Nick Abraham's Linkedin Analytics

I can't believe I have to say this, but if you're running a cold email campaign off social engagement, make sure you remove the person who posted. It's things like this that can ruin an otherwise-great cold email, and destroy your credibility in the process. Not to mention, look at the company name this person used for Leadbird. It's our LinkedIn headline—not our actual company name. I don't care what you're offering or how good your social proof is. Mistakes like this are campaign killers. Next time you run a campaign like this, make sure: 1. All social engagement is scraped properly. 2. Company names are entered properly (there are easy ChatGPT prompts you can use to clean these). Otherwise, have fun in the trash.

I’ll never track my team’s time. In fact, I don’t care what they’re doing between 9am and 5pm on weekdays. If you set the team up properly, you won’t have to care either. I don’t want them feeling like we’re overbearing or anything like that. So, instead of time tracking, we just have daily and monthly non-negotiables. Real examples: 1. Inbox must be empty at EOD This means they've replied to all clients—which we of course need. 2. Clients must hit send volume threshold at end of month. If the team member makes this happen, we know we're on the right track for each client. 3. Clients must hit inbox count threshold. Might be different across clients, but the team is responsible to make sure infra is properly set up. The point is that I don't need to track the team's time when their work is tied to outputs they control. They know they're responsible for them, and that's that. They get their work done without feeling like I’m watching their every move. Win-win.

Trying to show the prospect you're active listening on the sales call:

It's not your fault—it's your client's. (At least, most of the time.) Here's something many lead gen agency owners don't realize: 80% of your client's results depend entirely on their offer. Yet, so many agency owners beat themselves up, thinking they're failing, incompetent, or suffering from imposter syndrome when campaigns don't perform. In reality: If your client has no clear product-market fit... If their offer doesn't resonate... If competitors have superior products... Even hand-crafted emails and hyper-targeted outreach won't save the campaign. Clients typically hire agencies for two reasons: 1. They have zero lead flow (often due to weak offers). 2. They want to scale existing lead generation. Cole Gordon handles this brilliantly. His account management team doesn't even start onboarding until clients complete offer training and come ready with multiple "cold-ready" offers. Why? Because a strong offer is like fishing with a wide net in a lake full of fish—instead of aimlessly fishing in an empty pond. Here's my advice: Put the pressure on your clients to develop strong, compelling, and market-tested offers BEFORE launching campaigns. Great resources to recommend: Alex Hormozi’s content on offer creation. This shifts responsibility to clients, ensuring your campaigns have a real shot at success. Remember: No agency can succeed without a great offer behind them.

"I can't get my reply rate up" One look inside their company: - No VSL on site - No G2 or Clutch reviews - Emails have no relevance - Emails aren't personalized - No case studies published - Lead list targeting is weak - Still monitoring open rates - No customer logos on site - DNC not updated in months - Bounce rate always above 2% - Subject lines SCREAM "Sales" - No customer interviews on site - Emails look like everyone else's - No double-verification on lead list - Emails appear written by an AI SDR - Emails are multiple paragraphs long - No sales assets available or being sent - Founder hasn't posted on social in a year - Offer does nothing to lower perceived risk - Problem you're solving isn't important enough - Email sequences are 4 steps and add no value That's probably why.

Of the 10,000+ cold emails I’ve got, less than .01% of them were good. This was great Here's why: 1. True personalization. This email was actually personalized. It references my pinned post on X. Even if an agent scraped my profile and wrote this, it still appears personalized, which is important. 2. Direct The sender explains his reason for reaching out in one sentence. That’s how every cold email should be. No questions asked. 3. Soft CTA The sender doesn’t ask me for a call or anything of the sort. He instead asks for interest, which is an important distinction. 4. The entire thing is short + skimmable. I got the gist of this email in just a few seconds. That, again, is how every one should be. Way too many cold emails are still far too long. This was a good reminder that you need to shorten them. Also, for the record: Most senders won’t get away from sending with a hefty signature like this. This company will inbox because their main domain has great authority. It’s very similar to Ramp, where cold email is probably under .5% of their total email volume. Anyway, I hope that helps. Is there anything you didn’t like about this email?

The amount of outbound / GTM tooling is making some marketers worse at their jobs—not better. I have to admit before writing the rest of this post: I include our agency and corresponding SaaS tools in this list. The boom of GTM tech and other outbound vendors that make your GTM motion easier / faster / more efficient is a great thing. But it's stopping marketers from learning the true fundamentals of lead generation. There are certain tools (one of which we own) that literally let you: - Enter an Apollo search link - Have emails auto-created / warmed - Have leads scraped and verified - Have personalized lines written to each - Have the campaign run on autopilot - Send you positive replies right to your inbox It's great, quick, and easy. But what about when these tools break? What happens when you have to buy and create your own inboxes? Or when you have to figure out how to build relevance into your own emails? Or when you have to manage campaigns without the help of incredible automations? These tools are to outbound what ChatGPT is to a high school student right now: Awesome, high-impact tools that reduce the need for effort, skill, or know-how. All that to say, if you're an outbound marketer: 1. Learn the fundamentals of lead generation first*. Understand each part of the process and how to carry it out manually. 2. After learning this, THEN layer on tooling. This is supercharging your outbound. I've said my piece.

This 3-layer cold email personalization tactic looks 100% human but is fully automated. Here's how it works: (for context, we are still sending this and seeing great results). LAYER 1 – Social follow We scrape a list of a certain company or entity's followers that might signal the person is interested in our services. In this case, someone who follows Clay is likely interested in generating leads, one way or another. LAYER 2 – Colleague reference After that, we mention we aren't sure if this should be sent to their colleague, and we name them. Again, this information is scraped, but they don't need to know that. It looks human. LAYER 3 – Quicklines AI-personalized line. Hate on these all you want...we have the data: They perform better than emails without them. You can see what the entire email looks like in the second half of the picture below. It looks like a short, relevant, personalized email written by a human. It's short, relevant, and personalized—but certainly not written by a human (at least not at scale). Any questions on this?

I've been using coding assistant tools like Lovable and am seriously starting to wonder about the viability of legacy SaaS platforms. Across my agency, we pay for: - Calendly ($400/mo) - Trainual ($299/mo) - Typeform ($150/month) That's $850/month, or >$10K/year on single-feature tools that are necessary to the business, but could be easily replicated in 5-10 hours of dev work with Lovable or a similar tool. There are probably more on our expense sheet that fit this mold, in all honesty. And we're a small fish, in this sense. There are bigger players than us spending way more on the same tooling that undoubtedly want the same. I know there are switching costs. I know enterprises want the support and some custom functionality. I know it's not like these tools will be gone by next year. But, imagine a company with even basic dev resources and some bandwidth to try to rebuild these tools internally. How does it make sense to spend $10K+/year when you can build and run them for <$500/year?

Why don't more job seekers use cold email to find jobs? This cold email from a candidate was borderline perfect. Here's why: 1. True personalization in SL and body. For context, this person is referencing my cold email re-writes I do here on LinkedIn. I'm not sure if that was pulled with an agent or manually, but it got my attention. 2. Pain + Agitate The sender does a good job of pointing out the pain of scaling a lead gen engine, then agitates it. Conveniently, what they pitch me on is the solution. 3. Soft CTA I maybe would've asked a question to end this, but still, not bad. The person didn't push for call, and instead left the next steps in my hands after writing a valuable email. 4. Relevant social proof. This person effectively uses a resume point as social proof that I would care about as the "prospect" (love it). 5. The entire thing is short + skimmable. This is very important. There was no extra sentences added. It makes for an easy reading and skimming experience. Anyway, I hope that helps (sorry for the fuzzy screenshot!) If you're on the job hunt, I don't see why you wouldn't do this. I'd bet if they sent even 100 of these, they'd get a bite.

We send 2,000,000 cold emails per month for over 200 active clients. Now I want to share my most important findings with you. Those emails book up to 1,000 meetings per month. I've tried every tactic and made every mistake in the book. Now, I compiled the 17 mistakes holding you back from booking more meetings with cold email. They're all here for your viewing. Let me know if I'm missing anything.

I couldn't make this up if I tried. These are two real responses to the exact same cold email that came in 1 hour apart 😂 Seriously though, no matter how good your cold email is, someone will find a way to hate it. Don't let it discourage you.

This is one of the most exciting announcements I've EVER made. We've quietly worked on this for 6+ months, and now it's time to share it with you. After taking 1,000s of sales calls, we learned that some companies want to test and validate outbound, but don't have the capacity or need for a full agency service just yet. For years, we just didn't work with them. Now, we have something just for companies like this, that lets you: - Enter an Apollo search link - Have emails auto-created / warmed with Hypertide and Mailreef - Have leads scraped and verified - Have personalized lines written to each - Have the campaign run on autopilot - Send you positive replies right to your inbox You literally just enter the search link and write whatever copy you want (we can help with that). All for a small set-up (infrastructure fee) and $500/mo for upkeep. You get full infra, 10,000 email sends, and 5,000 lead credits each month. If you want to test outbound for your offer but don't want to spend thousands on an agency, this is for you. If you want this, check the comments.

I'd rather have 40 clients paying $2,500/mo than 10 clients paying $10,000/mo. And I know that's not the advice you typically hear, but I can justify it. Most agency owners will tell you less clients that pay more is better than more clients that pay less. Their argument is that a $1,000/mo client and $10,000/mo client often require the same level of operational capacity / resources, yet one of them pays 1/10 of the other. And I get that. Except what these people don't mention is the level of client concentration risk associated with higher paying clients. Think of it this way: Higher-paying clients: - $100K/mo agency - 10 clients paying $10K/mo - 1 client leaves = 10% of revenue gone Lower-paying clients: - $100K/mo agency - 40 clients paying $2.5K/mo - 1 client leaves = 2.5% of revenue gone I speak to tons of agencies that are finding it hard to justify their high retainers month over month. More than that, it just hurts less to lose a lower-paying client. The facts are the facts. Yes, it's way harder ops-wise, but less client concentration risk makes up for that. Agree or disagree?

Men:

This is an incredible cold email everyone should take notes from. Let's break down why: 1. Phone number in subject and first line. If there's a subject line that's going to get you to open, it's seeing your own cell number in it. Simple as that. The sender also re-iterates this in the first line of the email to make sure the subject line works contextually and preview text is optimized. This can be pulled from various vendors, but this was a different story. More on that below. 2. Puts the product in action. This is a phone number data provider. This sender uses their own product on this person to show them the level of data they can get them. This is perfect "dog-fooding" and should be used by more companies. Also, it's another layer of personalization. 3. Brief explanation with social proof. This email was well-targeted. He knows the recipient wants high-quality data. That's why the text highlighted in yellow works so well. Being able to name-drop Clay, 11x, AWS, and Snov helps, too. Hats off to this company, and I hope you were able to learn something from this!

I've received 10,000+ cold emails in my life. This one is, well, the funniest 😂 Seriously, credit to this person. And honestly, this gave me an idea for a challenge that will both be funny, but help everyone write even better cold emails. If you aren't afraid to get roasted...I challenge you to send your best cold email to nick @ leadbird . io. I'll pick one per week to review, critique, and tweak (all in good fun of course). Don't worry if ICP fit isn't perfect - I just want to see the email, structure, offer, etc. I'll be waiting for your submissions.

Finding a list of perfect-fit accounts is a HUGE pain for outbound marketers. So we built a tool that does it for FREE. If you've ever wanted a full list of accounts you KNOW are good fits, instead of trying to pick them out of a bigger lead list, this is for you. Just enter your perfect fit ICP's website and it spits out a list of similar accounts. Like I said, 100% free. We've had this built internally for a while. I had to convince the team to even let this out, in all honesty 😅 Now it's yours, 100% free. Comment "EMAIL" and I'll DM you the link (must be connected).

I NEVER planned on giving this away. We send 2,000,000 cold emails per month for 200+ clients. And for the first time ever... I'm giving away a master doc of the exact* cold email copywriting frameworks, scripts, and templates we use to do it. We use this exact doc to generate over 1,000 qualified leads per month for clients via cold email. And now it's yours, 100% FREE. All you have to do is copy and paste your offer in (just make sure you can handle the number of new calls 😉 ) Want it? Comment "EMAIL" and I'll DM you the link (must be connected).

When the warm lead responds and you don't want to take any chances: