u/Correct-Paramedic188

Running a cold calling campaign targeting cannabis dispensaries across the US and need help sourcing contact data.

Ideally looking for:

• Direct lines or cell numbers for decision makers (owners, ops managers, whoever actually picks up)
• Store/front desk numbers as a fallback
• Brand name
• Number of locations (trying to segment by operator size)

I'm specifically targeting smaller operators — 7 locations or fewer. Not really interested in the big MSOs.

Happy to pay for a solid list or trade something if anyone's sitting on data. Also open to tools/sources I might be missing — already tried Apollo with mixed results.

Cold email subreddit getting nuked because people turned them into spam dumps.

Every LinkedIn "guru" is selling some content growth hack.

AI is flooding inboxes with garbage that gets filtered before a human ever reads it.

Meanwhile, I threw up a post a few weeks ago half-testing whether there was demand for a done-for-you cold calling service. Nothing serious, just gauging interest.

Close to 30 people responded - mostly people wanting a commission based structure or do something hourly, lol.

Booked 4 meetings from it - people who actually knew the price and answered a couple qualification questions in the DMs

Two people signed up on the spot - they said on the call they were going to move forward, two of the easiest closes in my career.

For a channel that everyone wrote off five years ago.

Here's what I think is happening: every channel gets arbitraged to death.

Cold email got spammed into the ground.

LinkedIn DMs are a meme at this point.

Content is so saturated that even good posts get buried.

The second something works, 10,000 people copy it and it stops working.

Cold calling never scaled the same way.

You can't automate a real conversation.

You can't send 50,000 cold calls a day from a burner number and call it a campaign.

The barrier is effort and most people refuse to do it.

That friction is exactly what makes it valuable right now.

I spent five years in sales.

Cold calling was always the highest-conversion channel when done right, just time-consuming and uncomfortable.

Those two things haven't changed.

But the relative advantage of picking up the phone has probably never been higher.

Question for the room: is cold calling actually making a comeback in your world, or is this just an anomaly on my end? And if you're running it as a service, what are you charging?

Offering cold calling as a service: you bring the list, I book the meetings.

Running an outbound operation and opening up capacity for a few clients.

Here’s the deal: if you have a lead list sitting around that nobody’s calling, I’ll work through it and book meetings directly on your calendar.

What I handle:

- Dialing through your list
- Qualifying prospects live on the call
- Booking the meeting before I hang up (or following up same day)
- Reporting on contacts reached, conversations had, meetings booked

What I need from you:

- A list with names, companies, and phone numbers
- A quick call to understand your offer and ICP so I’m not winging it
- Calendar access or a booking link

Rates are negotiable.

Introductory pricing for the first two weeks to prove the concept before we talk about anything longer term. After that, month-to-month, no long contracts.

Best fit: B2B companies with a defined ICP who have leads they’re not calling. Doesn’t matter if it’s 50 names or 500.

Drop a comment or DM if you want to talk.

I'm building out a prospecting list targeting home service businesses (HVAC, plumbers, landscaping)

Looking for the best sources to:

1. Find local businesses in a specific service vertical and geography
2. Get direct phone numbers (not the front desk "press 1" number)
3. Identify the actual owner or decision maker

I've tried Google Maps scraping, Yelp, and a few data providers but coverage on smaller owner-operated businesses is spotty.

What's actually working for you? Paid tools, free tools, manual methods all useful.

Trying to build something repeatable, not just a one-time list.

Hey all, I run a B2B sales agency and I'm building out a prospecting list targeting home service businesses (HVAC, plumbers, landscaping)

Looking for the best sources to:

1. Find local businesses in a specific service vertical and geography
2. Get direct phone numbers (not the front desk "press 1" number)
3. Identify the actual owner or decision maker

I've tried Google Maps scraping, Yelp, and a few data providers but coverage on smaller owner-operated businesses is spotty.

What's actually working for you? Paid tools, free tools, manual methods all useful.

Trying to build something repeatable, not just a one-time list.

Hey all, I run a B2B sales agency and I'm building out a prospecting list targeting home service businesses (HVAC, plumbers, landscaping)

Looking for the best sources to:

1. Find local businesses in a specific service vertical and geography
2. Get direct phone numbers (not the front desk "press 1" number)
3. Identify the actual owner or decision maker

I've tried Google Maps scraping, Yelp, and a few data providers but coverage on smaller owner-operated businesses is spotty.

What's actually working for you? Paid tools, free tools, manual methods all useful.

Trying to build something repeatable, not just a one-time list.

Any recommendations on dialers to use?

I've used Nooks in the past but I'm running a one man sales and marketing agency so I won't meet the minimum seat requirement for most enterprise solutions.

I just need something I can use to call through a few hundred prospects a day for myself and my clients as warm leads flow through.

Any help would be appreciated!

Met with a guy today who runs a lending platform for SMBs exploring a potential referral partner setup. He mentioned one of their email partners sourced about $4M in deals, which based on their rev share model probably netted them around $100K.

Then he dropped this: that partner sends 1 million emails per day.

For context, I run cold email campaigns for clients and we're typically in the 20K–100K per month range depending on the client. I've heard of bigger shops doing 1M per month, but a million per day? That sounds wild.

My immediate reaction: is that even feasible from an infrastructure standpoint? And more importantly, isn't this exactly why people don't open cold emails anymore?

So I'm asking the group:

1. Is 1M/day actually doable for a single operation?
2. Is it reasonable to assume that kind of volume leads to real results, or is it just spray-and-pray at scale?

Genuinely curious what people think here.

Just wanted to see if anyone has good recommendations on API services to pull real time hiring info for companies.

I know Clay has a workflow and I currently use rapid API marketplace but I wanted to see if anyone knows of sites that can pull hiring info from Linkedin, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc.

I started my own business a little over a year ago.

I picked a name I thought was cool and also was relatively cheap to buy the .ai domain for.

I recently received a notice letter from a intellectual property law firm letting me know I was committing IP theft because a company named the same name minus the AI- ex: mine company is ACME Ai, there's is ACME.

They filed a trademark on the name in 2020 and have been a company for 12 years so it seems legit.

Is there anything I can do or should I just change my name?

I am not married to the name but the idea of getting a new domain, redoing a lot of my internal banking and back-end sounds like a pain and would rather not have to.