Co-Founder & CEO at LeadHaste - a world-class B2B lead-gen agency that sends you ready-to-buy prospects so your team can spend time on what matters most: closing deals.

"How's it going?" is the cold email of real life.

You say it to someone you haven't talked to in months. You don't actually want an answer. You're just filling space before you ask for something.

And it got me thinking about outreach.

Most cold emails work the same way. They open with filler before sliding into the ask.

"I wanted to reach out because we help companies like yours..."

That's the business version of walking up to someone at a party and launching into your elevator pitch after a hollow "how's it going?"

It leads nowhere.

The emails that actually get replies do something different. They ask a specific question. They reference something only that person would care about.

They make the reader feel seen, not targeted.

One of our best performing emails last quarter had zero pitch in it. Just a question about a decision the prospect made on their website.

1 positive reply per 47 sends.

Compare that to the average: 1 per 1,350.

The difference wasn't the offer. Wasn't the subject line. Wasn't the sending tool.

It was the quality of attention.

Before you write your next cold email, ask yourself: would a real human actually say this to another human's face?

If not, rewrite it.

⚡️Dimitar Petkov

Clay World Record Holder | Co-founder @ LeadHaste | Clay & Smartlead Certified Partner

You don't need a marketing agency to build your ICP.

I keep seeing founders pay $10k-$20k for "ICP development."

An agency interviews 8 customers over 2 months. Delivers a PDF. You skim it once.

That's not strategy. That's expensive paperwork.

Here's what actually works:

1. Pull your last 20 closed-won deals
2. Look at what they have in common - industry, size, tech stack, trigger event
3. Feed your sales call transcripts into Claude and ask it to find patterns in pain points
4. Cross-reference with your CRM data on deal velocity
5. Build a scoring model in Clay using those signals

That's it. One afternoon. Maybe $20 in API costs.

Your sales calls already contain everything an agency would charge five figures to "discover."

The data is sitting in your Gong recordings. Your CRM notes. Your support tickets.

You don't have a research problem. You have an assembly problem.

Stop outsourcing your own customer knowledge.

taplio

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