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.

LinkedSelling

Outbound Operations Architect

Senior Campaign Manager

Campaign Manager

Junior Campaign Manager

Monteith Group Inc - Symmetry Financial Group

- Studied for and passed Missouri Life, Health, Accident Insurance Exam
- Purchased warm leads on new homeowners who contacted our corporate office looking to protect a mortgage
- Dialed leads to set appointments, reviewed medical background and eligibility
- Researched insurance options to find the best options for clients
- Game-planned appointments with senior agents and managers in my region
- Ran appointments with clients in-person and over zoom to review options for insurance coverage with eligible clients
- Filled out the underwriting application for clients
- Maintained communication with clients during the underwriting process to keep them informed of approval status
- Delivered policy to clients upon approval

Insurance Agent

University of Missouri-Saint Louis

- graphics & video production intern
- filmed, edited, and produced a 10-minute virtual tour of the athletic facility
- engaged university teams and coaches on social media to promote video release, boost views and recruitment assistance
- tabling and networking on campus to increase game attendance

Athletics Marketing and Video Production Intern

- Escorting prospective students and their families around UMSL's campus for individualized tours
- Hosting prospective students and their families for visits with faculty and visitors 
- Providing front-line customer service for the university through answering phones, welcoming visitors, answering questions, giving frequent directions on campus
- Participating in student-panels, giving my experience as an UMSL student 
- Operation of Lost & Found for 17,000 students
- Management of office organization and space

Student Ambassador & Tour Guide

Lakeside Renovation & Design

- siding installer for Lakeside Exteriors
- operated heavy saws, power tools, other heavy equipment
- assembled workplace equipment including ladders, picks, and power poles
- transported material
- other duties included trailer organization, site-clean up, and ensuring workplace safety

Siding Installer

Huntington Outdoor, LLC

- Data Research: Produced sales research data from online searches to help the sales team better identify strategic businesses that were more likely to purchase a billboard face rental in towns and cities throughout Ohio.
- Sales Shadowing: Followed and assisted the sales team on visits throughout Ohio to better understand and learn to execute the sales process for Huntington. 
- Outdoor Production: assisted the building team on erecting new billboard faces in towns and cities throughout Ohio.
- Product Install: installed new billboard vinyl on billboard faces under new rental contracts

Project Intern

Forge Leadership Network

- Podcast production: created, recorded, and edited eight pilot episodes for podcast project to launch in 2019
- Graphic Design: used mobile apps such as Canva and Photoshop Express to create banners and graphics for social media posts
- Social Media Operation: daily operation of social media and interaction with social media followers 
- Page Maintenance: verification of Facebook page, updating online data to provide the best touchpoints for online visitors
- Social Media Plan: revised and redesigned social media masterplan to include newer elements of social media from 2018

Social Media Marketing Intern

Outbound Operations Architect, LinkedSelling | MultiChannel Outbound Lead Generation & Sales Development

As a leader at your company, it is your responsibility to consistently grow your sales while eliminating unneeded expenses. 

To do that… You need your sales team to focus on what they’re best at: closing. And you need to fuel their pipelines with quality leads in an efficient way.

Our aim at LinkedSelling is to help do just that while you take back wasted time, make revenue more predictable, relationships more profitable, and sales processes more repeatable. 

We exist to help B2B or service-based businesses like yours accelerate sales development and work with businesses from small and medium sized all the way up to fortune 500 companies.

As your full-service, outbound lead generation & sales development team, we partner with you to find and attract the right clients and get them to book appointments on your calendar consistently, filling your pipeline with amazing sales opportunities that are authentically human.

You’ll take advantage of our proprietary systems to find targeted prospects - at whatever volume you’re looking for, build strategic relationships with them, nurture interest, stay top of mind, and lead them to book appointments with you, where your sales team will take over. 

No matter what stage you’re currently at, we’ll have the right people on your side to help you get better sales opportunities so you and your team can close, not just more clients, but more of the RIGHT clients.

Every business is different, so we have different solutions that help businesses like yours solve these kinds of problems and help you meet your financial goals. 

➨➨ If you’re interested in learning how my team can alleviate the overwhelm of getting leads, and how we can work with you to streamline your efforts, allowing your sales team to focus on closing, click here to talk about your options: http://bit.ly/2WUrBG7

Don’t just get the lead. Take the lead.

Grant Beckmann

This is a super minor hack in Clay, but it saves you money and increases accuracy.

If you ever need to take a list in Clay and transform it to a JSON list to write it to another table, don't use Claygent or AI to output the JSON array. You'll spend money doing it, and sometimes, the AI will error out.

Instead, write the json code yourself using a formula, and then hit up this free api endpoint.

POST https://httpbin(.)org/post 

content-type: application/json 

Clay.formatForJSON({{Email Lines}}) - if using a formula. Just use the merge code if not in formula mode.

GTM Engineer | The Deal Lab - Finding Message Market Fit

Clay posted this report of the best phone number providers in 2025 and BetterContact was ranked the best provider with the combination of the best accuracy and widest market coverage.

This report is for Europe, but I've seen similar results in the US on our campaigns. 

We've been enriching our replies for some clients and dialing those replies to set meetings, and I have to say I agree with Clay's findings. Roman Hipp and the BetterContact enrichment has been producing great results for The Deal Lab lately on the phones.

Just wanted to give quick shout out to Harris Kenny and OutboundSync, who tie a lot of our campaign work back into client Hubspot accounts. We have a couple clients we're doing unique things for at The Deal Lab, and their team has supported us with special requests and been flexible to help us get what we need at a great deal.

For one client, we are sending over half a million emails a month, and for another, their CMO started with the company after we had already begun the engagement and needed us to make this happen quickly.

For both of these, and for a lot of clients, integrating activity (especially replies) from the sequencer into their CRM is a must-have, and without Outbound Sync, that would been a much bigger headache.

Super grateful for this partnership!

Smartlead, Icypeas, and Surfe are solving one of the annoying and longstanding problems in the GTM/Clay ecosystem right now - getting contact lists from company lists.

To get lists of people, you used to have to
- Spend lots of Clay credits (for not great contact coverage)
- Download the list from Apollo (outside the Clay ecosystem because the API was slow)
- Scrape SalesNav (even harder and slower to do)
- Use AI (which was either really expensive, inaccurate, or not comprehensive)

Now you can 
- Hit the Icypeas API to find contacts for cheap
- Hit the Smartlead API to find basically free and unlimited contacts in SmartProspect
- Hit Surfe using Clay to find contacts for .1 credit per contact.
- Use 1 Clay credit per company if we still haven't found any contacts
- We can still use AI, but coverage before this point is way better.

On each one of these, the coverage really is not bad. 

We are hammering the new SmartProspect API and one of the coolest things is that they return you the contacts without emails for free - and the cost for the email credits is just so, so low that it will take us a while to run out, if we ever do.

Two dark horse mentions here if you want more coverage and don't mind leaving the Clay interface to download leads via CSV.
- SearchLeads gives you leads for free if they don't have any emails. The emails are also basically as cheap as it cost to scrape an Apollo lead back in the day, though not nearly as cheap as a SmartProspect email - and the coverage is also about 50% of what it could be I think.
- Octave has amazing value in their lead search (I'll keep the details under the hood because I'm not sure if they want everyone to know) but from what I've seen, their coverage might actually be the best of them all. They do not include emails though.

Logged into Smartlead this morning and my heart sank - there is now a pricing calculator on SmartProspect.

Was super excited about the unlimited prospects they use to offer as part of their prospecting search, so was super bummed they were going to be charging per lead going forward.

Till I realized it was all just an ad to show how much more you'd pay for those same leads from Apollo(.)io and ZoomInfo. 

The pricing of SmartProspect doesn't change, no matter how much you slide that bar to the right. 

Nice one Vaibhav Namburi - you got me here.

Best part of this tool is that it also gives you email addresses, not just people found.

And also, you can already extract leads on a small scale from the SmartProspect api hidden on their website. It's a bit buggy if you have a big list, but hit me up if you want me to show you how. Can't wait for the official API to release!

Clay has built a new feature that I honestly haven’t heard hardly anyone talk about - I think it’s a major efficiency unlock for GTM teams building on Clay.

It’s called a function - a backend table that completely removes the headaches of rebuilding all of those standard workflows you run on every single list build: 

email waterfalls, phone waterfalls, linkedin url finding, etc

Rebuilding these enrichments on every single list build is a huge pain
- Every GTM Engineer on your team has a different way of doing it
- It’s a huge time drain
- It’s pretty important to get right so you don’t waste Clay credits
- Requires technical expertise if using HTTP API enrichments

So to standardize this complex enrichment across all of our clients at The Deal Lab, we built it one time, put it in a Clay function, and now we just need one two columns: 

“call function” and “result”.

Our biggest use case:
- Call “Email Enrichment Function”. Give it name, domain, and email (if you have it)
- the function validate the email
- then enriches the email if invalid using Icypeas, Prospeo.io, BetterContact, and LeadMagic.
- it validates each of those emails using our “Email Validation Function” (LeadMagic and OrbiSearch)
- Spits back the valid email at the end.

That’s it.

No more 47 columns of waterfall enrichment in your table. No more rebuilding it every single time. No more struggling to teach your GTM team which providers to use in that waterfall.

It’s essentially an internal app built on Clay that takes an input, runs it through whatever you want behind the scenes, and returns whatever data you want at the end.

Unlocks time for the GTM Engineers.

Saves money on email enrichments by optimizing data flow.

Improves the quality of emails found by using the best process every single time.

I still think Clay functions are the cleanest, simplest method to enrich your contact data: one column to call the enrichment workflow, one column for the result. That’s it. You’re done.

You could take ANY contact list and use just ONE function to do every standard enrichment that you pull in: clean first names and company names, validate emails, enrich for linkedin/phone… One function could do it all with a couple clicks.

Here’s an actual example of a Clay function we built that we’re re-using across every single contact table we build at The Deal Lab.

Takes in: full name, domain, and email (if available)
Runs through our preferred waterfall:
→ Validates existing email (if available)
→ Find email with BlitzAPI (if needed) → validate
→ Icypeas (if needed) → validate
→ Prospeo.io (if needed) → validate
→ BetterContact (if needed) → validate
→ LeadMagic (if needed) → validate

I showed a snapshot of this below with just one email finder.

You can see each validation is actually calling a sub-function: we validate with both LeadMagic and OrbiSearch, so rather than repeatedly building 6 complex validation setups in the same table, we just call our validation function after each finder. 

(Yes functions are even used inside of functions.)

We just added BlitzAPI to the waterfall - quickly applied this across our workspace because every table uses the same function to enrich the data.

The best part? On your contact table, you call the function, and get the report back. That’s it. So simple.

There’s a new email validation provider on the block called OrbiSearch - their pricing for validation rivals that of LeadMagic's smtp email validation at scale, is 4x cheaper than the other catch all tools on the market.

At a basic entry point (where most people might start) of 50k prospects validated per month, OrbiSearch is less than half the cost of BounceBan and Enrichley. 

At a starting large scale point (500k prospects validated per month), OrbiSearch is less than a quarter of the cost of the others. At this point, the cost per validation is $.0004 per validation, which is right where LeadMagic prices their starting validation on SMTP valid and invalids. (Lead Magic doesn't resolve or charge for most catchalls as they are very strict with their validation criteria.)

OrbiSearch's api is really fast, and their quality of catchall validation very comparable to BounceBan (Verify risky emails without sending messages). 

With most catch-all validation being 2x if not 4x the cost of validating an smtp, it's nice to see providers breaking into the market at lower rates.

There's one api-based people-data provider I didn't mention a few days ago.

I think this one might be even cooler than the others.

The ideal way to build a list of people at each account on your target list would probably include:

1. Choosing your top tier titles
2. If none are found, choose secondary titles.
3. Select only the top 3-5 contacts at each account.

BlitzAPI by Antoine Blitz does just that.

I tested it out on a list build and yes, it does provide good coverage. They have +360M profiles in their database.

Still more tests to come here, but something like this could be one of the leading solutions in the market - it prevents pulling 50 contacts at one company and 0 at others.

How do we know when cold email doesn't work for our business?

Good question. 

What if SpaceX had said "How do we know when it's just not going to be possible to land the Starship back on earth?"

They didn't. Every failure and test just got them closer to the goal.

The real question is:

"What is cold email teaching us about our market right now?" - Kellen Casebeer

Look, there's two reasons to do cold email:
1) when you have a successful offer and copy you want to scale
2) when you want to want to test to find out what works. 

(The Deal Lab does both but #2 is Kellen's favorite.)

If you have tested cold email and gotten nothing, then you definitely know you're not in camp #1. 

But if you've gotten even a little bit of traction, but still aren't happy with results, then you need to stay in camp #2. Because you know you have something there. 

And quitting is a sure-fire way that you definitely will not end up in #1.

So, we keep testing. 

Email always "works" - you just have to let it teach you what you are doing wrong, whether that's product, market, offer, persona, or copy. 

Tinker and test and fix those things.

Outbound teams typically get judged on one thing (it’s not positive replies or positive reply rate):

Pipeline, opportunities, and revenue $ generated.

Up until recently, visibility into this was almost non-existent for most agencies:
- You need visibility into client CRMs
- Every sequencer and channel tracks things differently
- Custom integrations are either fragile, expensive, or take time to build
- Your team ends up chasing screenshots instead of running campaigns (huge pain)

So you default to reporting what you can see instead of what actually matters.

That is what 🚀 Benjamin Reed is fixing with his new tool RevyOps.
- Plug into email and LinkedIn sequencers, Clay, and the client CRM
- Write data from Clay or sequencer webhooks into RevyOps
- When the lead status changes in the client CRM, send that back into RevyOps
- Track every lead across all clients from first touch to closed won in one place

We are going rolling this out across all of our clients at The Deal Lab. 

This gives us the ability to be much more consultative in how we help sales teams track and close the business we help them generate, and also helps the clients and us track the ROI of our engagement.

Outbound agencies that can show precise, CRM-level revenue attribution are going to look very from the ones still talking about reply rates.

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