion Play by Brian LaManna

9. AI Campaign Ideas by Dujam Dunato 
(inspired by Eric Nowoslawski)

10. Rhetorical Question by Leif Bisping

11. "Observation | Call-Out | Proof" by Nick Abraham

12. "Trigger | Process | Symptoms" by Tal Baker-Phillips


What’s your go-to cold email template?

Drop it below 👇


P.S: We compiled the best copywriting frameworks we used to book 15,000+ B2B meetings for 260+ companies into one Notion doc.

Want it? Let me know below, and I’ll send it over :)

Write like the top 1%

Snowflake hit $4,000,000 ARR with 60% of its pipeline generated by SDRs.

Here’s their strategy (and how you can reproduce it):

First, you need to ensure your departments collaborate towards the same objective.

For Snowflake: Marketing, SDRs & Sales sit under ONE SINGLE team.

They ran the experiment for specific regions.

- The ones that did it had up to 46% meeting rates.
- The ones that didn’t do this had 17% meeting rates.

1️⃣ Alignment

Marketing & Sales operate hand in hand.

Marketing collects insights to be leveraged by the sales team.
The sales team executes on them within 2 weeks.

Seems obvious, but truth is most companies have these 2 teams working in silos.


2️⃣ Intelligence

Snowflake leverage signals a lot.
Their rationale is to get in front of prospects as soon as they’re exploring their use cases.

They do that via:

- Third-party intent signals (job changes, funding rounds, web searches)

And further down the funnel via:
- First-party intent signals (product usage, email clicks, website visits).

They rely on tools such as Bombora to detect accounts showing interest in the background. I’d suggest leveraging Clay, PredictLeads or Common Room for this.

Accounts flagged as “high intent” convert 4x better than standard accounts in the CRM.


3️⃣ Activation

When accounts display enough buying intent, Snowflake’s teams deploy their “1-2 punch” play.

That is:

Weeks 1 & 2: ABM team nurtures target accounts with personalised campaigns (ads + emails + dedicated landing pages)

Week 3: SDRs jump in with outbound.

By the time an SDR cold calls a prospect… they’re already not cold anymore.

Result = 36% meeting rates on pre-warmed accounts (vs. 10% on cold)

4️⃣ Engagement

They reach prospects everywhere they are.

→ Calls
→ Cold Emails
→ LinkedIn DMs
→ Custom microsites

True multichannel orchestration.

(I’d suggest leveraging a platform like lemlist to replicate this omnichannel engagement)

5️⃣ Optimisation

They continuously iterate on what works and what doesn’t.

Performance metrics get shared between the teams in bi-weekly alignment meetings.

ABM, SDRs, & AEs are all informed of what works in terms of messaging & targeting.

But they don’t try to attribute who’s responsible for the deal precisely.

Instead, they measure impact at the account level and optimise the entire funnel together.

The outcomes speak for themselves:

→ Deal velocity multiplied by 2.
→ Tier-1 accounts convert 5x better.
→ 2-4X more meetings on ABM accounts.

… and you don’t need Snowflake’s budget or 200+ SDRs to start executing on it.

You can start by:

- Aligning marketing & sales on shared objectives.
- Tracking buying signals 
- Launch ABM campaigns 2 weeks before starting outbound.

… and measure impact at the account level.

And if it feels like too much at once, send a DM… we’ll help you implement this system.

P.S: This workflow breakdown comes from Elric's newsletter.

Snowflake $4B ARR

How to turn $233,000 in LinkedIn ad spend into > $1,500,000 in closed revenue?

We're showing the entire playbook today. Live

CONTEXT

AirOps had a great product trusted by Webflow, Ramp, Carta and LegalZoom. But their pipeline had been stuck at ~$536K/month for almost a year.

We built a full ABM motion combining outbound + LinkedIn Ads, hitting the same accounts from every angle.


WHAT WE'LL COVER:

Account-Based Outbound
→ Building and tiering target account lists with Clay using fit + intent signals
→ Syncing outbound and LinkedIn Ads to hit the same companies from both sides
→ Signal-triggered plays that changed based on account engagement stage

Thought Leader Ads
→ Why we put 80% of ad spend behind founder content, not product ads
→ Using webinars as an outbound play - 112 positive replies from input-request invites
→ Cross-channel feedback loops between outbound and paid

The Results
→ $7.8M qualified pipeline
→ $1.5M closed-won revenue
→ 164 deals created, 30 closed-won
→ 15x pipeline ROI on $233K ad spend
→ 1,058 outbound replies
→ Ad spend scaled 20x with positive ROI

We won't keep it high-level. We'll show the exact system: TAM to TAL to signal stack to coordinated touches to pipeline.

Hosted by Ivan Falco (Head of Growth at ColdIQ) and Eoin Clancy (VP of Growth at AirOps).

Today, March 12th - 1:30 PM EST

Link to register below 👇

P.S: Anything specific you'd like to learn about combining outbound with LinkedIn Ads?

taplio

The Battle

Nimo Shkedy

Michel Lieben 🧠

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreMichel Lieben 🧠's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Nimo Shkedy

Michel Lieben 🧠

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Michel Lieben 🧠's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreMichel Lieben 🧠's LinkedIn Performance