🦾Eric Nowoslawski

Founder Growth Engine X | Clay Enterprise Partner

I am a direct response outbound lead generation expert. And by that jumble of words, I mean that I leverage cold email to build predictable revenue pipelines for my clients. 

I leverage over 20 databases to merge Firmographic, Technographic, and Persona data to build highly targeted playbooks with my clients. 

I believe we need to arm sales teams with the knowledge of their total Target Addressable Market and teach them how to score that Market for which companies have the most pain and need their solution. 

The best way to do this is to look at public indicators such as open jobs data, employee growth/attrition, social media growth, web traffic, new product launches, employee sentiment, individual employee tech investment, company tech stacks, etc.

With this data, not only are you only messaging with people that you know have a problem that you can solve, you also are armed  with powerful messaging that cuts through the noise. 

I teach sales teams to embrace technology and multiply what is possible per employee.

Founder

There is actually a limit to cold email reply rates.

Knowing this can hopefully free you from testing things that won't matter.

Let me explain.

I have worked with customers in the past that are obsessed with getting the reply rate as high as possible. They think if they send a good enough email, every single person who could possibly see it is going to respond.

We've run tests that show this just isn't the case.

We had the opportunity to work on behalf of Forbes at Web Summit. We had the list of speakers. We had all their emails. We cold emailed them from infrastructure that had warmed up for four months. The pitch was simple: "This is our booth. We want to interview you for Forbes. Book a meeting." And we sent them a link to Forbes.com.

That only got a 30% reply rate. Basically all positive.

When I say "only" 30% — if I were a speaker at an event and Forbes wanted to interview me, I would think the reply rate would be even higher than that.

We also helped a customer email their own customers. We found data that showed they needed a new product, and we could fix the problem for free.

Still only a 10% reply rate.

I say all this because these two examples are pretty undeniably good offers. And they still did not get 40, 50, 60% reply rates.

When you're sending emails, there are so many reasons why somebody doesn't respond. They didn't even see it. It got mixed up with everything else in their inbox. It's just not the right time for them.

When you've run a couple of experiments and the reply rate is staying pretty steady, I would think more about experiments around lists and experiments around offers versus trying to change the copy to see if an AI personalization or a fancier way of saying something is going to move the needle.

List segmentation and changing your offer matter way more.

What experiments have you run that changed your thinking on reply rates?

Jed Mahrle

Practical Prospecting has helped 50+ B2B tech companies create custom outbound systems that consistently book meetings.

Visit our website to learn more: practicalprospecting.io

Not ready?

Join 30,000+ readers of The Practical Prospecting Newsletter: content.practicalprospecting.io
Join the waitlist for my course + community: practicalprospecting.io/vip/

Practical Prospecting is a done-for-you lead generation agency. We've helped dozens of B2B startups book meetings by creating repeatable outbound systems.

Our process has 3 steps:

(1) Email Infrastructure
(2) Precision Targeting 
(3) Practical Messaging 

To learn more, visit our website & book a free strategy call: practicalprospecting.io

After our call, you'll receive 1 unique outbound campaign idea for your B2B company (including relevant triggers, offer ideas & sample messaging)

Not ready to work with us? 

Join 22,000+ readers of The Practical Prospecting Newsletter for actionable tips and strategies: Jed.substack.com

I’ve been using ZoomInfo’s GTM Studio for about a month now.

I recorded this in-depth video walking through all the features for anyone curious.

Here are a few things I like most:


#1 - Waterfall enrichment is free. 

You don’t pay extra to access email and phone data from 40+ vendors. This is HUUUGE. 


#2 - The AI agent. 

It’s been surprisingly reliable (and cheap) for running enrichments, writing custom fields, and handling personalization.

#3 - 200k row table limits. 

This won’t matter for most people, but when I’m working with clients that have huge TAMs, I want to work with as much data as possible.

#4 - Built-in signal enrichments. 

There are a ton of signals available right out of the box, and there's no extra enrichment cost. 

Some I’ve literally never seen anywhere else, like recent podcast mentions.

Stuff like this gets me excited when I've seen everything there is to see in the data space lol. 

What are your thoughts on GTM Studio? 

HMU if you have questions or want me to create more videos!

#sales #zoominfopartner

Coming Soon: Practical Prospecting Pro (Join The Waitlist Below)

Been playing with ZoomInfo's GTM Studio for the last few weeks now. 

In this vid, I covered the AI enrichment feature (my favorite so far).

I use this in two ways:

#1 - To filter my list so it's more targeted 

Example 1:
“Read the company website and determine if they manufacture physical products vs provide services. Output YES/NO.”

Example 2:
“Analyze this company’s website and confirm whether they sell to healthcare providers or just adjacent industries.”

Example 3:
“Based on company description + website, classify if procurement workflows are likely manual (spreadsheets/email-heavy).”

#2 - To create personalized snippets for cold email

Example 1:
“Read the company homepage and write one sentence explaining what the company does in plain English.”

Example 2:
“Identify one operational challenge this company likely faces based on industry + size, and write a natural cold email opener.”

Example 3:
“Read the company website and identify one recent initiative, focus area, or priority they’re clearly investing in.”

Lmk your thoughts in the comments!

#sales #zoominfopartner

I swear at least once a month I find a new insanely useful feature in ZoomInfo.

Recorded this video to share a few of my favorite “hidden” ones.

Such as…

#1 – The “Likely to Engage” filter

Shows you who’s more likely to respond via phone or email. Similar idea to TitanX (not sure how they calculate it on the backend).

Example: you have a list of 10k contacts you want to call. Turn this filter on and it’ll surface the people most likely to actually pick up the phone so you know who to prioritize first.

#2 – The “Investors” filter

I run this play with startups all the time.

If you have a few startup customers, figure out who their investors are → then find all the portfolio companies → reach out mentioning you already work with {{customer}} who shares the same investor.

Not a silver bullet cold email strategy, but it 100% makes the email warmer.

#3 – Company Attributes

I made a whole video on this a while back, but it still blows my mind how deep the data goes.

Normally I’d have to spend $$$ enriching for this stuff elsewhere.

Makes your filtering way more granular.

#4 – Newly Discovered Contacts

Everyone is pulling from the same lists in the same platforms.

If you sell to SaaS, we’re all using the same “Software Development” industry filter.

Which means the same people get hit again and again and again and again. 

This filter shows you contacts that were recently added to ZoomInfo’s 
database, so you can prioritize people who probably haven’t been blasted yet.

Check out the video and lmk what you think!

#sales #zoominfopartner

We just built a new workflow that’s going to save us hours every week.

Every day, n8n pulls in all of our active campaigns from Smartlead.

From there, it flags anything below our benchmarks:
- Under 2% reply rate
- Under 20% positive reply rate

Those campaigns get sent to Claude.

Claude analyzes them against our Testing & Iteration SOP, identifies the likely issues, writes new email variants to test, and automatically pushes everything into Asana as a task for the team.

Outbound is a speed game. The faster you iterate, the faster you find a winning campaign. 

This makes us 10x faster.

If you want the workflow or the material I referenced in the video, comment below or shoot me a DM.

#sales

Shoutout to 🚀 Benjamin Reed and team for building a THE solution for outbound agencies: RevyOps

It solves two big problems for us:

1. Data costs

We can now repurpose data whenever we find emails, phone numbers, or run other enrichments instead of paying for the same data over and over.

2. Reporting

All of our campaign reporting is in one place. It makes it way easier to spot underperforming campaigns early and the level of reporting is way deeper than what you get inside email sending tools.

If you run an outbound agency, definitely worth checking out.

Ben's a cool guy and you can tell they genuinely care about their customers and wanting to see them successful with the platform. 

Also (for what it's worth) I am not getting paid for this, no affiliate revenue, no discounts, etc. just had a great sales/onboarding experience and wanted to shout them out!

#sales

We just put together a 2026 Email Deliverability Checklist that walks through:

– 20 deliverability tactics you can implement immediately
– How to properly set up and protect cold email domains
– The small mistakes that tank inbox placement fast
– What Google Gemini’s new spam filters are looking for
– A quick video guide on setting up DMARC, SPF, and DKIM
- And more!

This is the exact process we use when onboarding a new client at Practical Prospecting. 

Shoutout to Anthony Baltodano and Pablo Gallego for their contributions to the guide!

Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/emPB9vTV

#sales

Open article: 2026 email deliverability checklist by content.sellbetter.xyz

Across all clients in 2026, we’ve averaged ~30% reply rates on LinkedIn messages.

I used to think that only SaaS marketers and sales leaders responded consistently on LinkedIn. 

I was wrong…

Our clients industries are extremely broad (healthcare, SaaS, IT services, landscaping, local businesses, etc.)

And we regularly see 15–45% reply rates across those industries. 

For comparison, cold email usually lands around:
 • ~1% reply
 • ~10% positive reply

And honestly, I don't think we're doing anything ground breaking. LinkedIn is just a way easier channel for two reasons:

(1) Less competition
(2) No spam filters to get around (like with email)

That said, the downside is, of course, volume. You can only (safely) send 30 messages a day. 

Which means you have to be much more selective with who you message.

So we usually pick the highest intent segments from our email lists as the leads who get LinkedIn DMs. 

If you want our exact messaging framework (and a free GPT for building your own LinkedIn messaging), check out my latest newsletter! 

(link to the newsletter on my profile)

#sales

Two things I haaaaaate about most data vendors:

(1) They don’t give you enough filters, so building a targeted list is almost impossible.
(2) They don’t save enrichments. If you pull someone’s email today and they show up in a list later, you have to pay again for the same data.

@Prospeo doesn’t have either of these problems.

The filters are ridiculously deep. Lowkey top 2 data tools I’ve used when it comes to filtering options.

And they save your contact data, so you don’t pay twice for the same email or phone number. If you run an agency, this is a huge deal.

I recorded this vid because I don’t think enough people know about Prospeo. 

Especially if you're a smaller company or agency and don’t want to spend a fortune just to get good data and good filters.

Curious what others think. Anyone else using Prospeo???

#sales

One of the biggest problems we see conversion rate from positive reply to meeting booked. 

I wanted to share a few ways we've been solving this...

First, the most important thing is that not all positive replies are built the same. 

I classify them into two buckets:

#1 - Leads that asked for more information or the lead magnet you offered them.
#2 - Leads who explicitly showed interest in a meeting. 

They are NOT built the same. 

The first issue we used to run into all the time is offering lead magnets that tons of people would reply to, but they were too disconnected from the clients actual value prop that they had no interest in taking a meeting. 

Don't get me wrong, those leads still have value. But it takes more time to follow up with them and nurture them until they eventually are ready to take a meeting. Or, it takes having an aggressive sales rep who's not afraid to dial the phone and get them on a meeting ASAP. But that is unfortunately rare (just ask Luke Ruffing). 

So ask yourself:

Do you prefer higher volume positive replies that are lower intent? 
Or lower volume positive replies that are higher intent?

There isn't a right answer. It really just comes down to the having the bandwith and/or sales team to handle the leads. 

Beyond that, there are 3 core things we focus on to increase conversion rates from reply to meeting:

#1 Speed to Lead. 

Treat every reply like an inbound lead. We've been testing Underfive.ai (not sponsored), which is an AI agent that you can prompt to auto-reply to your emails and LinkedIn messages in, you guessed it, under five minutes. 

So far it's promising. But we haven't moved everything over to that just yet. 

#2 Multi-Channel Follow up

Once a lead replies, call them, hit them on LinkedIn. And keep following up every day until they booked. 

I know that sounds aggressive. But they raised their hand. Cold email isn't easy. It takes some grunt work. 

We also occasionally use Smartlead's "subsequences" to automate the follow up. 

#3 Always Go For the Meeting

Once you have a bit of interest, always go for the meeting. And share your calendar link so it’s as frictionless as possible.

Too many people go back and forth over email waiting for the perfect time to ask for a meeting. The perfect time is right away.

What else would you add??

#sales

I've been a Prospeo user for 2+ years now. 

If you are looking for quality data (without breaking the bank) their V2 is a great option. 

The main thing I like about it is all the filters that come out of the box. 

You can filter by:

- Do they have public pricing?
- What email provider they use
- Do they offer a free trial?
- Do they have a mobile app?
- Headcount by department
- Time in current rule
- Online reviews
- Funding data
- Job postings
- Tech stack
- Intent
- NAICS

Check out the video for more...

#sales

Here’s the exact LinkedIn outreach framework we use across dozens of clients that averages a 30% reply rate. 

If you don't believe me, check out my latest newsletter. I broke it all down there. 

Step 1 — Blank connection request

Over time we’ve seen that no-message connection requests get the highest acceptance rate.

The goal is simply to open up the channel. 

Step 2 — Short question

1–2 sentences ONLY. 

Example:
“hey how do you track [thing] before it becomes a problem? Been talking to a few other [niche] teams and curious how you handle it.”

Step 3 — Send a resource

Even if they don’t reply. Could be a guide, checklist, benchmark report, video, etc. 

Quick tip: 

In your first message, say you're sending [thing]. Then intentionally don't send the thing, but have HeyReach.io, automatically send it a couple hours later: "Just realized I forgot to send [thing], here it is!"

Step 4 — Soft bump

Something simple like:
“if it's relevant, want to chat next week?"

Side note: Been using the Smartlead x HeyReach integration recently. You can do super cool things like auto-send a connection request/message right after someone replies to an email (image below). 

No this post is not sponsored by heyreach or smartlead... 

#sales

taplio

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