ColdIQ

Here's the #1 thing to address if your cold emails don't get replies: (It's easier to fix than you think) → Improving your email deliverability. Here's a 7-step guide to do so: 1/ Build a robust email infrastructure = Purchase secondary domains/mailboxes. You can use ColdIQ premium email infrastructure or Instantly.ai done-for-you email set up. 2/ Warmup your domain and gradually increase your daily sends. lemlist, Instantly.ai, Woodpecker.co, Smartlead, MailReach all include warm-up features that'll help improve your email reputation. 3/ Clead your lead lists If your emails bounce a lot, you're sending a bad signal to email platforms. Wich improve your odds of landing in spam. Make sure you use reputable tools to find + validate emails (for example LeadMagic, FullEnrich, Prospeo.io, Icypeas) 4/ Optimize your copy Try to use: - spintax - plain text - few links ... and remove open rate tracking. 5/ Match your email service provider with your prospect's Instantly.ai has a feature that automatically sends emails to Google mailboxes using other Google mailboxes... and likewise for Outlook to Outlook. 6/ Most importantly... send emails you'd want to receive. You’re sending unsolicited emails. Prospects are receiving too many already. If you provide great value, you can break all the rules as much as you want... and you should still be alright! P.S: How are your cold emails campaigns performing this month?

My GTM tech stack(2 months into my role) Email - Superhuman ✅ Honestly a game changer. Blows Gmail and Outlook out of the water. One of the best products I’ve ever used. ❌ It’s pricey (~$25/user/month), so scaling it across the team is tough. Worth it for key folks though CRM – HubSpot ✅ Easy to set up, plugs into everything else we use, and not crazy expensive. Once you figure it out, you can pretty much run it solo. ❌ Still needs a bunch of add-ons to actually be valuable. We bought their "Breeze" data enrichment package and that was a disaster. Super limited data - Easily the worst ROI we’ve had on a tool. Big shoutout to Eyal Katz for being a champ through the implementation. Outbound – Amplemarket ✅ Super intuitive UI. Way better than Clay or Apollo IMO You can build lists with a GPT-style prompt and run multichannel sequences (email, LinkedIn, calling). ❌ Their LinkedIn automation is very basic - didn’t know that going in, but they say improvements are coming. Amazing work by Molly Maahs from Amplemarket team for making the sales process actually enjoyable. LinkedIn Automation – Dripify ✅ Clean UI. Lets you build and launch complex LinkedIn campaigns in minutes. ❌ Managing this across a team is rough. Not really built for scale. Dripify, if you're reading this. happy to share some thoughts. Website De-anonymization – RB2B ✅ I love that little dopamine hit when someone visits our site and I get a Slack ping. ❌ Integrations are very basic and barely working, data’s shaky, and there's zero guidance on what to do once someone shows up. That said, we're barely paying anything, so it stays for now. Call Recorder – Fireflies.ai ✅ Cheap, reliable, dead simple to roll out, and plugs into Hubspot like a charm. ❌ Doesn’t give you the revenue intelligence you’d get from Gong, but it costs like 5–10% of what Gong does. We’ll upgrade when it makes financial sense per seat. Domain Warmup – ColdIQ ✅ I love these guys. Been following their content on LinkedIn and they’re consistently crushing it. They opened a dedicated Slack channel for support, and they help us warm up and manage 10+ domains for around $125/month. Super responsive team and the service just works. General thoughts: ➤ I’ve got full-blown software fatigue. It’s 2025 and I still need 7 platforms just to run one outbound campaign. ➤ Writing effective emails and sending them to the right people at the right time it still 100% an art. No software I’ve tried beats a sharp human. My job’s safe 😅 ➤ If your GTM lead doesn’t know how to stitch together and automate a sales stack… you’re still in trouble. Feel free to send them my way, I’ll give them my 2 cents. ➤ LinkedIn is still our highest-performing channel. If you’re not investing in your personal and company brand, you’re falling behind.

We’re switching CRMs from HubSpot to Attio. I turned our setup plan into a cheat sheet to share here. For context, we're still keeping HubSpot as a marketing automation platform. But my Gen-Z sales team hates the UX of HubSpot. Key components of the setup: 1. Sales Pipelines 2. Email Templates 3. Properties 4. Workflows 5. Reports 6. Integrations Here’s a 1 page cheat sheet 👇

The hardest skill to learn for founders. No, it’s not selling. I just met an outbound agency owner making $30k/month. He told me he feels absolutely stuck in a trench. All because of one reason. He’s doing everything himself. - Still running all the sales calls. - Still handling operations. - Still coaching his team. He is eager to grow, but refuses to delegate. And the funny thing? He knows it’s the problem. But keeps telling himself: “No one can do it as well as me.” You see, most businesses don’t fail because they’re bad. They fail because the founders refuse to step out of their own way. If you’re doing everything yourself, here's the bad news: You aren't scaling a business. You’re just keeping yourself busy. Delegation isn’t about finding someone as good as you. It’s about finding someone good enough. And giving them the time to become better. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you grow. ColdIQ growth skyrocketed once we trusted Fivos Aresti to take over sales from us. P.S. What’s one thing you wish you had delegated sooner?

Over 1,100 booked calls in 2024 With 2 SDRs, Content & Systems: Here’s what we did (and how we’re doubling down in 2025): 1/ Published > 800 LinkedIn posts Content is the foundation of our top of funnel. We studied the format, hooks, and visuals of high-performing creators. → Used tools like Scripe, Kleo and Taplio to find 'viral' ideas. Built a publishing habit across multiple people in our team. (10+ people at ColdIQ regularly post content on LinkedIn) We focused our posts around buyer pain points. 2/ Promoted top-performing posts Ads aren't the funnel.  They extend what is already working. Every month, we review our LinkedIn content. Analyze which posts booked meetings, and with what personas. → Then we run Thought Leader Ads to boost the best ones to the right audience. 3/ Captured hidden engagement signals You’re getting way more inbound signal than you realize. We tracked: - Profile views - Likes, follows, comments - Website visits → Tools we used: Instantly.ai, RB2B, Common Room, Teamfluence™. These helped us identify companies interacting with us. 4/ Routed those leads to Clay → Everything is centralized into one Clay workspace → Lead info is enriched, deduplicated, and cleaned within the platform. 5/ Scored & segmented with AI Not every inbound lead shall be reached out to. We used Claygent, OpenAI, and Claude to: → Classify leads into Tier 1, 2, or 3. → Add context like role, tech stack, and current initiatives to our messaging. → Pursue Tier 1 leads with multi-channel outreach (phone, email, LinkedIn). 6/ Enriched with accurate contact data → Used Prospeo.io, Icypeas, LeadMagic, and FullEnrich for phone + email enrichment. Ran waterfall enrichment to maximize data finding rate. 7/ Sent short, contextual outreach We used: → lemlist for multi-channel → Instantly.ai for email-only Messages often included a lead magnet or value offering to improve results. 8. Booked 1,127 meetings → These helped us hit $3.4M in ARR by December 2024 (we've grown a bit since!) This 'system' is obviously not perfect. But I'm convinced it's one of the most cost-effective playbooks for B2B companies. (Caveat: your audience needs to be on LinkedIn) Curious what your current playbook is to generate pipeline? 👇

The new hottest job in sales? (and how it can save you $20k+ a month) Companies used to hire large SDR teams to get meetings. But the game has completely changed. One skilled Go-to-Market (GTM) Engineer can now deliver the same output as 5 traditional SDRs—at a fraction of the cost. Why?→ Smarter Tech: Modern sales tools like Clay, Instantly.ai and Common Room mean one person can automate personalized outreach and generate the same (or better) results. → Efficiency Over Volume: Mass-blasting emails hoping for replies no longer works. GTM Engineers leverage precise data, personalized messaging, and automation to convert fewer, but higher-quality conversations. → The Rise of Hybrid Skills: GTM Engineers are a blend of data analysts and automation experts with high business acumen. They’re the most in-demand role in sales today because they maximize impact while controlling costs. This isn’t a theory—it’s already happening. I can't keep count of all the companies asking me to help them find a GTME to hire. GTME skills are probably the hottest skills to have in sales right now. Agree or disagree? Let me know your thoughts

My agency hit $4M ARR with Clay as our 'secret' weapon. Here are the features you should master first: 1/ AI-Powered Formulas Why? ↳ Clay lets you use AI to create some conditional formulas that will help you build precise & complex tables. Knowing how to use this feature will allow you to put any growth idea you have into existence. My ranking: S-Tier 2/ Clay’s AI Agent (Claygent) Why? ↳ Claygent acts like an army of assistant that scours the web to surface any data point you need. Finding the right data is the most essential element to successful outbound campaigns. And none do it better than Clay’s AI Agent. My ranking: S-Tier 3/ HTTP API Integrations Why? ↳ Clay has 100+ native integrations with data platforms. This means you can do most of your data enrichment natively with Clay. But sometimes, Clay doesn’t integrate with the platform you need. Being able to manually connect it yourself means you're not limited to existing integrations. My ranking: A-Tier 4/ Waterfall Enrichment Why? ↳ You can aggregate ‘best-in-class’ phone & email finders to enrich data. 1 good solution = finding ~50% of your list. 5+ good solutions = up to 85% finding rate. My ranking: A-Tier 5/ Using AI Models in Spreadsheets Why? ↳ You can leverage Claude, OpenAI & other models on many records at one. This entails prompting actions such as ‘GPT lead scoring’, ‘AI messaging personalization’, ’10-K Reports analyses’ and more. My ranking: S-Tier Btw, Dan Rosenthal and I broke down ALL the features we used to grow ColdIQ to $4M+ ARR in a 38-minute video. → You can watch it right here: taap.it/kh73Nd P.S: What’s your favourite Clay feature?

What is a GTM Engineer? Go-to-Market Engineering is a key ingredient in modern sales. Legacy sales orgs continue to train a production line of sales clones. Modern orgs are specializing, automating, and seeking hyper efficiency. The outbound role has become highly complex so it makes sense to centralize those complexities into their own team-supporting roles. This raises the question of whether your company should build these specialized functions internally, or buy/outsource them from an agency. Michel Lieben is the Founder & CEO of ColdIQ, where they've built outbound systems for over 100 B2B sales organizations, focusing specifically on the GTM Engineering role. He shared a wealth of knowledge with me on GTM Engineering, AI SDR tools, and how/when to outsource B2B outbound VS build internally. If you're unclear on these topics, definitely add this one to your watchlist. Full conversation: https://lnkd.in/gGVaVc7J

If I lost my business tomorrow … Here is what I'd need to restart a new one 👇 Grit and a Gmail account. I wouldn’t touch any of the 30+ tools we use now. Not because they’re not good. But because you don’t need them when you’re just starting. Instead: I’d open a Google Sheet. List 100 companies I want to work with using Sales Nav. Find the decision maker for each. And write 100 emails by hand. No sequences. No enrichment. No fancy setup. Most people think they need to get their hands on the latest tech. When all they need is grit. To do things that don’t scale. To get rejected 87 times and still write email 88. To do the boring, unscalable things long enough. If you’re under $20k/month, you don’t need more tools. You need more conversations. Let an agency like ours automate once you’ve proven the offer works. But if you can’t get 5 replies manually, what makes you think tech will fix that? Outbound isn’t complicated. We’re just addicted to shortcuts. P.S. What would you choose - putting in the reps or high-tech early on?

I spent 300 hours researching 1,500+ software. Here's how to upgrade your tech stack with AI: 1️⃣ Use AI apps for building leads lists Your ability to put the message in front of the right person is the biggest predictor of your outreach campaign's success. Some AI applications make the process easier by helping you: - Build lead lists - Deeply research prospects - Segment & score prospect Examples include: - Relevance AI Prospect Researcher and Enrichment agents - Clay’s AI Agent and Integration with 100+ data platforms. - Exa’s AI Research & Data Sourcing Agent 2️⃣ Use AI to orchestrate complex workflows Running cold email campaigns used to be fragmented across several platforms and involved moving around .csv files from one tool to another. Workflow builders & AI agents now help you: - Build a list  - Score your leads - Find their Emails - Verify these Emails - Personalise your messaging with AI - And import to leads to a sales engagement platform … all that from a single tool. Examples for these tools include Clay, Relevance AI, Common Room & Unify. 3️⃣ Use AI to improve your deliverability A message that doesn’t get read, doesn’t get replied to. Every year, deliverability is getting harder to crack. Thankfully, a few sending platforms are leveraging AI to help with: - Secondary domains & mailboxes setup - Automated Spintaxxing - Email warm-ups Examples include: Instantly.ai, lemlist & Woodpecker.co. 4️⃣ Use AI to help close your deals We’re still far from seeing AI successfully replacing humans in Google Meet. But the AI bots are already listening to these sales conversations. They already help by: - Taking notes from convos - Surfacing insights from individual conversations - Surfacing aggregate insights from MANY conversations For example, one thing I like to do is ask Attention what our prospects have asked most in our latest 100+ sales conversations. Once I know that, I can address these points in our messaging. P.S: Any unheard-of use case you’ve seen with AI applied to go-to-market?