🦾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?

Vaibhav Namburi

Founder @ SmartLead | 1x Exit | Always Hiring The Best

I like buying coffees, leading passionate people and building great products - FAST.

I'm recommended by C - Level Execs of Billion $ companies, I've been given prestigious awards and lost my hair in doing so.

I started Five2One in May 2017 with $500 and grew it to 7 figures and 10 team members in 11 months & 28 days (the day I closed the deal that got us the 7 Fig mark)

I started & sold Cenario.co 1.5 years post the pandemic outbreak.

I started SmartWriter in June 2021, grew it to 14,000 users including Facebook, Stripe & VaynerMedia.

I started Smartlead in June 2022, currently (Aug) at 6,000 accounts.

We've been recognised as one of the best in Australia and have built 62 production-grade applications for start ups and corporates.

I've worked with The UN, PwC, NewsCorp, Carsguide, AutoTrader, IAG, WilliamHill, Maoneng, SocietyOne, Lumachain, UNSW, Archistair and many other multi-(b)million dollar companies.

I have taught at 2 software bootcamps on how to build quality software products in various technologies and authored 3 courses on Udemy that gained nearly ~35,000 students online.

I've spoken internationally and nationally at over 46 events from meetups to paid conferences.

We've helped clients raise Millions in blockchain and worked with companies that are changing the world as we know it.

During this time I learnt how important having a strong team (that aligns with you) is, how important it is to believe in yourself and to enjoy what you're doing.

I still forget to put semi-colons and eat dessert before the main course.

I'm now building what I've wanted to from the beginning - our own products (smartwriter.ai, smartlead.ai)

You'll often find me on stage sharing advice and tips on bootstrapping a B2B business to talks on AI's position in the future, the best software development and product growth tactics.

I've been called a tech lead, CEO, CTO, coder, engineer, founder, leader, coffee buyer, non-sleeper and many other things -no one seems to realise i'm an excellent singer 😂

I've had the amazing opportunity to mentor for world-class accelerators like Startmate, Antler UK, Incubate, UNSW Founders and Australia's largest VC fund Blackbird as a Giant

I can be your "thought leader" too, just beware that I think a lot about potatoes

So, you've read this far ... coffee?

Member

RevGenius is a group of revenue-generating sales and marketing professionals brought together to learn, share, support and grow with each other.

I don't think people understand. Building a growing business was never about code.

It's about grit. Doing a meticulous grind, obsessively, while the world moves ahead of you, year after year.

Promising yourself "one more time". When there's no steam left, but somehow you need to build back up, again and again and again.

A conversation last week sparked a thought, and coincidentally as I was using Claude Cowork to do some analysis, I found this document I wrote to myself in 2019 (PS I carry this in my wallet, those who know, know).

Fun fact.

I missed EVERY. SINGLE. TIMELINE.

Not even by an inch, or a mile, but probably a 100 miles.

Then the second one I missed by 80 miles.

The third by 50 miles.

The fourth by 20 miles.

Failed 11 ecommerce brands.
Flowyse didn't make 0.00001% of that
Failed Forbes 30U30 4 times in a row, year after year.
Was renting in 2021.
Didn't own a Tesla.
Was definitely a multi-thousandaire 😅
Was barely paying myself a salary in 2021 forget the revenue
I was living in my sister's & brother in laws house in 2022.

Things don't always go according to your plan.

But that is no excuse to not stop.

Last week could have been bad. It's your responsibility to make the next week better.

PS yes I had all the way till 2023, but that was too embarrassing to share haha

This eventually led to Smartlead - whose numbers will be a guess till I die, those who know, know tho. 😉

So yes, atleast in my perspective (i may be wrong), business was NEVER about "coding" apps, respectfully that was the most predictable part.

Our customer beat us to a billboard presence on Times Square.

And I couldn't be happier!

KEY OUTREACH was the most successful agency on Smartlead in 2025

Across billions of emails sent and 10000s of customers on the platform, they took the number 1 spot.

An incredibly difficult spot to attain given the volume people we send through us and the volume of customers we have.

This award wasn't just for volume of replies but density of positive replies and meetings they booked for their clients.

Extremely proud of the KEY OUTREACH team and all that they achieved!

And very grateful they chose to attain their success on Smartlead's infrastructure.

Had Suprava Sabat present of 1400 person registered event yesterday.

I dont think people realise what they are competing against if this is what the market is.

The same applies to all the best performers in the space.

Face it. The market IS crowded because you cant land their attention.

You need to be everywhere, not just on outbound, you need to be on paid, content, community, social, offline events. And that is the reality.

If you want to stand out you need to work for it.

She showed us yesterday that her approach includes hours of research on content, using automation where needed to aggregate as much relevant signal data beyond just funding.

They do scraping on PH for feature releases to trigger signals and so much more. The tools are all there to think outside the box.

I can also bet this post wont get the engagement it needs because im telling you to work hard, people are engrained to quick results.

And that leads me to my main point. Want to build a $100M business, its not going to come through agents or building 100s of things.

Nail what your customers want. Solve every problem in your domain. And do that for years.

taplio

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Vaibhav Namburi

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The Battle

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Vaibhav Namburi

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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);}🦾Eric Nowoslawski's LinkedIn Performance

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