Michel Lieben 🧠

Founder / CEO @ ColdIQ | Scale Outbound with AI & Tech 👉 coldiq.com

I’m (Michel) the Founder & CEO at ColdIQ, a sales prospecting agency (+ we compare the latest sales tech, too!).

We worked with 100+ B2B organizations (including SaaS & Agencies!) and are using Clay, Prospeo, FullEnrich, Instantly, Lemlist, Ocean.io - alongside other great sales tools - to run outbound campaigns that flood 🌊 our (and our clients’) inboxes with interested prospects.


We can help you:

• If you’re a B2B business leader who doesn’t have the time to handle your prospecting engine or to hire and manage salespeople… You can outsource your lead gen to us, and we’ll transparently show you the exact way we run your campaigns. (We’ll provide SOPs, too… if it works so well that you want to build your in-house team).


• If you’re a sales leader or an outbound agency owner: We’ll help you set up the exact systems & tools we use to run automated ‘trigger-based’ campaigns that convert like crazy. 


• And… if you simply want to improve your B2B sales automation skills or learn to run these campaigns yourself, we’ll teach you by building a campaign from scratch together with you —from ‘idea’ to ‘running campaign’ (we’ve done it more than 50 times already, and the rumour says people ❤️ed it).


We've launched hundreds of campaigns, so you don't have to.


Thus - if you: 
- are a B2B service/solution provider making > $50k/month
- provide solutions with Lifetime Value > $10k
- want to shortcut your outbound success


We can help.

Send a DM, and I'll share more details.

Alternatively, reach out to michel[at]coldiq.com 
or via the website 👉 coldiq.com 


__________



And if you're looking to build your top-of-funnel tool stack... 
Check our curated lists of the best outbound tools here 👇

👉 coldiq.com/tools 👈
👉 coldiq.com/ai-sales-tools 👈

Performance-based B2B lead generation 💥 | coldiq.com
→ We help you scale your prospecting activities by implementing outbound sales systems in your business. We take care of sourcing leads, researching your ICP, crafting the sales messages, automating sending and ensuring the high deliverability of messages. We let you focus on what brings money into the business: closing deals.

I turn 31 today. My business made $557,000 last month. But before that, I failed 7 businesses in a row:

Here’s what I tried building... 
and why I'm convinced each 'fail' got me closer to a 'win'


1. I started a clothing brand with my friend Thibault Selderslagh.

👎 We barely managed to sell 15 t-shirts. We had to order minimum 400. So we ended up with 385 t-shirts... now collecting dust somewhere.

👍 But, I learned how to create websites during this process.

↳ ... a skill I used to create the V1 of my website ColdIQ.


2. I co-founded a raffle lottery in the UK 🇬🇧

👎 I invested 40,000€ of my personal savings. We only managed to sell £1,000 worth of lottery tickets.

👍 But, I learned to run ads while desperately trying to sell these tickets.

↳ ... a skill we now use to book 50+ monthly meetings via ads. And that we offer as a service to clients (with some closing > $1M as a result!)


3. I tried to become an Instagram influencer.

👎 I found a hack that grew my account to 29,000 followers. Then it stopped working, and I've lost followers ever since. I never made a dime from the platform, nor did I get offered any free brand product.

👍 But, I learned about social media & algorithms.

↳ ... a skill that got me to be a LinkedIn influencer instead (😆). But more seriously, this led to 15,000,000+ impressions & 1,000+ inbound meetings for my company.

(And we now offer it as a service too... send a DM!)


4. I ran a sports betting affiliate website.

👎 I grew it to $6,000/mo, until it dropped to 0 overnight because of regulation changes in Belgium 🇧🇪

👍 But, I learned a lot about monetizing affiliate brand deals.

↳ ... a skill that allows us to generate > 5-figure per month in passive affiliate revenue.


5 & 6. I started an MMA Betting blog AND a Crypto blog.

👎 None of them made a single $1.

👍 But, I learned SEO & Copywriting

↳ ... skills that are responsible for driving 100s of thousands of visits to ColdIQ's website.


7. I launched a Facebook Ads agency

👎 I booked 15 meetings, and didn't manage to close a single client.

👍 But, I learned cold email in the process.

↳ ... a skill that turned into a service we currently deliver for 70+ clients, amounting to > $500K in MRR.


Takeaway?
You win, or you learn.

And each failure turns into a lesson that lets you try again... better.

So keep pushing!

P.S: What's the worst business idea you've tried... and what did you learn from it? 👀

Failing 7 businesses before growing one

How I would find my first 10 clients if I had to restart from 0:

It's how I've hit > $6.5M+ ARR in 3 years 👇

1. I'd find a ‘free’ way to get my brand out there.

In the beginning: 

You have lots of time.
You have little money.

So you want to start with a time-consuming channel that doesn’t require much funds.

This could be:
→ Writing blog articles.
→ Creating LinkedIn posts.
→ Recording YouTube videos.
→ Being active in niche communities.

I tried them all.
The one that worked best for me was LinkedIn.

It’s what I recommend to all my friends in B2B to get started.


Software you can use:
- Design: Canva or Figma
- Content Ideation: Taplio or Scripe 


2. I'd direct this ‘visibility’ to a short landing page.

Your brand efforts will gather interest.

Interested visitors will check your site or your social profiles.
You want them to understand asap how you help.

The most effective way I found to do so, is to record a 5-min video sales letter, breaking down your offering.

Some people won’t buy straight away.

For them, I’d suggest creating a lead magnet to grab their email addresses
… and nurture them with valuable content over the long term.

For the ones that didn’t provide their emails, you can use visitor identification software to de-anonymize them (in the US).


Software you can use:
- VSL Hosting: Wistia
- Landing Page: Webflow or Framer
- Visitor Identification: Midbound or Instantly.ai


3. I'd reach out to warm ‘high-fit’ leads.

Many prospects will engage with your content but won’t try to schedule a call

Still, they might be interested.

In this case, I’d suggest reaching out to every prospect who’d make an ideal client but hasn’t messaged you yet.

I recommend writing your first 25-50 messages by hand, before trying to automate.

This could look like:
“Hey {{name}}, seems my post on {{topic}} resonated with you. Are you working on {{potential initiatives}}? Happy to swap notes if that’s helpful.

Whatever you write… the magic of manual notes is that it forces you to re-read & improve your messaging every time.

This allows you to uncover patterns…
Which will be invaluable once you scale your sending.


Software you can use:
- Email Outreach: Instantly.ai
- LinkedIn Outreach: Expandi
- Multichannel Outreach: lemlist
- Email Finding: Wiza, Prospeo.io, LeadMagic or FullEnrich.


4. I'd repeat the above steps for 3 months straight before considering giving up. 

This 100% works.
It sounds simple, but it’s challenging to keep working hard when things are uncertain.

Working hard is difficult on its own.
But working hard, when doubting that there’s a point, is even harder.

To make it work, you must somehow convince your brain that you’re not doing this for nothing. Even when you get 0 results in the first weeks, or months.

Repeat these steps enough times.
And you’ll inevitably improve.

Improve enough…
And soon enough, you’ll reap the rewards of your hard labour.

Good luck ✌️

P.S: Who's starting something new in 2026? 👇

Claude can now build advanced n8n workflows from a single prompt.

Just use this Claude project setup, and it will handle 90% of the work 👇

This completely changed how we build automations at our $6.5M ARR agency…

Here’s precisely how we run this:

1. Write a basic prompt describing your workflow. 

Claude (Sonnet 4.5) will read it, break it down & output an n8n JSON file that can be imported.

2. Claude takes care of the complex implementation.

That is:
- Filed mappings + expressions
- Data flow between nodes
- Trigger configurations
- Conditional branches
- Sticky notes for docs
- Error handling

Beware: there are usually a few small items to debug, and it won’t add your API keys for you. But everything else is handled.

Now, what’s included in the system:

1️⃣ Full Claude Project Setup

The system infrastructure that transforms Claude into an n8n workflow builder. 
(Just need to copy paste & you’re ready to go!)


2️⃣ Over 70 n8n Documentation Pages

The official n8n GitHub documentation from which we extracted syntax, capabilities & node references. 

That’s how Claude knows how to build functioning workflows.


3️⃣ Templates & Frameworks

Templates + Frameworks you can copy-paste for use cases like lead routing and social listening.


4️⃣ Real-life Examples 

Our actual prompts vs. the workflows Claude ended up building.
(So you can see what worked well, and what did not).


5️⃣ SOPs to always stay updated with the latest Docs

Step-by-step guide to pull and compile n8n documentation every time there’s a new feature.
(Which is every week in AI world)


Once again, this is democratising complex workflow buildouts.

Starting from scratch or piecing together documentation used to take a lot of time.

“How to build n8n workflows?” has always been a bigger challenge than “what n8n workflow shall I build?”

This flips the questioning on its head.

Spend most of your time thinking about which automation moves the needle for your business. Not how you'll build it.

...and leverage Claude to get 90% of the way there.

If you want to get the entire system, including the documentation package & guide to set it up yourself, comment “PROMPT”, “n8n” or “CLAUDE” and I’ll DM it to you!


P.S: Kenny Damian is our n8n 🐐 at ColdIQ, and the man behind the agentic workflows we build for our > $10M ARR clients. If you want to get access to these value drops before everyone else… you NEED to follow him!

Silicon Valley is the hub of GTM unicorns.

But have you seen what’s going on in Europe?

Giants are being built in countries with just 11M inhabitants 🇸🇪 🇧🇪

And it’s happening all over the continent.

Here are some of my favourite EU success stories:

1. Odoo 🇧🇪

Founded by Fabien Pinckaers, Odoo quitely grew to 40M€ MRR and is now valued at well above $5B.

They did that by breaking all the rules:

→ A generous Freemium model.
→ Kept it open source & community-powered.
→ Built 100s of apps, instead of just ONE block.

All the while: 

- his board was trying to get him fired.
- spending 7 years near bankruptcy.
- losing 16M€ from overnight

Today, it’s 6500+ employees & 750M€ in revenue in 2025.

I’m especially proud of this one, as a fellow Belgian 🇧🇪!


2. Lovable 🇸🇪

Founded by Anton Osika & Fabian Hedin… it’s the loudest success story of the year.

Lovable hit $200M ARR last week, one year after hitting $1M ARR.

At ColdIQ, we use it to build free tools for lead generation purposes.

Testing out prototypes required technical people. 
Most of our team is able to spin off a ‘free email finder’ or a ‘custom client dashboard’ in a day.


3. lemlist 🇫🇷

The French success story that should be studied by everyone in GTM.

Founded by Guillaume Moubeche, now led by Charles Tenot.

It includes lemlist, Taplio & now Claap under one umbrella.

Some things to takeaway:

- A 300K+ combined followers, employee-wide LinkedIn content strategy.
- Unseen build-in-public transparency by their Founder & the entire team.
- Bold acquisitions (i.e: Taplio, Claap) so their app ecosystem covers every GTM function.

At ColdIQ, they're our #1 choice for all our multichannel prospecting campaigns!


4. n8n 🇩🇪

They’ve been a staple in automation teams for some time…

But with the rise of AI agents… they became a category of one.

More modulable than their competitors, more powerful, less expensive… it’s an essential component of modern AI + GTM tech stacks.

It’s saving our team hours of work everyday!


Other GTM success stories across Europe:

🇨🇿 Apify
🇫🇷 Aircall
🇫🇷 arcads AI
🇫🇷 Argil
🇫🇷 Dust
🇫🇷 FullEnrich
🇫🇷 Hyperline
🇫🇷 Prospeo.io
🇬🇧 Attio
🇬🇧 ElevenLabs
🇬🇧 Synthesia
🇲🇰 HeyReach.io
🇪🇸 Genesy
🇪🇪 Pipedrive
🇦🇹 Storyblok
🇳🇱 Expandi
🇳🇱 Framer

… and the list goes on!

P.S: What EU SaaS is on your radar at the moment?

Talks about #b2bgrowth, #salestools, #prospecting, #outboundsales, and #leadgeneration

Most companies bet their entire LinkedIn strategy on the Founder.

We get the whole team involved:

Last month, this allowed us to sign 14 new deals, totalling ~$70,000 in MRR for our agency. Plus, another 16 customers won for our educational program.

It’s a win-win.

For the team:
→ They grow their brand, a precious asset they own… and that will benefit them whatever they decide to pursue.

For us:
→ They send visitors to our site and generate qualified leads every single day.

Everyone shares around their domain of expertise: 

- Ivan talks about ABM, LinkedIn Ads & Funnels.
- Millie shares tips on Founder-Led branding.
- Monika shares her best cold email rewrites.
- Kenny shares his latest n8n workflows.

… and the combined posting volume makes it challenging not to come across ColdIQ on your LinkedIn feed.

2026 will be the year of Employee-led branding.

Don’t miss this shift.

Outbound helped lemlist hit $37M ARR.

And this sequence is one of their highest converting ones:

They built a workflow that turns LinkedIn engagement into booked meetings.
On autopilot.

Here’s the breakdown, shared by Erwan Gauthier:

STEP 1: CONTENT

An influencer or an internal creator publishes on LinkedIn.

But not on any topic.

The post has to attract their ICP and be insightful enough to spark actual engagement.

The comments, likes & shares on the post... = potential intent.


STEP 2: SCRAPING

They use Jungler to scrape all post interactions.

Because people are familiar with their brand, reply rates are much higher than with pure cold outreach.


STEP 3: DATA ROUTING

Via n8n, they push all the extracted contacts to Clay.

Clay is the data hub: enrichment, scoring + workflow automation all happen in one place.


STEP 4: DATA SCORING & CLEANING

Not every engager is worth reaching out to.

They score based on the job title, the engagement itself & additional ICP criteria.

It’s also the right time to remove duplicates & existing customers.


STEP 5: DATA ENRICHMENT

Via Clay, they enrich additional data points, such as:
- Tech stack
- Recent activity
- Current org. Initiatives
- …

...any relevant data point to craft a personalised message.


STEP 6: AI PERSONALIZATION

lemlist’s AI variables generate custom first lines for all contacts.
Each message feels individually personalised.


STEP 7: MULTI-CHANNEL OUTREACH

They run the sequence across email & LinkedIn.
This maximises the odds of prospects reading their outreach.


STEP 8: MEETING BOOKED

Warm, relevant outreach performs.

And this is one of the most efficient ways to:

1. Warm-up leads..
2. Segment the highest quality ones
3. Gently ping them with context.


This is one of lemlist highest performing outbound plays.
It’s also a play we love to run at ColdIQ.

If you’d like to implement something similar, send a DM. 
(We’ll run this for you, among other high-converting GTM plays!)


P.S: Make sure to follow Erwan Gauthier for this sort of breakdown. He shares some of the best B2B growth content on LinkedIn.

lemlist

Head of Growth @lemlist

Jungler

Clay

ColdIQ

I just crossed 60,000 followers. LinkedIn got us to $6.5M+ ARR.

Here's every tool I used to grow my following:

1. Content Ideation

→ Taplio (go.coldiq.com/taplio)

I use their in-app feed to find outlier LinkedIn posts in my niche.

You can input keywords such as: "ai sales", "outbound" or "GTM" and then filter for posts that:

- include the above 'searched' keywords
- were posted within a month ago
- had 300 likes or more

I then reverse-engineer the structure, hook & CTAs of these high-performing posts to improve my own.

→ Scripe

Also great for content ideation. 

It lets you aggregate posts by author, which is another helpful way to find 'viral publications' or 'outliers' on a given topic.


2. Copywriting

→ Grammarly

As a non-native English speaker, I make lots of spelling mistakes. 

I use Grammarly's extension to correct my writing in real-time.

Doesn't sound too crazy, but this could be the most helpful application in my LinkedIn tech stack.

→ Claude

I use Claude to generate hook variations, repurpose past content & brainstorm new angles.


3. Visuals & Design

→ Figma / Adobe

My LinkedIn strategy relies a lot on visuals.

When made well, they multiply the reach of your publications up to 10X.

Our designers use either Figma or Adobe's suite to design our carousels & infographics.


→ Canva

My first-ever carousels published on here were made on Canva.

It is the most beginner-friendly app to create social media visuals.


4. Video Creation

→ OpusClip

I use Opus's AI features to automatically create short-form videos from my long-form content.

The output isn't as great as that of a professional editor...
But it's cost-effective.

And multiple AI-edited videos got me 50,000+ views on LinkedIn (while only taking me 2 minutes to generate).

→ Screen Studio

Screen Studio is my favourite Mac Screen recording app.

It's great to make video walkthroughs or tutorials because it automatically zooms/focuses on the parts of the screen you're actively working on.

It makes video outputs look much more fancy than they'd be otherwise.

→ Ezgif

I use Ezgif to create .GIF files out of my short audioless video content.

If you're planning to publish a < 15-second audio-less video on LinkedIn...

I'd recommend speeding it up and converting it into a GIF file.

I'm not 100% sure why, but it outperforms in terms of reach & engagement.


5. Content Planning

→ Notion

My central content hub.
It's where I collect ideas, draft them, and prepare my posts.

Notion also serves as my content calendar.


That's the entire stack I used to go from 0 to 60,000+ followers.

It's also the tech stack I plan to get past 100,000.

What tools did I miss?

Let me know 👇

P.S: If you want to grow your account, sell a B2B product, but don't have time to post... send a DM. 
We'll do it for you ✌️

From 0 to 60,000+ LinkedIn followers

How to write cold emails like the top 1%

(Frameworks we use for clients at our $6M+ ARR agency)

1. AIDA Framework by Monika Grycz 💌

2. AI Campaign Ideas by Dujam Dunato

(inspired by Eric Nowoslawski)

3. Similar orgs' challenges by Patrick Trümpi

4. Observation, Call-Out, Proof by Nick Abraham

5. Trigger, Implication, Pain by Aaron Reeves

6. Trigger, Process, Pain or Symptoms by Tal Baker-Phillips

7. Champion Tracking by Brian LaManna

8. Rhetorical Analogy by Leif Bisping

9. Content Asset Giveaway by Ethan Parker

10. "Quick maths" by Thibaut Souyris

What's your go-to cold email framework?

Share it below 👇

P.S: We compiled the copywriting frameworks we used to book 10,000+ B2B meetings for > 200 orgs in a 'more' exhaustive document.
Let me know if you want it :)

Anatomy of a high-converting cold email

I spent 150+ hours trying out 62 AI Agents.

These 7 actually help you sign more clients:

1. Agent Builder: Relevance AI

↳ It helps you build custom Agentic workflows.

For example, you can build: 
→ A workflow that identifies viral posts given a list of topics/creators, & adds the ones that outperformed to a Google Sheet.

Type out inside Relevance what workflow you’d like to build 
…and it does most of the automation building on your behalf.


2. Research agent: Claygent

↳ It helps you effortlessly research prospects at scale.

Claygent is embedded inside Clay & works like an assistant you can delegate time-consuming tasks to.

For example, ask it to: 
→ Find pricing info on 1000+ SaaS companies.

Claygent will then:
- Browse the web and navigate each SaaS website.
- Navigate until it finds pricing.
- Give you the price.
- Explain where/how it found it.


3. Reply agent: Instantly.ai

↳ It monitors your inbox and drafts answers on your behalf.

Typically, with cold emails:
The faster you reply, the more meetings you book out of interested leads.

Example use-case:
→ Activate Instantly’s reply agent for your outbound campaigns.

And then, these reply agents can be trained to automatically:
- assess whether prospects were interested or not
- draft a reply, based on interest, that mimics your tone 

You can run it entirely on autopilot 
…but I suggest always keeping a human in the loop for quality control.


4. Development Agent: Lovable

↳ It helps you build mini-tools without coding experience.

For example, ask it to:
→ Build an app that finds email addresses or a client reporting dashboard.

And then, after a good chunk of debugging, it creates a ‘decent’ prototype.


5. Sourcing Agent: Exa’s Websets

↳ It builds precise prospecting lists only requiring natural language prompts.

Example use-case:
→ You tell it you want to build a list of "CEOs in AI SaaS companies, from 100 to 250 employees, in NY, who raised > $1M”

The agent comes up with the filters, sources the list in real-time, provides leads that fit some of the criteria, and only charges you for leads that fit them all.


6. LinkedIn Agent: Valley

↳ It mimics human SDRs in the DMs.

Example use-case:
→ Let it run your prospecting.

Valley autonomously: 
- sources your ICP
- identifies relevant signals
- writes outreach messages
- monitors conversation & replies

... and it does that pretty impressively for a 🤖.


7. Sales agent: Attention

↳ It records your meetings & provides insights your sales team can leverage to close deals.

For example: 
→ Let Attention join your meetings. 

It’ll analyse conversations in real-time, update your CRM, & suggest best next steps.

Then, it can also analyse 100s of sales conversations, and provide insights around:
“What made prospects book a meeting with your team”
“How did they hear about your company”
“What’s preventing them to buy”


P.S: Have you recently 'hired' an AI agent in your business that effectively helped you find clients?

Best AI Agents (2025)

These 4 GTM agents will save you 5 hours every day:

They automate:

→ Content creation
→ Market research
→ Prospecting

Here’s how they work:

AGENT 1: AUTOMATE LEAD RESEARCH

This agent captures company profiles, enriches them & scores them on autopilot.

Step-by-step:

- GhostGenius sources company profiles
- Agent monitors credibility signals (follower count, high activity, active website) 
- GPT scores each profile against our ICP criteria.
- Contacts are deduped so they’re never reached out to twice.

Qualified validated prospects are sent directly to a Google Sheets for prospecting.


AGENT 2: LOCAL OUTBOUND ENGINE

Apify extracts information about local businesses from Google Maps.
But this raw data is typically unstructured, messy & outdated.

Thus, through the Agent:

- Google Search API fills incomplete metadata.
- Each website is scraped for keywords, tech stacks, & offerings.
- GPT enriches every business profile & classifies these.
- Additional info (i.e: emails, phone numbers, contact links) is extracted.

The data is then exported to Airtable or Google Sheets.
Initial low-quality data turns into sales-ready records.


AGENT 3: CONTENT GENERATOR

Drop a content brief into a Google Form.

Get auto-generated:

- Copy for your LinkedIn carousels, slide-by-slide.
- Visual briefs for your designer.
- LinkedIn publication drafts.
- LinkedIn (or social) Hooks
- CTAs

Drafts are automatically added to your Notion content calendar.

They need a 10 to 15-minute manual edit, and they’re good to go.


AGENT 4: REDDIT INTEL SOURCING

Many GTM teams ignore forums & communities.
But they’re typically goldmines for learning about your prospects' pain points.

Reddit has communities in almost every niche.
But it’d take lots of time to read through all these.

Thus, the agent, based on a website/domain:

- Identifies ICP signals.
- Extract relevant threads via Reddit API
- Summarizes pain points, language used by prospects, frustrations & what they seem to care about most.
- Sends a daily report to your inbox.


THE RESULT: MORE PIPELINE

These steps save a lot of manual time, which you can now allocate to going in-depth into more worthwhile, high-value activities.

All these automations are built inside n8n.

Which one is most valuable to you?

4 n8n agents for GTM

We’re about to hit $7m ARR. Here’s the GTM workflow that signed us 70+ high-ticket clients: 

Step-by-step breakdown ↓

1. Our team publishes 250+ LinkedIn posts every month.

- We use Taplio to identify posts that outperformed.
- We study the hooks, formats & visuals of these outlier LinkedIn posts.
- We solve our prospects' pain points in our content pieces.

↳ This works so well, I want to do more. Hopefully reaching 500+ monthly posts across the ColdIQ team.


2. We spend $10,000+ a month promoting our most effective publications via LinkedIn Ads.

- We study what posts generate qualified meetings.
- We analyze which ICP books from the posts.
- We boost said post in front of said ICP.


3. We identify anonymous visitors & reach out likers/commenters who didn't schedule a call.

- On ColdIQ’s site: Instantly.ai & Midbound de-anonymise our visitors.
- On LinkedIn: Clay captures our social activity.


4. We route all our warm leads to Clay.


5. We use LLMs to Tier, Segment & Score prospects.

- Claygent automates research at scale on our inbound leads.
- OpenAI prompts segment out leads.
- We contact warm leads via LinkedIn, Email & the phone.


6. We enrich the contact information of our filtered leads.

- We use Prospeo.io, LeadMagic, Wiza to find emails adresses.
- We use Prospeo.io, FullEnrich to look up phone numbers.


7. We send DMs, emails & call ‘warm' prospects.

- We make our outreach concise & valuable.
- We use lemlist for multi-channel outreach
- We use Instantly.ai for email outreach.

- Expandi is another great option for LinkedIn outreach.


8. This workflow booked us 1,500+ meetings in 2025 & closed > $3M ARR already.

- It helped us grow to > 35 FTEs
- It helped us reach > $6.5M in yearly revenue.
- It helped our clients close $500K+ in revenue at > 3-10X ROI


P.S: Anything you’d improve in the workflow below to get us to $10M ARR?

LinkedIn content got ColdIQ past $550,000 in MRR.

And this workflow turns each of our posts into pipeline:

Here's the step-by-step breakdown:

STEP 1: CAPTURE REAL-TIME ENGAGEMENT

Each profile view, like and comment gets automatically tracked.

Someone engaging with you or your content doesn't mean they'll buy from you... But it could be a sign.

STEP 2: DATA ENRICHMENT

For each of these engagers, Clay enriches data on the person & their company.

- Job title
- Tech stack
- Hiring signals
- Company size
- Funding rounds

All of this information is enriched within minutes.

STEP 3: AI QUALIFICATION

Most of the people who engage with your content aren't a good fit for your offerings.

We use OpenAI & Claude's flagship models to score each contact.

- Great fit? We moved them to the next step.
- Not a fit? We stop the enrichment process here.

AI qualified based on criteria such as:

- B2B vs. B2C
- Geography fit
- Industry match
- Company size match
- Estimated customer LTV
- Seniority, Function & Job Title

STEP 4: CRM DEDUPLICATION

Before doing anything more, we verify: is this lead already in our records?

→ Is it an existing customer?
→ Are we already in talks with them or their team?

If so, skip them.

→ Are they a net new contact?

If so, push them to sequence.

At scale, it's difficult to avoid it entirely...
But you want to avoid reaching out to existing customers.

STEP 5: WATERFALL ENRICHMENT

We find contact data via a waterfall that includes Wiza, Prospeo.io, FullEnrich & LeadMagic.

This allows us to maximise our coverage, and get from ~50% verified email to > 85%.

STEP 6: CONTEXTUAL OUTREACH

Depending on the prospect's tier, we'll engage via email or multi-channel outreach.

Each prospect gets a tailored message via Instantly.ai or lemlist that references the topic of the post they engaged with.

Something along the lines of:

"Hey {{first_name}}, saw you engage with posts on {{topic}}, so I figured you'd be interested in this breakdown laying out how Snowflake sourced 60% of its pipeline from SDRs using {{unique mechanism}}"

STEP 7: POSITIVE REPLIES & BOOKED MEETINGS

This system consistently books 100+ qualified meetings for ColdIQ.

And it runs 24/7 on autopilot.

→ Every content piece can become a lead magnet.
→ Every engagement can turn into a qualified opportunity.
→ New conversations happen every day.

If you're posting on LinkedIn and not at least monitoring WHO engages with your posts... you're missing out.

Are you currently tracking your LinkedIn engagement?

P.S: We can build this workflow for you, alongside other GTM plays, including some similar to those we built for AirOps... that helped them get from $2M to $15M ARR just this year. 

Book a time with our team if you're interested :)

I tested way too many AI Sales tools.

Here are the categories I’m closely watching in 2026:

1/ Workflow Builders

Why?

↳ They help you build advanced, multi-step, automated prospecting workflows.

Example use-case: Running a signal-based Clay campaign that scores leads, segments them into several tiers, adds an AI-personalized first line… and pushes contacts to your favourite sequencer. For 1,000+ leads. On autopilot.

Examples include:

→ Relevance AI
→ Outbond
→ Clay
→ n8n


2/ MCPs

Why?

↳ They enable AI agents to take actions by connecting to your tools. Without you needing to manually open them.

Example use-case: Connecting Claude MCP to Google Calendar so that it… 

[1] checks how many sales calls you have today
[2] researches each prospect
[3] provides relevant talking points for the qualified ones…
[4] cancels meetings with unqualified leads. 

All that, without opening your calendar app.

You can prompt via tools such as:
→ Cursor
→ Claude
→ VS Code
→ Mistral AI

And connect to your apps using:
→ Docker, Inc
→ Pipedream
→ Composio


3/ All-in-One Sales Platforms

Why?

↳ They consolidate every essential cold outreach feature within one platform.

Example use-case: Warming up domains, building a lead list, monitoring relevant signals, enriching contact data & automating email outreach (Instantly.ai) or multi-channel outreach (lemlist) without any other prospecting tool. In essence, running your entire prospecting campaign in one place.

Examples include:

→ Instantly.ai
→ Expandi
→ Artisan
→ lemlist


4/ Sourcing Agents

Why?

↳ They source data autonomously, given a set of prompts.

Example use-case: Sourcing a list of Sales Leaders, based in SF, in VC-based startups that have > 5X’d revenue 2 years in a row within the last 3 years… by simply telling Exa, in plain English, that this is the list you’re trying to build.

Examples:

→ Relevance AI
→ Outbond
→ Claygent
→ Tavily
→ Apify
→ Exa


5/ Conversation Intelligence

Why?

↳ They record meetings & extract relevant insights from your business conversations.

Example use-case: Reviewing your latest 100 sales calls via Attention’s agent to figure out the most frequent objections your sales team gets from prospects.

Examples:

→ Momentum.io
→ Fireflies.ai
→ Attention


6/ Signal Platforms

Why?

↳ They monitor intent signals to help you uncover prospects in buying mode.

Example use-case: Monitoring previous product buyers (champions) in Common Room, to pitch your solution when they move to a new company (that doesn’t use your product yet!)

Examples:

→ Common Room
→ TheirStack
→ Outbond
→ Clay


7/ AI SDRs

Why?

↳ They automate your prospecting entirely.

Example use-case: Letting Valley write your outreach, qualify your leads, monitor replies & answer on your behalf.

Examples:

→ Artisan
→ Valley

P.S: What AI Sales software category are you betting on in 2026?

AI Sales Categories for 2026

lemlist hit $37,000,000 ARR, adding +$1M in net ARR per month.

Here’s a breakdown of their funnel:

I really wanted to understand the recipe for their success…

So I asked Charles (their CEO), Yann (their VP Sales) & Erwan (their Head of Growth) and compiled their insights all together below 👇

1️⃣ Lead Generation

They drive 200K monthly site visits, via:

1. LinkedIn

10% of their team has a personal brand:

- Kévin (79K)
- Lucas (57K)
- Erwan (37K)
- Guillaume (36K)
- Tal (35K)
- Charles (34K)

…amounting to 300,000+ followers.

Everyone has their own ‘sub-niche’.

→ Erwan shares his growth experiments.
→ Guillaume talks about entrepreneurship, bootstrapping & SaaS.
→ Charles shares learnings scaling from $30M to $100M as a CEO.

Tools they use:
- Content Ideation: Taplio
- Visuals: Figma


2. Paid Ads

They spend ~20K/mo across LinkedIn, Google & Meta.

Google works well for high-intent searches.
LinkedIn works best for ABM campaigns (targeting larger companies).


3. SEO

Search still brings ~15% of their signups thanks to:

- Ranking #1 for keywords such as “multi-channel prospecting tool”
- Meta resources (i.e: Cold Email Templates) that build authority.
- Multi-lingual content that ranks in several languages.
- Mini-tools (i.e: Free Email finder)

Tools used:
- Keyword research: Ahrefs, Semrush
- Mini-Tools: Replit, Xano


4. Partners

Their partner motion, built by Lilibeth is now responsible for ~$4M ARR.
Crazy enough, she shared the entire method in a 56-minute podcast.
(The post can be found on her profile)

Partners that spread the word about lemlist earn a 25% referral fee.

Tools used:
- Affiliate Platform: PartnerStack
- Partner Management: Notion


5. YouTube

They published 451 videos on their company channel, totalling 17K subscribers & 1,324,759 views.

Guillaume, their Founder, initially started a YouTube channel in English that he grew to 46.3K subscribers.

Until he got fed up (I assume 😆) and decided to launch one in French that is already at 24.1K subscribers.


6. Outbound

lemlist is a multi-channel prospecting tool. And one way to improve their product… is to use it internally.

Which they do… a lot.

Their outbound process looks like so:

For sourcing:
- Source high-fit orgs (Tier 1) via Sales Navigator (this is taken care of by their GTM Engineer)
- Extract 3 most relevant contacts from each company.
- Using Sales Nav again, find extra relevant personas.
- Add all leads to HubSpot
- Enrich info via lemlist.

For outreach:
- Inside Hubspot, the sales team enrols contacts directly to multi-channel lemlist campaigns
- They cold call, via lemlist’s VOiP.


2️⃣ Lead Capture

20,000 orgs sign up for a free trial every month
They get 1,000+ monthly demo requests.

I ran out of space, post is continued in the comments below 👇
(Keep reading, we're getting to the interesting parts 👀)

LinkedIn got me past $6M ARR. But Jake Trinder, the mastermind behind Instantly.ai & Clay's channels, argues YouTube is better.

His proof? He grew multiple channels from 0 to > 7-figure revenue from YouTube.

So we did a side-by-side comparison 👇

1. Core Focus

→ LinkedIn: Booking meetings by publishing relevant snackable content.

→ YouTube: Building trust & booking meetings via in-depth educational videos.


2. Key Rules to Win

LinkedIn: 

A. Find outlier/viral/proven publications using tools like Taplio.
B. Consistent high-quality posts relevant to your ICP.
C. Frequent engagement actions with your audience.
D. Optimized profile (banner, title, featured section).

YouTube:

A. Nail combination of thumbnail + title before recording.
B. Focus on quality. YouTube = "Winner takes all"
C. Deep research on titles, thumbnails & trends.


3. Posting Time & Frequency

→ LinkedIn: 3 to 7 posts per week. Same posting time every day.

→ YouTube: 1 video per week. Posting when audience is most online.


4. Top Software

→ LinkedIn:

- Content Ideation + Analytics: Taplio
- Visuals: Figma, Canva, OpusClip
- Writing: Claude, Grammarly

→ YouTube:

- Content Ideation: 1of10, Viewstats, vidIQ
- Production: Adobe Premiere Suite
- Recording: Tella, OBS Studio


5. Expected Reach

→ LinkedIn:

- Audience = B2B focused (i.e: sales, marketing, HR & tech buyers).
- Prospects browse the feed to educate or entertain themselves.
- Over 310,000,000 monthly active users.

→ YouTube:

- Audience = Broad, top-of-funnel (creators, entrepreneurs, founders).
- Audience is actively searching for the content you're creating.
- Over 2,500,000,000 monthly active users.


6. Engagement Expectation

→ LinkedIn: 

- Decent conversion rate. 'Easy' to produce content scale.
- You can reach out to post engagers (DMs).
- Leads are nurtured daily.

→ YouTube:

- High conversion rate from long-form content.
- Audience can binge-watch channels.
- Can't contact viewers directly.


7. Challenges

→ LinkedIn:

- Can take weeks/months before generating any leads.
- Staying consistent is hard.

→ YouTube:

- Lots of upfront work to get 1 good video out.
- Consequent investment in studio setup.
- Talking to a camera can feel weird.


If you had to pick one platform to scale your business, which would you choose?

P.S.: If you need help with YouTube, reach out to Jake. He's the best at growing B2B brands on there. If you need help on LinkedIn, send me a DM :)

Every tool we use to run our $6.5M+ ARR agency:


1️⃣ Content

LinkedIn drives us 200+ leads every month.

This includes my account (62,000+ followers) & other team members (250,000+ combined). I use:

- Taplio & Scripe for content ideation & inspiration.
- Notion’s calendar for content planning.

I’m about to hit 2,000 YouTube subscribers. I use

- Sony FX30 to record videos.
- Tella for screen & audio recording
- vidIQ to gain inspiration from outlier YouTube videos.

We drive ~100,000 visitors to our site every quarter.
1/3rd come from SEO & LLMs. We use:

- Webflow to host our blog.
- Ahrefs for keyword research.

- AirOps for AI Search Optimisation & to build programmatic pages at scale.

We have about ~10,000 newsletter subscribers.
We regularly clean the list to maintain > 40% open rates. We use:

- beehiiv to send 3-5 weekly emails.


2️⃣ Outbound, Ads & GTM

We deliver Outbound & GTM services to 70+ B2B clients.

Our outbound stack has way more tools than needed, since we adapt to clients’ stack & requirements.

→ For Data Sourcing & Enrichment, we use:

- Clay, FullEnrich (Waterfall Enrichment).
- Prospeo.io, Wiza, LeadMagic (Email & Phone Numbers).
- Exa, Openmart, LinkedIn, Apollo, DiscoLike (B2B Databases).
- Clay, Common Room, Midbound, Trigify.io, Teamfluence™ (Intent Data).

→ For Sales Engagement, we use:

- lemlist (Multi-channel outreach)
- Instantly.ai (Email outreach)
- Expandi (LinkedIn outreach)

We spend around ~30,000€ on Ads across LinkedIn, Meta, Google & YouTube. We use:

- Clay to build our ABM lists.
- Usermaven for attribution & analytics.
- Fibbler to track engagement from our target accounts. 


3️⃣ Agency Operations

Our team includes 33+ FTEs & ~10 Fractional Freelancers

For internal operations, we use:

- Notion (Project management & Documentation)
- Supabase (Internal Database Infrastructure)
- Airtable (Internal Ops & Source of truth)

For internal comms, we use:

- Norrsken Barcelona (Office by the Sea)
- Google Meet (Visioconferencing)
- Slack, Loom (Async comms)

For internal AI needs, we use the latest flagship models (Gemini, OpenAI, Claude) & OpenRouter, Inc for LLMs aggregation.


4️⃣ Inbound Funnel

We book ~120 qualified B2B meetings. We use:

- Google Analytics & UserMaven (traffic & lead tracking)
- Webflow & Wistia (Site & VSL Hosting)
- Default (Lead capture & enrichment)
- Customer.io (Lead re-engagement)

We started creating mini-tools as lead magnets for email capture. We use:

- Vercel (app hosting)
- Lovable (prototyping)


5️⃣ Sales

We closed +$832,800 in new ARR last month.
And, collected another $60,000 for our educational program. 

We use:

- Attio (CRM)
- Qwilr (Proposals)
- Attention, Fireflies (Meeting recordings & insights)

To accept (& make) payments, we use:

- Ramp 
- Stripe (subscriptions)
- Mercury / Revolut (business accounts)

And… I believe that’s close to everything!

P.S: What’s one tool you would recommend adding to our tech stack?

The best B2B data is the one your competition doesn't have:

...and you can find it for less than $50/month ↓

Thus, if you want to extract data...

→ Via a marketplace of thousands of pre-built scraping workflows: Apify (go.coldiq.com/apify)

→ Through AI agents researching the web on your behalf: Apify, Clay, Relevance AI, Exa, Outbond.

→ Without exiting LinkedIn: Prospeo.io, lemlist, Expandi.

→ On dedicated pages: Instant Data Scraper, ZenRows.

→ By crawling search engines: Firecrawl, Perplexity.

...there's a tailor-made solution!

What's your go-to software for data scraping?

Data Scraping Software (2025)

AI agents are replacing human employees.

Funny enough, they operate in very similar ways:

The smartest agents don’t work alone.
They work in teams.

Some behave like assistants.
Others as managers.

And as with any sort of team, there are different ways to structure their collaboration.

To illustrate this:
We can look at how 3 multi-agent setups would handle the same task…

For example: Scheduling a quarter business review with an important client.


1️⃣ Hierarchical setup

A manager agent assigning tasks to its agent team members.

1. The manager receives a task = Schedule a business review.

2. It tells a subordinate agent to check potential times to meet with the clients.

3. Another agent checks product usage from the client. "Has usage recently dropped? Is engagement still strong?"

4. A 3rd agent drafts an email based on client availability & product usage: 

"Hey Achilles, it's been a while - wanted to ensure you're using the product to the fullest. How about a quick chat next week, Wednesday?”

5. The manager reviews everything and sends the email.


2️⃣ 'Human-in-the-Loop' 

A smart assistant tapping your shoulder when needed.

1. The agent drafts the business review email and finds some available times.

2. But… it sees the client gave negative feedback 2 weeks ago.

3. Before sending the email, it asks you: “Do you want to review the email before I send it?"

4. You make small tweaks, and you send it.


3️⃣ 'Sequential' setup

Like a factory or an assembly line where each person does one task and hands it off to the next.

1. 1st Agent asks: "Is a quarterly business review due?" based on the client's last meeting time.

2. 2nd Agent pulls client's usage data.

3. 3rd Agent drafts a short email.

4. 4th Agent sends the email to book the meeting.


So, when should you use which?

As a rule of thumb:

- Hierarchical setups work well for complex, multi-step tasks.

- Human-in-the-loop setups are recommended for high-stakes, sensitive tasks.

- Sequential setups for ordered workflows with clear dependencies.


P.S: What's one process in your team that would run better...
with some smart agents working behind the scenes? 👇

In the past 85 days, 24 separate ColdIQ teammates published 581 times on LinkedIn. This generated a combined 43 473 reactions, 28 130 comments & +34 023 new followers.

It led us to sign +27 clients for our agency, adding ~$153,000 in new MRR. 

Smarts brands already have their CEO posting. 
Smarter brands got their exec team on board.

But very few managed to build a company-wide LinkedIn program.

Here’s what no one taught you about successfully turning your team into ambassadors:

1. It needs to start at the top.

Have a look at the leaderboard:

Alex published 65+ times within the last quarter.
I published 57 times.

When we talk about consistency...
We walk the talk.


2. You need to crack it first.

Your team needs proof to build conviction.

While you can invest in external help (i.e: coaches & gurus) to grow… your team doesn’t have this luxury.

You need to be their 'coach'.


3. You need to make posting easy.

There’s a recipe for “successful” LinkedIn posts:

→ Strong hook
→ Proven topic
→ Nice visual 
→ Breathable writing 

But, brainstorming hooks & finding topics can be hit-or-miss.
→ I encourage my team to re-use mines.

Designing visuals takes time.
→ We put designers at their disposal.


4. You’ll need to invest in training.

Making this work requires many unscalable 1:1 sessions in which we:
- Plan content
- Brainstorm ideas 
- Rewrite posts & hooks.

And scalable actions too:

- Running team-wide sessions sharing best practices.
- Bringing 'big' influencers (i.e: Lara Acosta, Pierre Herubel) to teach our team.

Ivan Falco had 4K followers and was struggling to crack 40 likes.
After our 1st team session, his posts started hitting 150+ likes.

He then grew from 4,000 to > 18,000 followers.


5. They need to want to grow their following

We ask applicants if they’re interested in growing their brands.
Many new joiners heard from us via LinkedIn.

If we attracted them, they were more likely interested to grow.

Kenny heard about ColdIQ from a post by Monika.
He literally published on his second day working with us.

He started below 1,000 followers 9 months ago.
He’ll crack 10,000 by EOY.


6. You need to incentivize your team

Millie came up with a scoring system based on engagement & follower growth.

With the opportunity to gain:

🥇 $5,000
🥈 $2,500
🥉 $1,500
4️⃣ $1,000

… & $500 for every person publishing 20+ times.

My only beef with the scoring is that it places me second 😭


7. It gets easier with each person who manages to grow

We currently have 8 team members with 10,000+ followers:

- Mich: 61,475
- Alex: 55,137
- Melissa: 40,392
- Ivan: 18,568
- Yevhen: 16,325
- Soheil: 12,039
- Millie: 11,796
- Monika: 10,030

Every successful internal 'audience growth' story builds conviction for the rest of the team.

I believe we’ll see many similar success stories in 2026

And if you want to be one of these… I’m personally offering 6-week long workshops to help you win, as a team, on LinkedIn.

Send a DM if you’re interested :)

This 4-step ABM system generated $2M in pipeline in 90 days

(And most B2B orgs can reproduce it)

Here's the step-by-step process:

1. Build your initial list

- We analysed closed/won accounts to build our ICP model.
- We used Ocean.io to find similar companies.
- We used Clay to qualify & enrich contacts.

Result = 1250 high-potential accounts uploaded to our LinkedIn Ads campaign manager.

2. Prepare LinkedIn content for thought-leadership ads

- We analyzed our latest 100 qualified sales calls.
- Analyze pain points, objections, & words they use.
- Study high-performing posts in client's niche using Taplio.
- Published on LinkedIn across active leadership accounts (CEO, CMO...)

3. Promote successful content on LinkedIn

- Every post became an ad creative to be promoted in front of our 1250 high-potential accounts.
- We track pipeline generated with GA4 UTMs.
- We use HubSpot to track the journey from impressions → engagement → pipeline.
- We use Fibbler to measure ad engagement & influence over pipeline.
- After 1 month: we activate MOF & BOF retargeting when target audiences are warmed up.

4. Re-engage ICP fit via warm outbound.

- We monitored every like and comment via Clay.
- We deanonymized visitors via Instantly / RB2B / Midbound.
- We routed qualified leads via Clay to Instantly.ai automated sequences.

Result:

$2M in pipeline.
In under 90 days.

Ivan Falco calls it "Creator-led ABM"
(I'm looking for a name I like better, sorry, Ivan.)

I think of it like a GTM Flywheel...

In which each channel feeds & fuels the others:

LinkedIn Ads ↔ Outbound ↔ LinkedIn Content...
Working in sync towards a joint objective.

Want us to implement this for you?
Send a DM :)

P.S: If you want to learn more about this system, Ivan Falco recorded a masterclass including the formulas, frameworks, timing & entire workflows you can leverage to reproduce these results. Lmk if you want it in the comments!

taplio

Michel Lieben's Linkedin Analytics

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taplio

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