Lead generation is broken.

Too many companies:

- Try to generate leads themselves, but fail
- Hire a lead gen agency with bloated retainers who can’t deliver

Lead generation as a whole is always changing, so unless you’ve got a dedicated team
on it (that knows what they’re doing) — you can expect to overpay for underwhelming
results.

That said, in 2025 — you don’t need to try to generate leads yourself, or pay an
outsized retainers for subpar work.

With Leadbird, you:

- Don’t pay for overpriced retainers
- Only pay per meeting-ready-lead we deliver
- Get the expertise of career outbound salespeople

We achieve this for you through:

- Targeted lead list building
- Domain + inbox set-up and warm-up
- Proven cold email copywriting principles
- Done-for-you cold email campaign management

Book a free demo from the link in my bio to join over 115 active clients getting
high-quality, meeting-ready-leads every single month.

Talk soon,
Nick

Nick Abraham

Maybe I’m falling for ragebait, but cold email has let me:

(1) Drop out of college.

(2) Grow my own agency to multi 7-figures of revenue.

(3) Employ 30+ people around the world full-time.

(4) Buy my sister and Dad cars.

(5) Rent my dream apartment.

(6) Buy my first 5 properties.

(7) Work with 100s of businesses.

(8) Make lifelong friends.

(9) Give my future family a financial head start.

Just remember, for every one person that dunks on cold outbound, there's another person whose life was changed because of it.

I send 2M+ cold emails and 1M+ LinkedIn DMs per month for 1,000+ active clients across Leadbird and Cleverly

Gemini 3 cannot sell a $10k service package.
GPT 5.1 cannot sell a $10k service package.
Llama 4 cannot sell a $10k service package.
Opus 4.5 cannot sell a $10k service package.
DeepSeek-R1 cannot sell a $10k service package.

A great human seller can.

I posted the below tweet earlier this year. If I could edit it, I would say:

“If I had a son, I would preach that you can either be top 1% in whatever job you have or risk losing it to AI’.”

Because “AI is going to eliminate [insert role]” is surface level thinking, and too broad of a generalization.

It is, of course, going to eliminate roles, but not roles in their entirety. 

Instead, it will eliminate the bottom 99% of certain roles while accelerating the top 1% of others.

Sales is a great example.

AI can handle a lot of the outreach process, even including script writing. What it can’t do is work a deal the way a human would.

The same can be said for a lot of software dev work, in my opinion. Great engineers will never be out of work, but average/mediocre ones likely will.

In short: if you want to AI-proof yourself, become top 1% at what you do. Easier said than done, I know…but very much worth it.

I jokingly posted this and SO many people commented or messaged about Agency 3 and asked for an intro. This is a huge problem.

This post was a joke. No lead gen agency worth their salt would ever take a deal in which they generate leads for clients, and only get paid if/when the client closes them.

We can't control what the client does after we generate the lead.

- What if they simply don’t engage with them?
- What if the lead asks to follow up later, and they don’t?
- What if their sales team just can’t close for their product/service?
- What if their pricing is way off the market norm?
- What if their reviews online are terrible, and the prospects drop out pre-call?
- What if they have no social proof and can't build trust with prospects?

There is so much that is out of the lead generation agency's control. 

Moreover, the client will have no skin in the game and not value the opportunity if they have no risk associated 

The agency can do their job perfectly and even go above and beyond and still make zero dollars because of something on client’s side.

Just a word of warning!

Excited and grateful to share I’ve reached 20,000 followers here on LinkedIn!

Almost 3 years ago, with 3,000 followers, I started posting the most valuable content I could every day (sometimes 2x per day).

Since then, I’ve been able to:

- Meet lots of awesome people I now consider friends.
- Learn a ton about outbound, GTM, and marketing.
- Attract incredible clients we’re extremely grateful for

Whether you were one of the first 3,000 or a part of the next 17,000, I truly want to say thank you. None of it's possible without you.

To that point, I only ask of you is to comment what type of content you want to see more of moving forward!

Super excited to show off our new client portal that makes it far easier for clients to track replies!

Before, we had clients logging into Smartlead to check email replies, then switching to a LinkedIn inbox manager for DM responses, then tracking cold calls elsewhere.

The entire lead gen operation was fragmented across three interfaces that didn't really interconnect.

Clients would miss responses because they forgot to check one of the platforms. They'd get confused about which channel was performing better. 

The biggest sign of this was support tickets kept coming in asking where to find specific replies.

So, we effectively rebuilt our client portal, using MasterInbox as the common thread. Now when clients log in, they see everything in one feed (emails, calls, DMs) that looks completely native to our platform.

Most importantly, clients have commented on how much easier this is for them.

Not to mention, it helps us, too. We've eliminated ~80% of the "where do I find my replies?" support requests. 

As for performance, clients are responding to leads faster because they're not losing track of conversations across multiple tools.

We're rolling this out to all clients because the upgrade is that significant.

Of the 1,000s of client campaigns we've run this year, the best-performer in recent memory was for a yoga studio.

I am big on local lead generation, and this is a perfect example of it. 

This yoga studio hired us to reach out to other businesses to try to get them to book group classes, retreats, off-sites, etc.

So, we scraped lead lists of local businesses and wrote a hyper-local cold email campaign to go with it.

And though you might expect the best performing campaign to be for an agency with a great offer or a hot new SaaS product, this blew others out of the water 

The point is that cold email for local businesses is wildly underrated. If you have or know of a local business interested in generating leads via cold email, feel free to reach out.

We’d love to replicate this.

If you’ve ever pulled leads from Apollo or anything else using “Industry” filters, read this post to make them way more accurate:

They have miscategorized companies in the industry that aren’t relevant to your ICP.

We've been using a new method to get our refined TAM into one list.

See, most lead lists give you name, email, company, LinkedIn URL, and a generic "industry" tag. The problem is that those industry classifications are wrong a lot of the time.

You end up messaging wrong accounts or missing perfect fits.

We found a way to fix this using data already in your lists.

Every company LinkedIn URL comes with an "About Us" section where they describe exactly what they do.

Process:

- Take 3-5 dream clients.
- Go to their LinkedIn About Us sections.
- Pull out every relevant keyword - product terms, customer segments, pain points, industry language. Build a keyword bank.

This takes 20 minutes.

Now layer this on top of broad industry tags. Instead of just "Healthcare," filter for Healthcare companies whose About Us mentions your specific keywords.

Gets you from the neighborhood into the right house.

This is basically advanced semantic filtering without expensive AI tools.

Use the company's own words to qualify them instead of relying on generic industry buckets.

My agency has 283 active clients. If we don't get to 1,000 by the end of 2026, I'll view the year as a failure. There are 3 things we need to do to get there:

LEVER 1 – Churn Reduction

We want to cut our churn in half.

Our sales team don't lie to prospects, but much of the churn does come from misaligned expectations around lead generation, so we are investing a lot in making that extremely clear up front.

LEVER 2 – More Time On Growth

This sounds obvious, but few people do it in practice. It's so easy to get caught up in day-to-day operations and not spend enough time on top of funnel activity.

There's so much more we could be doing (YouTube, ads, events, etc.) here.

LEVER 3 – Make Sure Our Team Levels Up

To serve 1,000 clients, we need to make sure our team is operating at all levels.

We had them at off-sites in Dubai and Cape Town in the past few months, and we'll do another one next year.

More tangibly, we are trying to get them more ingrained in lead gen overall.

We are asking them to go follow other leaders in the space and consume their content on a regular basis.

To me, this is an undeniable way to level up.

This comes off the heels of rebuilding our client portal and making it crystal clear and easy to operate. If you have any questions or want to see more on this, let me know.

One of the most common replies you'll get to cold emails at scale is "how much does it cost".

Generally, you'll either:

A) Give the price. Without further context or sales tactics, people automatically see this as a cost and have a hard time justifying the ROI. This usually makes it harder to get on a call.

B) Give a range. This is a bit better, but depending on budget, it still may be hard to paint ROI via email. You need to give a fairly broad range.

Now, very few businesses selling >$1000 packages are public about pricing.

I think that should change.

Your pricing should be publicly available somewhere, ideally on a dedicated page that does a lot of the selling for you.

This might look like:

1. Landing page with 8-minute VSL, full of social proof, with pricing in the middle.

2. Static pricing page, full of social proof + process walkthrough.

This changes your reply from:

"Sure, our pricing is XYZ"

to

"Sure, feel free to have a look here [link] for more information on that".

This way, instead of your prospect just seeing the amount of money you want them to pay you, they get a much fuller picture of the value you provide.

If I were in charge of business development at a local blue collar business like this and needed to win jobs with cold email, I would:

1. Scrape a list of local businesses with an office location.
2. Write the following email copy:

—

[name], just wanted to touch base. We're an HVAC company in the area at [address].

Curious - do you have a go-to person for any kind of AC/heating repairs?

—

You might get a couple of jobs from this, but that is not really the goal with this kind of work.

The "magic" is what happens after.

3. Enroll all positive replies into a weekly nurture sequence (case studies and value).

Do this locally for 90-120 days.

It's the most surefire way to make sure that when a business' AC/heating breaks, they think of you right away.

Scaled to thousands of businesses across a major metro area, you're looking at serious pipeline.

Plus, a VERY small portion (if any) of your competitors are doing this.

To that point, if your business or someone you know would benefit from a system like this, comment or DM me!

Job titles are lying to you about who actually does the work. 

If you're selling something without a clean buyer title, your targeting is probably broken.

Here's how we fixed ours:

Outbound breaks down when your product is ambiguous. 

Say you sell financial forecasting software. 

Who owns forecasting depends on the company (Finance, FP&A, Operations, Strategy, or even founders, etc.).

A "Finance Manager" could handle AR, AP, Treasury, or actually build forecasts. You can't tell from the title.

So we stopped guessing titles and started targeting the actual work.

Layer 1: Department filtering

Start with departments where your problem sits. For forecasting: Finance, FP&A, Operations, Strategy.

Layer 2: LinkedIn description keywords

Every user writes a description under their title:

- "Own the quarterly forecast"
- "Build headcount forecasts"
- "Drive variance analysis"
- "Maintain the revenue model"

These keywords self-identify who does the work.

Instead of targeting "Finance Manager" and hoping, target "Finance Manager who mentions 'forecast' and 'financial model' in their description."

The process:

1. Pick 1-2 relevant departments
2. Extract 8-20 keywords tied to your product
3. Filter people mentioning those keywords in descriptions
4. Hit people who self-identify as doing the work

Example query:

Department: Finance/FP&A/Operations

Description contains: "forecast" OR "financial model" OR "budget"

This surfaces only people who explicitly manage forecasts.

We've been running this across ambiguous products and have seen both higher reply rates and better conversations.

The perfect cold email has:

- Relevance = Reason for reaching out.
- Personalization = Part that only makes sense to them.
- Offer = Outcome you'll provide.
- Social proof = Proof you've done it.
- CTA = Low-risk ask that puts the ball in their court.

Not complicated!

We've had clients we book 100s of meetings for per month, and others who churned because "cold email doesn't work".

The difference in how they operate:

Ones booking 100s of meetings:

- Willingly give away free value
- Take suggestions on optimizing offer
- Understand it's a volume game
- Don't overanalyze campaigns
- Chase leads we send them religiously

Ones who are convinced cold email doesn't work:

- Refuse to give away free value because it'll bring "bad leads".
- Refuse to optimize their offer to make it cold-ready.
- Want to send to a "targeted" list of 76 accounts.
- Analyze campaigns in relation to "industry standards" they Googled
- Let leads sit dormant for days and weeks after we submit them

It isn't exactly rocket science. This isn't to say we're perfect at what we do with every campaign.

It is to say we operate based on the data we have, and our data shows that this works.

We're doing 60,000 cold calls per month for clients and ourselves right now. Our number 1 learning for what converts to appointments and what doesn't has nothing to do with cold calling tech or set up.

It strictly has to do with the caller's tone.

One of the big pitfalls of outsourced callers is that they come into the call with no tonality.

Typical "Hey, do you have 10 seconds to speak? I'd love to show you how we could..."

Callers will sound robotic because you are grading them on the amount of dials they do per day. So, they speed-run through the list 

The much better play to run is:

1. Ensure your caller has a curious, inquisitive tone.
2. Ensure they don't get into the routine of sounding like a robot.

It sounds like a simple fix, but it's really not.

This is the difference between booking appointments from cold calling and wasting a ton of money.

How it feels when you realize you can just send more cold emails to get more leads:

We’re sending 260k cold emails Thursday-Sunday this week.

So many sellers view holidays and weekends as time to pause campaigns. I just don't see the point in doing this…mainly for a few reasons:

1. Because so many sellers pause their campaigns, inboxes are way less crowded.

2. Often, you’re targeting someone senior with outbound. Senior people, even though less on weekends, are more likely to check email (even once per day) during the holidays.

3. Generally, people are in more relaxed, friendly moods on a Thanksgiving Friday than they are on a random November Tuesday morning. This bodes well for reply rate.

Disclaimer:

You can expect ~50% of your typical campaign performance in terms of positive reply rate during the holidays. Yes it's reduced, but it's not worth stopping sending altogether.

TLDR: Don’t pause campaigns this holiday!

If I had to increase positive reply to meeting booked rate for any B2B business, here are the exact steps I'd take:

(1) Set up an automation that enriches positive replies with all relevant info (LI URL if I don't already have it, phone number, etc)

(2) Send them a LinkedIn connection request post-positive reply.

(3) Cold call them after that as well.

(4) If the meeting still isn't booked, I'd bump the cold email reply, mentioning I called and left a voicemail. Then, I’d follow up one more time after that.

(5) If they STILL haven't booked, I'd set up a weekly nurture newsletter for all prospects that fit this mould. Each email would have a CTA to book a call.

The point is that you reach them on all platforms.

If you need to set this up:

- Find out what data you have available after each list scrape.

- Set up waterfall enrichment to find what you’re missing after a positive reply (phone number, LI profile, etc.)

- Outline a process for you/your sellers to walk through post-positive reply.

- Use your CRM or beehiiv to set up a weekly newsletter nurture sequence (52 emails comprised of social proof + value).

The more you reach them, the better chance you have. It's not that difficult, but a lot of companies struggle with this.

- client with $100,000 LTV

Client: We only got 3 leads this month.

Me: And?

Client: We are going to have to churn.

Me: Why?

Client: We're clearly not getting enough volume for this to work.

Me: Ok, let's run the numbers. Your average LTV is $100,000 right?

Client: Yes.

Me: Okay, so, if we charge you $300 per lead, we can generate 100 leads that you close 0% on, and you'd STILL be at breakeven with us.

Client: Yeah, but we don't close at 0%. We close at 10-15%.

Me: Exactly. Let's even cut that in half and take 5%. If you pay us $300 per lead and close at 5%, you'd pay $6000 in lead generation costs for $100K in rev.

Client: Oh.

Me: Do you see why you don't need a lot of leads for this to work?

Client: Yes.

We have 60,000 monthly cold calls worth of data to show that prospects absolutely still pick up the phone.

Yet, still, deniers will say that it’s not worth their time, or that nobody picks up the phone, or my favorite: “When you pull the list, you’ll end up with office numbers and not personal ones!”.

(for the record: It is incredibly easy to pull personal mobile phone numbers from lead lists).

My point is that you absolutely shouldn’t listen to people who’ve never given a channel a fair shake about whether or not it works.

If you did:

1. You’d never send a DM because “inboxes are crowded”.
2. You’d never send a cold email because “it doesn’t work”.
3. You’d never make a cold call because “nobody picks up the phone”.

In reality, cold calling and quite literally all other channels “work” if executed correctly and for long enough.

Heading into 2026, outbound marketers will have to multi-thread more and more, meaning it’s likely going to be time to pick up the phone.

Just remember: It does work.

"We already emailed them"

That's EXACTLY why you should be emailing them again.

At any given point, roughly 3% of decision makers in your TAM are actively looking for your solution.

That means even if you do everything right with your lead gen efforts, a good portion of your TAM simply won't buy right then and there (see: “email me next year” replies).

From there, you're given two choices:

1. Mark them as permanently "not interested" and move on.
2. Re-market to them with new messaging every 30 days from there on out.

If you mark leads that don't want to buy right now as "permanently not interested," you will eventually run through your TAM.

If you reach out to leads who don't want to buy right now, every 30 days with fresh messaging, you will be top of mind when they do want to buy.

This is also why it's effectively impossible to burn a relatively large TAM. (Taylor Haren does a great job of explaining this).

The point is, don't be scared of holding on to the same leads. Just make sure your offer is strong, and the messaging is unique each time.

Cheap Verifier

Founder

Cheap Inboxes

SalesBlast.io

EmailBison

Official Advisor

EmailGuard

Let Pam

Vice President Operations

Freelance Smart Contract and Solidity Engineer

Freelance Solidity Developer

Wunderman Thompson Data

Solutions Engineer

Renaissance Learning

Programmer Analyst I

Hack Reactor

Completed Full-Stack Software Engineering Immersive

Software Engineering Student

Slinging Inboxes

I love creating. 

Since I was a kid I've always tinkered and been interested in how things work. 

In college I started investing in oil ETF's and other stocks. That got me started in finance. 

After having so many close friends who were creating apps and companies, I let my interest in these run wild and started my own software company. But. I wasn't coding...yet.

Finally, I've learned to code and can create whatever sparks my interest. I'm so excited to have finally made it and become a software engineer and keep following my passion...to create.

After learning to code I started learning marketing via email and LinkedIn. Since then I started my own agency, Salesblast.io, where we help B2B firms market their products and services.

Ben Rasmussen

Customer service standards in this industry are absolutely broken.

People pay us hundreds monthly for inbox services. 

Then they apologize for asking basic questions.

This makes no sense.

You're the customer. 

Ask whatever you need.

But apparently the bar is so low that basic responsiveness feels like premium service. 

Clients are shocked when we actually answer their messages.

This tells you everything about our competition.

Most providers disappear after payment. 

Questions go unanswered for days. 

Support tickets get ignored completely.

So when we respond within hours, clients think we're doing something extraordinary. 

Actually we're not. 

We're just doing the bare minimum of customer service.

Answer messages. Fix problems quickly. Be available.

Somehow this qualifies as exceptional in the inbox provider space.

The opportunity here is massive. 

An entire industry exists where simply answering your phone makes you premium.

Most businesses fail at basics. 

They optimize fancy features while ignoring fundamental service quality.

Then they wonder why customers churn.

Your competitive advantage doesn't need to be revolutionary. It just needs to be reliable.

Respond fast. Solve problems. Be there when customers need you.

Everything else is secondary.

Follow me Ben Rasmussen for more business insights.

Taking action beats reading about action every single time.

People love asking "what should I learn before I start cold email?"

Wrong question.

The right question is "how fast can I send my first 1,000 emails?"

I see this constantly. 

People stuck in learning mode for months.
Reading every blog post about deliverability. 
Watching every YouTube video about subject lines. 
Downloading every "proven template" they can find.

Then they send 50 emails and wonder why nothing happens.

Poor soul.

When I started, I found a friend who needed clients. 

Set up cold email automation. Sent volume. Booked 3 meetings the first day.

Was my copy perfect? No. 
Did I know everything about deliverability? No. 
Did I have the "optimal setup"? No!

But I took action. And action creates feedback.

Feedback tells you what's actually broken.

You can't get that from reading.

The biggest lesson I've learned in business:

Doing it teaches you more than studying it ever will.

"How do I get better at sales calls?" 
Do more sales calls.

"How do I improve my cold email response rates?" 
Send more cold emails and test different offers.

"How do I scale my agency?" 
Get more clients and figure out the operations as you grow.

Everyone wants the blueprint before they start.

But the blueprint only makes sense after you've done it.

You learn by doing. Not by preparing to do.

I built Cheapinboxes to be the #1 inbox provider on the Internet because I executed fast.

And DEFINITELY not because I had perfect knowledge.

The market will teach you everything you need to know.

Follow me Ben Rasmussen for more content like this.

Volume isn't killing your deliverability. 

Your infrastructure is.

I've watched dozens of agencies throttle their campaigns because some "deliverability expert" convinced them sending over 500 emails per day would destroy their sender reputation.

Complete nonsense.

These same agencies wonder why they're booking 3 meetings per month while competitors sending 5,000+ daily are crushing it.

The brainwashing runs deep in this industry.

Somewhere along the line, cold emailers started believing that low volume equals high deliverability. 

That if you just send fewer emails with more "personalization," you'll magically land in the inbox.

This creates a poverty mindset around outreach.

You're not protecting your deliverability by sending 200 emails per day. 

You're protecting yourself from actually testing if your offer works.

Real deliverability issues come from bad infrastructure. 

→ Cheap domains 
→ Poor sender reputation
→ Terrible targeting that generates spam complaints.

Not from volume itself.

I've run campaigns at 10,000+ sends daily with better inbox rates than agencies sending 500. 

The difference → Proper setup + Quality domains + Actual list hygiene.

Meanwhile agencies are debating whether 300 or 400 sends is "safe" while their business starves from lack of pipeline.

Backward approach entirely.

If you're genuinely worried about deliverability, invest in infrastructure. 

Get proper domains. 
Use legitimate sending tools. 
Target better prospects who actually want what you're selling.

But don't convince yourself that staying small is strategic.

You're not being careful with deliverability. 

You're being careful with growth. 

And that caution is the real threat to your business.

Follow me Ben Rasmussen for more cold email reality.

Young cold emailers get all the attention.

Twenty-two years old, crushing campaigns, booking meetings, making money. 

Impressive, sure. 

But you know what's actually crazy?

The forty-year-old corporate guy who walks away from everything.

The stable salary. The predictable career path. The retirement plan his parents told him to protect. 

He throws it all away to send cold emails, and that takes a different kind of courage entirely.

The twenty-two-year-old has nothing to lose. 

No mortgage, no kids depending on him, no decade of conditioning telling him this is stupid. 

He's exploring, experimenting, playing with house money.

The forty-year-old? 

He's betting everything.

He spent twenty years learning that cold outreach is spam, that mass volume is unprofessional, that you need warm introductions and relationship building to succeed. 

Now he has to forget all of it. 

Deprogram himself. Rewire his brain. Send 5,000 emails per day despite everything his corporate experience taught him.

His former colleagues think he's insane. His parents don't understand. His spouse is nervous.

But he does it anyway.

He learns infrastructure, builds campaigns, tests offers, faces rejection at scale for the first time in his career. 

That's a different level of impressive.

Starting young is easy because you don't know what you don't know. 

You haven't been poisoned by corporate best practices yet. 

Starting later, after years of being told the opposite? 

That takes real conviction.

Most people can't do it. 

They stay comfortable, keep the corporate job, retire at sixty-five wondering what could have been.

The ones who actually make the jump and completely reprogram themselves? 

Those are the stories that fascinate me.

Follow me Ben Rasmussen for more cold email insights.

People ask me which inbox provider they should use.

Well, they're all giving you the same Google Workspace accounts. 

The product is identical.

A Google from one provider works exactly like a Google from another provider. 

You're not getting magic deliverability from specific vendors.

The only real difference is:

Response time when something breaks.

Does your provider answer in 12 hours or 5 days?

That's the entire competitive landscape.

Most providers take days to respond to urgent issues. 

Your domains get suspended and they ghost you. 

Your campaigns die while you wait for support.

We respond fast. Problems get fixed same day.

This shouldn't be revolutionary. 

But in an industry where customer service is terrible, basic responsiveness becomes your differentiator.

Stop overthinking provider selection. 
Stop searching for secret deliverability advantages.

Ask one question: How fast do they fix problems?

If the answer is "within hours," you found the right provider. 

If the answer is "eventually," keep looking.

The product matters less than the service. 

Everyone sells the same thing.

Choose based on who actually shows up when you need them.

Follow me Ben Rasmussen for more inbox insights.

Personalization is the most overrated tactic in cold email.

Every struggling agency I've consulted spends 30+ minutes researching each prospect. 

→ Reading LinkedIn posts. 
→ Finding personal details. 
→ Crafting custom openers.

Then they send 50 emails per week and wonder why they're broke.

This industry has convinced people that personalization is mandatory for success. 

That you need to mention someone's recent promotion or comment on their company news to get a response.

Wrong approach entirely.

Personalization works in extremely specific situations. 

High-ticket enterprise deals. 
Strategic partnerships. 
Situations where one client represents six-figure revenue.

That's maybe 1% of outreach scenarios.

The other 99% of the time, you're burning hours to feel productive. 

You're researching prospects instead of testing offers. 

You're optimizing tactics instead of validating if anyone wants what you're selling.

This creates a convenient excuse for low volume.

"I only sent 200 emails this month because I personalized each one" sounds better than "I'm scared to send volume because I might get rejected at scale."

But the math doesn't lie.

Agencies sending 5,000 generic emails with strong offers outperform agencies sending 500 "personalized" emails every single time. 

It's not even close.

Your prospects don't need you to prove you can Google them. 

They need you to prove you can solve their problem profitably.

Meanwhile personalization obsessed agencies are crafting the perfect opener while competitors are booking 20 meetings per week with two-sentence emails.

The "what if this prospect is special?" argument justifies staying small. 

You're protecting your ego from rejection at scale, not protecting response rates.

If your offer is strong, basic targeting works. 

If your offer is weak, no amount of personalization saves it.

Stop using research as procrastination. 

Test your offer at volume. 

Let the market tell you if people want what you're selling.

Personalization should be the exception, not the default strategy.

Follow me Ben Rasmussen for more cold email reality.

Hyper-personalization in cold email doesn't work.

I've run campaigns across dozens of industries. 

Tested every personalization strategy people swear by.

The results were consistently mediocre.

That opening line about someone's LinkedIn post feels forced. 

Prospects see right through it.

"Hey Sarah, loved your recent post about Q4 marketing challenges..."

This screams automated outreach. 

And almost everyone uses this exact template now.

Your prospect knows you didn't actually care about their post. 

They know you're running this at scale. 
The fake personalization insults their intelligence.

What actually works? Clear value propositions.

Leading with how you solve their specific problem beats mentioning their content every time. 

Prospects care about results, not whether you stalked their social media.

Most agencies waste hours researching prospects for personalization that tanks conversion rates. 

They could spend that time refining their offer or sending more volume.

The math is brutal.

Sending 5,000 emails with simple value-focused copy outperforms sending 500 hyper-personalized emails. 

Every single time.

Stop torturing yourself with LinkedIn research and stop pretending you care about their recent webinar.

Lead with value. Make your offer clear. Send volume.

Personalization is a crutch for weak offers.

Follow me Ben Rasmussen for more cold email reality.

Winning at cold email isn't complicated.

Most people overthink it. They obsess over subject lines, debate deliverability tactics, argue about personalization. 

Meanwhile, they're booking three meetings per month and wondering why nothing's working.

Well, first, you need a volume system that can handle 10,000+ sends per day consistently. 

Not 500 emails. 
Not 1,000 emails. 
10,000 minimum. 

If your infrastructure can't support that, you're playing a different game than the people actually making money.

Second, nail your offer. 

This is the part everyone wants to skip, but it's the only thing that actually matters. 

Your offer needs to be so good that prospects feel stupid saying no. 

If you're struggling with response rates, your offer probably sucks.

Third, diversify. 

Multiple niches, multiple campaigns, multiple client retainers running simultaneously. 

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. 

One niche dries up? You've got three more printing. 

One campaign stops converting? You've got backup systems already running.

Fourth, instant response protocol. 

When a prospect replies, you respond immediately. Not in an hour. Not tomorrow morning. Right now. 

Speed kills in this game, and the agencies booking 50+ meetings per month are the ones treating every reply like it's on fire.

Honorable mention goes to vertical selection.

Work with SaaS companies, agencies, dev shops, or B2B service providers. 

These verticals have money, understand the value of leads, and actually close deals. 

Trying to sell cold email to e-commerce brands or local businesses? 
You're making this harder than it needs to be.

That's it. 

Volume system, killer offer, multiple campaigns, instant responses. 

Everything else is noise designed to make you feel busy without actually building a real business.

Most cold emailers will ignore this because it's not sexy. 

They want the secret subject line formula or the magic personalization hack. 

Those people will stay broke.

The ones who actually implement this simple system? 

They'll be the ones doing six figures per month while everyone else is still debating tactics.

Follow me Ben Rasmussen for more cold email reality.

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The Battle

Nick Abraham

Ben Rasmussen

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Performance ScoreNick Abraham's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreBen Rasmussen's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Nick Abraham

Ben Rasmussen

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

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);}Nick Abraham's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreBen Rasmussen's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreNick Abraham's LinkedIn Performance